Now is the season to know that
everything you do is sacred.
—HAFIZ
The sacred makes surprise appearances.
Walking the gauntlet of thirty beds on the long single hospice ward at Laguna Honda Hospital, I noticed Isaiah out of the corner of my eye. An African-American man raised in Mississippi, Isaiah was actively dying. His breathing was labored, and he was sweating up a storm. I sat down next to him.
“You look like you’re working really hard,” I said.
Isaiah raised his arm, pointed to the distance, and said, “Just gotta get there.”
“I forgot my glasses. I can’t see that far in the distance. Tell me what you see.”
Isaiah described a bright green pasture and a long hill leading to a grassy plateau.
I asked, “If I promise to keep up, can I come?”
He grabbed my hand tight, and Isaiah and I started climbing together. His breathing got shorter, and he perspired more with every step. It was a long walk. Not an easy one.
“What else do you see?” I asked.
He described a one-room red schoolhouse with three steps leading up to a door.
My training informed me that Isaiah was disoriented to time and location. I could have told the old man that his visions were likely being caused by brain metastasis and morphine. I could have reminded him that we were in a ward at Laguna Honda Hospital. But that was only true on the most superficial level.
The deeper truth was that we were walking to a little red schoolhouse.
I asked, “Do you want to go in?”
Isaiah sighed. “Yeah. I’ve been waitin’.”
“Can I go with you?” I asked.
“Nope.”
“Okay, then, you go,” I said.
A few minutes later, Isaiah died quite peacefully.
To know the sacred is not to see new things, but rather to see things in a new way. The sacred is not separate or different from all things; it is hidden in all things. And dying is an opportunity to uncover what is hidden.
The beloved Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh uses a simple exercise to illustrate this point. He holds up a blank sheet of white paper and asks the audience to name what they see.
Most respond, “White paper.”
Children and poets answer more creatively. They say, “Clouds, rain, and trees.”
Because as Thich Nhat Hanh says, “Without clouds, there will be no rain; without rain, trees cannot grow; and without trees, we cannot make paper. And if we continue to look, we can see the logger who cut the tree and brought it to the mill to be transformed into paper. And we see the wheat. We know that the logger cannot exist without his daily bread, and therefore the wheat that became his bread is also in this sheet of paper. And the logger’s father and mother are in it, too. When we look in this way, we see that without all of these things, this sheet of paper cannot exist. Looking even more deeply, we can see we are in it, too.”
This is a way of expressing our deep belonging and interdependence with everyone and everything. This is a way of understanding that the sacred is not something apart from us. It is here with us in every moment.
The sacred has always existed. Everything is saturated with it. It is the nature of reality. Yet most of the time, we walk around in the sacred world with ordinary vision. It is as though we are color-blind, unable to clearly distinguish the different hues of the spectrum; we don’t always perceive or distinguish the sacred. We don’t appreciate the full breadth of its beauty. We see in a conditioned way, staying on the surface of life. When we pay attention, however, we realize that the sacred reveals itself continuously.
The word sacred is a symbol that points to the unnamable. The sacred cannot be fully described. All we can do is speak of certain qualities that characterize its presence, its influence on consciousness, and the ways in which we can access it.
Literally, sacred means “to make holy.” The root, sacra, also means “to set apart what is highly valued or important.” In the Jewish tradition, the room known as the Holy of Holies was the innermost and most sacred area of the tabernacle of Moses. It housed the golden Ark of the Covenant, which contained the holy tablets etched with the Ten Commandments. No ordinary person could enter. Only the holiest person, the high priest, could enter this holiest place on earth, and then only once a year, on the holiest day of the year. In the Catholic church where I served as an altar boy, the tabernacle had two golden doors. It was located on the highest altar and housed the Holy Eucharist, said to be the dwelling place of Christ. Only an ordained priest could open those golden doors.
If we were not taught the deeper meaning of these traditions, practices, and metaphors, we might erroneously assume that we lack the qualifications to know the sacred. We might believe that the sacred can only be accessed by special people with special training at special times. But ordinary people, like you and me, can and do regularly experience the sacred in myriad ways and forms, including visions of little red schoolhouses.
Uluru, also known as Ayers Rock, is a massive sandstone formation in central Australia. It is a stone unlike any other, emerging majestically out of a flat plain. The aborigines of the area don’t worship the stone, for the stone is more than a stone to them. They recognize it as a manifestation of the sacred. When we stand in reverence before Uluru, at Chartres Cathedral, atop the Inca citadel of Machu Picchu, or in the stillness of a redwood grove, we may feel that we are standing on sacred ground.
