The Light of Common Day
“He’s a spiritual
master in disguise,” she whispered into my ear before I met the new man in her
life; but the first thing Cathy felt when we dropped by Sue’s apartment
unannounced and met her new man was, “He gives me the creeps.”
I trusted Cathy’s
instincts, but I gave him the benefit of the doubt. I couldn’t accede that he
was a spiritual master in disguise, though. I never saw that in his eyes, nor
in his manner; and especially in his dog’s behavior that day.
He was surprised
that we dropped by and had the most startled look on his goateed face, as though
he had just been caught doing something truly wicked; but Sue was happy to see
us. She had extended an open invitation, and we happened to be in town that day
doing some shopping and sightseeing; so we dropped by.
Cathy doesn’t like
to drop by on people unannounced. It may be a womanly thing, but I don’t mind. I
love spontaneity, and if there was one gift that I would wish upon my children,
if I had children, it would be the gift of spontaneity. “Shades of the prison
house begin to close / Upon the growing boy,” said my favorite poet in
“Intimations of Immortality,” and before we know it we become fixed in our ways
and the freshness of the day begins to fade into the light of common day.
That’s what happened
to Sue. Her days became fresh again when she met Don walking his dog in the
park that day, but within two years of living together, first in her small apartment
and then in the house he rented outside the town limits away from her family
and friends and everything, she felt just as trapped as she felt with the last
man in her life who became abusive and whom she finally had to leave; but she
could not admit to herself that she had made another bad choice in men.
Don was her third
man since her alcoholic husband’s untimely death, and although he wasn’t
physically abusive he stopped talking to her; and he got into the habit of
sleeping most of the day and watching TV and cruising the Internet most of the
night, and she was lonely and miserable again and hated her life.
I saw the anger in
her eyes, in her face, and in her manner. No one else saw it, but she couldn’t
hide it from me; and I took her aside after a workshop one day and let her know
that I knew what she was going through because I didn’t want her to suffer all
of that anger alone because of what it would do to her.
“Sue, I want to
give you a heads up. I’ve been where you are, and it’s not a nice place to be.
You’re angry, and it’s souring your life. How are things with Don? Are they
getting any better?”
“Worse,” she said,
and she would have broken into tears had she not been so full of anger; but
that’s what I wanted to talk to her about.
I knew she would
tell me, but I couldn’t hint at it one way or the other; I could only hope that
she would admit to herself that her first impressions of Don were deluded. He
wasn’t a spiritual master, in disguise or otherwise; that was a fantasy that
had taken hold of her vulnerable mind, a vain and foolish desire that coloured
everything Don said and did until it was too late.
I knew what he was
the day we dropped by when his German Shepherd came over and licked my hand and
lay his head on my lap and lapped up all the loving I could give him as I
caressed his head and neck, despite his master’s efforts to stop bothering me. “It’s
no bother, Don. He loves the attention; don’t you, boy?”
Sue made tea and
small talk, but no matter how hard I tried—and I have a gift honed over the
years for eliciting information from people—I couldn’t get Don to open up to
me; not one itsy-bitsy iota. It was like he had become defensive like his dog
should have been, and his eyes betrayed his wary shadow.
Our visit was
short because it wasn’t going anywhere, but all during our visit Don kept
snapping his fingers for his dog to go to his side; but he didn’t. He stayed by
me lapping up all the love as he could get. That’s how I knew that Don wasn’t a
spiritual master in disguise. He wasn’t even master of his own dog.
A master is master
of his “dogs of desire,” the Sufis say; and I knew that Don wasn’t when for no
apparent reason a picture of a naked woman lying on her back with her knees
bent and legs spread apart and her hairy vagina for all to see suddenly popped
up on the computer screen as we sang the love song to God to begin our workshop
in Sue’s apartment before they rented a house outside the town limits.
Don wasn’t there. He walked his dog during our
monthly workshops. Janice and Ann saw the naked woman on the screen also, and
before Sue returned from the kitchen where she had gone to put on coffee for
our after-workshop fellowship I got up and shut the porn sight down; but I knew
that it was one of those signs from life confirming what Cathy had picked up on
the moment we met Don.
That’s what Sue
woke up to, and she was so angry at herself that she could hardly look me in
the eye because I was the only person she had told that she thought Don was a
spiritual master in disguise; and she was trying to build up the courage to
tell me that she was wrong. I couldn’t help her, though. That’s why I wanted to
give her a heads up. I had to let her know that her anger was only going to
fester.
It did with me,
but I had an outlet. I could write my anger out of my system, as all writers do.
“Why were you so angry?” she asked me, when I told her how my anger had begun
to sour my life like her anger was beginning to sour hers.
It was going to
hurt, and I didn’t want to hurt her any more than she was already hurting; but
it would be a good hurt, and I said, “I woke up to my own delusion, and it took
a long time to forgive myself for losing my perspective.”
She knew what I
was inferring, and I read approval in her eyes for me to continue. “We all do
foolish things, Sue; and it’s not a shame to admit it. I was in love with a
woman for a whole year before I realized that I was in love with an image in my
mind that I had created of her; but that was a long time ago and I got over it,
and so can you. My anger possessed me when I woke up to the shadow side of our spiritual
community, and it began to sour my life. We’re on wonderful path, Sue; but I’ve
studied many teachings in my life, and you can’t trust any one of them because every
teaching will manifest its own opposite eventually. That’s a principle of life
called enantiodromia. Our spiritual community
has its dark side; that’s what I woke up to, and that’s where all my anger came
from. I couldn’t forgive myself for getting sucked into the collective delusion
that our spiritual teaching is the most direct path to God because we have the Inner
Master to guide and protect us; it’s not, because all paths to God are
equidistant. But I bought into our teaching lock, stock, and barrel; and when I
woke up to the seductive elitism of our spiritual teaching I got angry at
myself for being such a vain and arrogant fool. That’s why I’ve been so testy
at our workshops and spiritual services these past couple of years.”
With a guilty look
of sorrow and relief in her watery eyes, Sue said: “Don’s not a spiritual master.
I don’t know what made me think he was.”
“He’s just a man,
Sue. Just an ordinary, fallible man.”
“I know; and I
don’t love him anymore.”
“When are you
going to leave him?”
“I can’t now. In
the spring.”
“Does he know?”
“Not yet.”
“Don’t tell him.”
“I’m not going to”
“Good.”
“Thank you.”
“For what?”
“Understanding.”
“You’re welcome.
Should we join the others?”
As we drove home after
the workshop I shared Sue’s dilemma with Cathy, and she said, “I’d get the hell out right now. I wouldn’t
wait till spring!”
***
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