Re: Where is God?
Originally Posted by
vcindiana
There is a touching episode in the book Mortal Lessons by Richard Selzer . It is a brief postoperative discussion which transpires between Selzer and a young couple.
I stand by the bed where a young woman lies, her face post operative, her mouth twisted in palsy, clownish. A tiny twig of faicial nerve, the one to the muscles of her mouth, has been severed. She will be thus from now on. The surgeon has followed with religious fervor the curve of her flesh; I promise you that. Nevertheless, to remove the tumor in her cheek I had to cut the little nerve. Her young husband is in the room. He stands on the opposite side of the bed and together they dwell in the evening lamplight, isolated from me, private. Who are they I ask myself, he and this wry mouth I have made, who gaze at and touch each other so generously and greedily?
The young woman speaks. “Will my mouth always be like this? “She asks.
"Yes” I say “ it will. It is because the nerve was cut."
She nods and is silent. But the young man smiles.
I like it”, he says. “It is kind of cute"
All at once I know who he is. I understand and lower my gaze. One is not bold in an encounter with God. Unmindful, he bends to kiss her crooked mouth and I am so close I can see how he twists his own lips to accommodate to hers, to show her that their kiss still works.
The image of the husband contorting his mouth and twisting his lips for an intimate kiss with his palsied wife haunted me.
Namaste VC,
The story is touching and lofty.
But at the same time isn't it hypocrisy? Not negating the essential goodness of God which eventually wells up from within, in most similar cases, the husband is likely to hunger for a symmetrical beauty again. Should we drape our emotions in pink and close our eyes to the ever remaining truth of essential ugliness of the cravings of individual ego?
On the other hand, the story exemplifies why God is Shiva -- the Good one, who is eternally above the individual.
Thanks for the story.
Om
That which is without letters (parts) is the Fourth, beyond apprehension through ordinary means, the cessation of the phenomenal world, the auspicious and the non-dual. Thus Om is certainly the Self. He who knows thus enters the Self by the Self.
Bookmarks