I cannot explain why human beings have made pilgrimages to such sites for thousands of years. Perhaps we need to attribute the power of the sacred to a place, an object, or a person in order to make it more real, more accessible. Perhaps these places are doorways, portals that somehow aid our perceptions. Who can say? The most important questions frequently remind us to live with them, not reaching too early for conclusions.
Regardless, it is clear that we all go to certain places to still our busy minds, such as the seashore, mountaintops, and monasteries. Sometimes we find stillness in a brief, uninterrupted moment on the couch. Intention and attention increase our chances of contacting the sacred. But recognition that the sacred is present may also arise suddenly and spontaneously, as it did with Jacob when, according to the biblical tale, he awoke from a deep sleep and said, “Surely the Lord is in this place, and I did not know it.”
Our response to the sacred might include joy, ecstasy, inspiration, inclusiveness, expansiveness, and a feeling of reverence, as if we have encountered what is holy in life. It is evident and unmistakable. Sometimes the experience has an intensity or density that is palpable. We may sense an inner stillness, as if the momentum we have counted on to keep us moving through life is no longer needed. The urge to do, fight, or control is released into non-doing. We come to a recognition that who we are is inseparable from stillness and the silence it introduces.
Zoe worked as a packer for a clothing manufacturer prior to moving into the Zen Hospice residence. Her favorite pastime was watching staged wrestling on TV. Advanced liver disease had caused jaundice, turning her skin yellow. The buildup of fluids made her belly swell, and due to the discomfort, she lost her appetite and stopped eating.
Yet despite feeling pretty miserable, Zoe maintained a buoyant spirit. The disease caused severe drowsiness, and so she slept sixteen hours each day. In the final weeks of her life, she moved into still deeper states of sleep that often would last a day or two, making for what I called “practice runs at dying.”
When Zoe returned to the surface of consciousness, she would share what had occurred on these dreamlike journeys. Once, she described a visit to a place of utter peacefulness, remarking, “If I had known silence was that beautiful, I would have spent a lot more time in quiet during my life.”
Deep silence is not merely a pause between sounds. It is an inner quietness felt in the heart, still as new-fallen snow on a mountain pass. This silence strips us of both belief and disbelief. It takes us beyond the known, beyond language, and into the sacred.
Silence is a natural response to the presence of the sacred no matter where it appears. Through silence, we become aware of the majesty in the ordinary; the beauty, the unity, and the depth of the sacred that is always around us and within us.
* * *
Birth is among the most real, honest, and unglamorous of human events, common to us all. Yet anyone who has witnessed a child being born cannot help but feel a reverent hush in the emerging presence of new life. In the midst of the mess of blood and tears, the pain, the emotional intensity, the shouts and chaos, there is beauty, unbounded joy, and an awesome power and authenticity expressed by the woman giving birth.
Childbirth is an invitation to enter the sacred. The key that unlocks its door is love, a love unlike any we may have known before. Ask any mother.
Death offers us the same invitation. In fact, birth and death come very close to one another. It’s difficult for us to say precisely when life begins or ends. Both can be times of great aliveness. Both ask us to accept our vulnerability, to be open to the unexpected, and to let go of life as we have known it.
Both birth and death can serve as portals to the sacred. Or not.
For many, death is utterly mundane, a purely biological event, a matter of physical science devoid of any mystery. Some people’s dying time is spent watching the Wheel of Fortune game show on TV. That’s okay with me; I’ve become very good at the puzzles. For some, death is full of tragedy. But for others, dying is a time of spiritual transformation that takes them beyond personal identity, bringing forward a sense of absolute safety, fearlessness, and even perfection in the face of the unknown. In the dying process, many ordinary people come to know themselves as what I can only call “an undying love.”
A Gallup survey showed that “people overwhelmingly want to reclaim and reassert the spiritual dimensions in dying.” But this doesn’t necessarily mean that they want more religion or beliefs thrown at them. It means that they are seeking more than the mastery of modern medicine.
Spiritual support is not a matter of esoteric practices and existential discussions. It can be as simple as offering our kind and reassuring presence or chicken soup made with affection. At Zen Hospice Project, we adopted the view that when people are dying, they need intensive care—intensive love, intensive compassion, and intensive presence. Ultimately, spiritual support is the fearless commitment to honor the individual’s unique way of meeting death.
