Chronic Illness as a Spiritual Calling. In particular, illness with fatigue as a major symptom, often pain works this way as well. The fatigue (or pain) increases when you expend yourself in activities (or thoughts or beliefs) that are not aligned with the Tao (or not Ultimately Loving). When you do or think or believe anything that distracts you from your deepest spiritual purpose, your illness will knock you flat. The harder you fight against the fatigue, the more bitterly you rail about what you can no longer do, the worse you feel. The more you accept the limits of your fatigue and quit pushing against them, demanding to be able to do, think, believe as you always did, the more fatigued or painful your experience is. When you let go of all expectations, when you learn simply to Be, when you forget any identity from Doing and remember that I AM, you feel more rested, more restored, more freedom from pain. We are taught that I AM is only half a sentence, that there must be a fill-in-the-blank following it, that AM is only a helping verb a transitive verb, rather than the intransitive verb it is. When you are fatigued or pained, you must continually scale back your life until there is little left except I AM. And that is enough. It is everything. I AM is the name God calls himself to Abraham. The Buddhists venerate All That Is. When you realize, because chronic illness has stripped you of all your illusions otherwise, that To Be is All There Is, there is no greater spiritual Truth. You become One with All. Enlightenment happens in the sickbed as under the Bodhi Tree. Salvation comes through illness as at the foot of the Cross. One way or another, as with all spiritual callings, you will find the Truth, either in living your vocation or in dying from it.
Posted on: Fri, 28 Mar 2014 18:25:43 +0000
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