Possibilities

My friend Liz has worked in the home health care field for many years, primarily as a visiting nurse for ALS patients. At one point she was caring for two homebound women, one in her twenties and one in her forties, who happened to share the same name. Perhaps it was this synchronicity that made them curious about one another, causing them to reach out for an email connection. They were to depart the world within six months of each other. Before they left, they determined that they would send their nurse, Liz, a sign after their departure, letting her know that they were tucked in and happy in the next world. “When we die,” one of them said to Liz, “we’re going to come back as horses. We’re going to run wild and free.”

A year later, Liz was working an overnight shift in another of her ALS patient’s houses. The night had been long, and she had been struggling, feeling quite alone and lost. At some point during that long night, she spoke the words, “Does anyone hear me? Please let me know everything will be OK.”

Eventually, the sun began to rise, and Liz stood to stretch and look out the window. There, in the driveway, stood two magnificent black horses. She suspected, after her sleepless night, she might be hallucinating. She ran to fetch the patient’s wife, who joined Liz to look out the window. Amazed, the owner of the house exclaimed, “I’ve lived here for forty years and have never had horses show up on my property.”

Apparently the two horses had escaped from their field some distance away to stand in this driveway at sunrise.

Liz told me she knew she had been heard. “My girls were together,” she said, “running wild, free from their disease.”

I’ve been doing some thinking about possibilities.

Could it be the case that we need to open ourselves to the possibilities for such a sign of encouragement to present itself? I am not suggesting we divorce ourselves entirely of skepticism. Skepticism is healthy, but if we aren’t careful, it will lead us down the road to cynicism. Cynicism is a cul-de-sac.

If nurse Liz had been in the dead end of cynicism when she was told of the sign of the horses, which would indicate the well-being of her two patients, I doubt whether she would have been gifted her remarkable equine visit.

Perhaps the possibilities of good things—encouragement, justice, comfort, peace—require two willing sides to reach out to one another. The receiver and the One who delivers such profound gifts.

The book Autobiography of a Yogi, published in 1946, opened my eyes to the possibility of the improbable. Its author, Paramhansa Yogananda, writes of yogis in India and their mystical feats of bilocation, levitation, telepathic communication. These marvels are numerous enough to take up residence in the minds of those who are part of this culture. If you live in India and a yogi appears to you one night in a dream only to make an appearance in your life a month later, you will not immediately make an appointment to visit your psychiatrist.

I have just been sent an article which appeared in the Atlantic by Christian Wiman that mentions the seventeenth-century Italian friar Joseph of Cupertino who took flight one day and landed breathlessly in the top of a tree, much to the surprise of a town square of onlookers. He soon became a curiosity for his ecstatic airlifts, attracting sightseers from other parts of the country. Eventually ordered to Rome, Joseph graciously whizzed around the Vatican for the Pope.

Surely, if we believe something is possible it has a better chance of presenting itself than if we believe it impossible. We are more likely to catch someone flying if we are a seventeenth-century Catholic, more likely to be introduced to our teachers in our dreams, if we are twentieth-century citizens of India.

This would imply that the possibilities of the miraculous are given permission to present themselves by our imaginations. If this is the case, then our unbelief, the restrictions we put on the possible, will affect what we are able to experience.

Our hopes need the oxygen of our imaginations to come true. I believe my hopes for peace, for instance, for stability in my country, to believe the US will return to a state of dignity and live out its intended values, needs the oxygen of my imagination.

I don’t know whether you have heard the rumblings of frustrated friends or expressed them yourselves: “Oh, that man in the White House is made of Teflon, he will never come to justice.” I imagine many of us have circled that cul-de-sac of cynicism.

I also imagine you are wondering how I traveled from the spiritually miraculous to the politically plausible. I believe the same rule holds for both. We need to open the doors of our hearts, our thinking, to allow for hope. We’ve done this before, seen this in our history—it’s in the DNA of our culture; we can free ourselves from authoritarian rule.

Yesterday, I read the Declaration of Independence. I highly recommend it, very fine reading, with its list of twenty-seven grievances outlining the “history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over these States.” These grievances against the rule of England’s monarchy in the 1700s are astonishingly resonant to the present moment. Here are just a few:

He has kept among us, in times of peace, standing armies without the consent of our legislatures.

Deprived us, in many cases, of the benefits of trial by jury.

Excited domestic insurrections amongst us.

Maybe it’s time to write our own declarations of independence, of independent courage, the courage to believe that we can overcome this darkness.

The Declaration reads, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed, by their Creator, with certain unalienable rights…”

We can do this. We can return to these ideals. They are part of us.

Again, I quote the Declaration: “A prince, whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.”

Agreed. We can do this.

No one is really made of Teflon. No one.

We can do this

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