Early on in the dying process, people often need help discovering what has value and purpose in life. Without meaning, life becomes mechanical, empty, soulless, too small for human beings to exist. Victor Frankl identified self-transcendence as an indispensable human capacity for meaningful living when he wrote, “Man is not destroyed by suffering; he is destroyed by suffering without meaning.”
Death comes to all. Whether we like that fact or not, it is certain to happen. Instead of avoiding this truth, it is useful to understand its meaning. Facing our own mortality can shift our priorities and values, and profoundly change our views of reality. Sometimes adversity is what helps us to discover our strengths, just as dying can help us discover the beauty in life. There is a commitment in the act of accepting death that can help us move from tragedy to transformation. Suffering is suffering. We can’t always explain it, let alone control it. But we can meet it with compassion. We can meet it with presence, look at it directly, understand it, and perhaps find meaning in our relationship to it. Meaning isn’t about assigning a cause. Meaning has a way of strengthening us; it builds resilience and enables us to confront suffering without running away.
Of course suffering isn’t necessary in order for us to find meaning. Some people discover meaning through activities such as making art, listening to music, being in nature, journaling, and storytelling. Others find meaning through relationship—the joy of companionship, the legacy of gift giving, reminiscing with loved ones about old times, or healing estranged friendships with forgiveness. At some point, however, meaning loses its importance to people who are dying. They withdraw from the external world as they are pulled into a more inward journey. If we—their well-intentioned friends, family members, and caregivers—keep distracting them by pulling them back to the world of time, objects, and meaning, we may break their connection to the flow of the sacred. Grandma doesn’t want to talk anymore about her first kiss on the Ferris wheel at the county fair. Playing your father’s favorite song no longer sends him into a reverie about his wedding day. Auntie Ellen’s heroic expedition to Antarctica, which was once the defining adventure of her life, fades in importance.
Remember the stillness and quiet I referenced that we feel at places that are doorways to the sacred, like Chartres Cathedral or a grove of redwoods? Now imagine several tour buses suddenly arrived and two hundred tourists disembarked with their cameras and loud voices, swarming through the place. Our attention would be sidetracked by the commotion. While the sacred would still be present, we might temporarily lose our connection with it. When caregivers and loved ones appear with their own agendas, memories, and needs, they become like the annoying tourists—an unpleasant distraction to those who are dying. But it need not be that way. As loved ones and caregivers, we can choose instead to act as quiet companions or trustworthy guides as the person who is dying journeys deeper into the sacred forest.
It is common for people at the time of dying to demonstrate distressing physical symptoms, mental agitation or grogginess, and emotional turmoil. In order to care for them, we must effectively address the pain, appropriately manage the symptoms, and attend to any disturbing issues. This requires mastery. However, if we bring only technology and medical expertise to the service of the dying, we will miss its holy significance. We may even interrupt an opportunity for growth and transformation.
Dying happens on two levels simultaneously—the physical and the spiritual. The body is closing down, while the consciousness is opening up. In order to compassionately companion the dying, ideally we attend to both processes at once. It can prove challenging for one person to manage all this. I find it difficult even with three decades of experience. That is why I often find it valuable to have more than one person in the room. One cares for the physical needs of the individual; the other accompanies the person on a spiritual journey.
Jennifer was dying after a long and difficult course of lung cancer. Laurie, a remarkable nurse, gave her undivided attention to Jennifer’s body. Laurie breathed with Jennifer through her shortness of breath, dabbing her cracked lips with a moist sponge and attending to all of Jennifer’s physical symptoms with skill and love.
Sitting at Jennifer’s bedside, I settled into my own body and came closer to myself, to the unperturbed silent awareness that rested under the agitation. Quieting my mind, I evoked the compassion in my heart. I attuned with presence to Jennifer’s state of being, to her changing consciousness, allowing it to impress itself upon my own. I remained present, clear, and calm, attempting to meet whatever occurred with equanimity. Undistracted by the superficial, I sensed that Jennifer’s essential self already had embarked on the journey. We traveled together, just as Isaiah and I did to the schoolhouse. I was honest with myself about my limitations. I knew that I could only accompany her so far. I offered her the spaciousness of my mind.
I did not know how Jennifer should die. Death is unknown and timeless. We discover it moment to moment. So I did my best not to interfere. I trusted in the wisdom of compassion, that our loving hearts would be our reliable guides. Just as two midwives had helped my son Gabe to take his first breath, Laurie and I helped Jennifer take her last.
Sitting next to Jennifer that day, I was reminded of a poem by Antonio Machado, which beautifully expresses for me how, while those who are dying might appear agitated on the surface, internally they can be quite still.
No my soul is not asleep.
It is awake, wide awake.
It neither sleeps nor dreams but watches,
its clear eyes open,
far off things, and listens
at the shores of the great silence.
It is not uncommon for people to emerge from a deep sleep or semi-coma state and tell me that they remember being with me at such times. Often, they thank me for being with them without interference. This nonverbal contact, being to being, is at the heart of healing. The felt sense of shared presence with another human helps us to appreciate that awareness is not ours alone, that it extends and continues beyond our separate selves. Objects, experiences, and even people come and go in awareness. Awareness is the background where there is no change. All change happens against it. Awareness is like a movie screen that knows what is being projected onto it.
Normally, we only see the suffering of impermanence, the coming and going of constant change, the coming together and falling apart, without realizing that all this appears and disappears on the background of perfect harmony. When we take what in Zen is called the “backward step,” we can look from the vantage point of open awareness, we know ourselves to be this background, this pure, bare awareness, against which all personal and universal change occurs. This is what we surrender to.
I have witnessed an increasing radiance as ordinary people with no spiritual practice become transparent to their essential nature. It is similar to the process of transformation that occurs for meditation practitioners after decades of contemplative practice.
The potential these experiences have shown me is undeniable. Without a doubt, dying holds an unmatched possibility for transformation. It can be inspiring and awesomely beautiful. And it can also be intense, messy, and complicated. Even in dying, we are impacted by conditions beyond our control.
Medical technology has dramatically altered the dying experience. The idea of a “natural death” is slowly vanishing from our culture, having been replaced by a more antiseptic, institutionalized death managed by medical professionals. There are wonderful benefits to modern treatments and interventions. However, there are also serious drawbacks. Witness the advances in life support, where the line between who is alive and who is dead has become increasingly hazy.
It seems we can’t resist meddling with the experience of death both technologically and philosophically. Idealized notions of a “good death” or a “dignified death” are equally troubling. They can blind us to what is actually happening, causing us to override the unpleasant and trample the sacred. Arbitrary standards about things “going according to plan” exert enormous pressure on dying people, adding guilt, shame, embarrassment, and a sense of failure to an already challenging process. Dignity is not an objective value. It is a subjective experience. Care with dignity promotes self-respect, honors individual differences, and supports people in the freedom to live their lives and their deaths according to their personal wishes.
When we interfere, we may miss out on or even interrupt the subtler dimensions of the dying experience. No matter how noble our intentions, we need to resist the temptation to act on our own biases or impose our well-meaning advice or spiritual beliefs on people who are dying.
Hannah was a Christian scientist with a deep and unwavering faith in God. At ninety-three, she had arrived at a place of acceptance of her death. She told me that her image of death was “to rest in the lap of Jesus.”
Hannah’s well-meaning granddaughter, Skye, came to visit. Skye shared that she had been reading a number of books on near-death experiences. According to these books, at the time of death, people are often greeted by their deceased relatives. Skye said, “Grandma, you don’t have to worry, because when you die, everyone you know who died before you will be there to meet you.”
When she heard this, Hannah became terrified of dying. The secret she had never shared with her family was that her husband, Edgar, had physically abused her for a good portion of their married life. He had died five years before. The idea of meeting Edgar again “on the other side” and spending eternity with him filled Hannah with desperation.
A contemplative approach to dying includes ways of being such as mindfulness, warmth, authenticity, stability, and generous listening. This allows us to enter the question of dying without so many answers. Being with dying calls for humility, acceptance, and a willingness to let go of control.
* * *
In the process of dying, a gradual awakening occurs. Almost imperceptibly, we begin a long, slow process of letting go, relinquishing what we know we can no longer hold on to or control.
Letting go is an entry into unknown territory. Grief is the toll that we pay. Tears are the fluids that ease the release.
In dying, we cannot hold on to our treasured possessions. One hospice resident, Brian, taught me this when he wept and then gracefully gave away his Gibson Les Paul guitar. “We are not what we have,” he said. “And anyway, there are no storage units in heaven.”
As we lose our ability to engage in our favorite activities, we must let go of traveling or cooking or making love, and then even simpler pleasures like swallowing without difficulty. We relinquish the roles we played in our families, workplaces, and communities and release the dreams we have carried with us for a lifetime but never achieved. In our dying, we must even let go of the future and everything and everyone that we loved.
Letting go is how we prepare for dying. Suzuki Roshi said that renunciation is not giving up the things of the world, but accepting that they go away. An acceptance of impermanence helps us learn how to die. It also reveals the flip side of loss, which is that letting go is an act of generosity. We let go of old grudges, and give ourselves peace. We let go of fixed views, and give ourselves to not knowing. We let go of self-sufficiency and give ourselves to the care of others. We let go of clinging and give ourselves to gratitude. We let go of control and give ourselves to surrender.
Surrender is not the same thing as letting go. Normally, we think of letting go as a release often accompanied by a sense of freedom from previous restraints. Surrender is more about expansion. There is a freedom in surrender, but it is not really about setting something down or distancing ourselves from an object, person, or experience, as it is with letting go. With surrender, we are free because we have expanded into a spaciousness, a boundless quality of being that can include but not be constrained by the previously limiting beliefs that once defined us, keeping us separate and apart. We release the fruitless habit of clinging to changing objects as a source of happiness. In surrender, we are reconstituted. We are no longer enslaved by our pasts. No longer imprisoned by our former identities. We become intimate with the inner truth of our essential nature. In surrender, we feel ourselves not gaining distance, but rather coming closer.
Surrender means moving into flow. I remember watching my father float in the Atlantic Ocean. He seemed to disappear into the sea. All I could see was his soft, white belly rising and falling on the waves. You cannot float if you hold on too tightly.
Surrender happens when we stop fighting. We stop fighting against ourselves. We stop fighting with life. We stop fighting with death. Surrender is a state in which resistance of any kind ceases to occur. We no longer put up any defense.
I’m not convinced that surrender is a choice. It seems involuntary. It feels to me like an inescapable undertow or karmic thread drawing us home. Qualities that engender surrender include faith, love, religious conviction, confidence in acquired wisdom, a sense of awe, and also something far more common—exhaustion.
Once, while river rafting on one of America’s wildest rivers, I was thrown overboard into a whirlpool. I did all the wrong things. I tried to swim at the edge of the whirlpool, imagining that I could somehow hoist myself out of the water as I might on the side of a swimming pool. My companions threw me ropes and shouted instructions, but I kept fighting the force of the whirlpool, trying to escape. I quickly became exhausted. Eventually, I was defeated.
The whirlpool took me down into a watery chaos. I was tossed around by a power much larger than me. It was relentless. I did not experience a gentle letting go into the light. I was terrified, filled with despair, and fighting for survival. I felt like I was breaking apart.
At one point, I no longer had the energy to fight. This was the moment when surrender entered. I had an experience that many people describe just before they’re in a car accident. Time stood still, and I could see clearly the distinct details of my surroundings, even in the turbulence of the muddy waters. Chaotic patterns shifted into a perceived order. I felt a growing sense of ease, some kind of mercy, and then a complete release. Consciousness was no longer confined to form. The river sucked me down, dragged me along the bottom, and spit me out in an eddy downstream. When I emerged, I felt like I had a new set of eyes. I could see my life in a fresh way, with pristine clarity.
I would not call this a near-death experience. However, my encounter with total surrender has helped me come closer to the reality experienced and described by patients who are dying. I have a sense of what Barbara meant when she said, “I am no longer in charge.” I could relate to the ease in Ruth’s voice when she told me, “Now I just fall back into the breath, and it catches me.” I recognized the smile in Joshua’s eyes when he almost sang, “Got no more worries. I’m just resting my head in the hands of Jesus.”
Surrender is infinitely deeper than letting go. Letting go is still a strategy of the mind occupied with the past. It is an activity of the personality, and the personality is primarily concerned with perpetuating itself. Letting go is still me making a choice. Ego cannot surrender. Surrender is the effortless, easeful non-doing of our essential nature without interference. We are simply aware.
Surrender is more like an initiation, in which the dispensable is sacrificed to the essential. While we may resist, our fighting ultimately proves ineffective. The dissolution of the false will naturally stimulates a sense of fear, and the voices in our heads tell us to pull back. But the sacred is so magnetizing, the surrender so compelling, that fear does not stop us. In time, the struggle ceases. Our consciousness recognizes that the power we feel, once so terrifying, is our own deep being. We surrender to the reality of non-separation.
Surrender is the end of two and the opening to the one.