I grabbed a light jacket to walk to the library. The sky over me winked blue; birds chirped; tiny green leaves grew on bare branches. As I tromped down a wooded path in the park, I thought of my father. From the time I was old enough to walk, he would take me on a nature tour of our backyard to look for signs of spring. Holding his big hand, I would point out tiny buds on our willow tree, and he would show me where our flowers were going to bloom. “Even though we can’t see it yet,” he explained, kneeling to my level and patting the earth, “things are changing down there. Soon you’ll wake up and everything will be different.”
I sniffed the air and couldn’t stop a smile. This was a scent I remembered: fresh earth, melted snow, and hope.
THOUGH CONSCIOUS THAT I was less than forty-eight hours from the finish line, food was the furthest thing from my mind. Walking Oxley, I floated along the sidewalk in a spirit-haze (which is a little like a hangover, except awesome) listening to Boston, one of my regular Pandora Internet radio stations.
Like an alert from the emergency broadcast system, the song “I Can Only Imagine” by Mercy Me broke through the station. I can’t explain how, but this song—one I sang in a hundred school chapel services and church meetings—thrummed loudly in my ear buds. The ballad is about heaven and being close to God, two things I had thought were lost to me. In exactly the way a song can conjure your first love and first heartbreak, this song had the power to open the floodgates of being in love with the God of my youth, and then being heartbroken.
Nine months ago, I would have cringed at the first notes, shut off the radio, and punched anyone near me. But on this day I stopped mid-step. Speechless with wonder, I dropped to the nearest bench.
My eyes were open and my senses intact: I could still see Oxley straining to chase a rabbit; I could still feel a slight breeze on my face. Everything was there, yet the physical reality seemed hazy compared to the sharp focus of my soul. This song that once represented my pain had been transformed. It crested with an overwhelming wave of beauty, a beauty that transcended the chords, the instruments, the vocalists.
The beauty of the song’s intention: The intention to reach out to our Creator, touch Something Greater than we are, and jump in faith, believing we will reach the other side. It was the songwriter’s intention; it was my intention.
Our words and methods were different, but our hearts were the same.
In that moment, with a barking puppy to my left, cars whizzing past on my right, the sounds of the city near and yet removed, I was immersed in beauty. Though no water was involved, that neglected urban corner—with its cracked sidewalk and weeds pushing through the concrete—became my baptismal font.
The song, formerly poison to my spirit, washed my whole being—over, under, and through—in a swirling bath. With wave after wave it cleansed my understanding. As I used the chorus to reach out to the Godiverse, I reclaimed everything that was lost to me. I looked past the words and the action to the heart, knowing that it wasn’t just the song that could never hurt me again; nothing related to my old spiritual life could hurt me again. When the last notes faded, the negative power of religious ritual dissolved with them, replaced, at long last, by peace. Josh’s peace, the Urban Monk’s peace.
My peace.
“I’M HERE FOR THE Tranquility Meditation? Sorry I’m running behind,” I murmured to an older woman as I slipped off my shoes. She was stationed by the entrance to the Buddhist Center’s main shrine room, sitting guard on the stairs, observing me with mirthful eyes.
She patted my arm. “You can never be too early or too late, dear. Everything happens right on time.”
I found a cushion and surveyed the people—about forty of them, varied in race and age. All were seated, solemn and quiet, on purple floor cushions. The only sound was deep breathing. I twisted my wedding ring as I settled cross-legged on my own cushion, closed my eyes, and thought how much had changed since my first visit, when Mr. Hotness had easily eclipsed the Buddhist Center in my mind.
I tried to sink my body into the cushion and my mind into the infinite, but the cushion was too hard and my mind too soft—full of memories from this journey and my fast. Wriggling in discomfort and chiding my mind for playing recess, I peeked at the Indian guy one cushion over and felt pity that he was stuck next to restless me. Ehipassiko, I reminded myself, breathing deeply and focusing my mind. I am here to come and see. To further calm myself, I mentally recited lines from the poem “Impermeable Peace” by Ajahn Ocean, a Zen nun:
Look upon me in the light
and you will clearly see your own reflection.
Part of me was still seeking the touchy-feely, ooey-gooey, “aha moment” that mystics report; after all, “I want to see God” was the first item on my fasting list a month ago. But as I reflected on all the ways the Godiverse had met me in my fast, I decided peace was enough. Still, my muscles contended in discomfort, and the thirty minutes passed slowly. I felt the Sickness in my joints; though the pain had lessened during the fast, it had not disappeared. Floor meditation only made it worse, so I gratefully rose when the bell rang to signal ten minutes of walking meditation.
As we circumnavigated the perimeter of the room in silence, I contemplated the paintings of great Buddhist lamas on the walls. Did you ever fast? I asked one. Have you seen God? I inquired of another. They remained tight-lipped and wise, sentries modeling inner tranquility.
Not looking forward to more time on the floor, I stifled a sigh as the bell rang for our second thirty minutes of meditation. Fidgeting through muscle cramps, I grasped my mantra as tightly as a string of prayer beads. Then I issued an invitation: Only Light of the Godiverse, come forth from eternity to meet me here.
Nothing.
I breathed, trying to relax into the experience . . . or nonexperience, as it were. And just as I exhaled, completely letting go of expectation, a tsunami of Energy rushed in through the top of my head. My being filled with light. I glowed with it, pulsed with it, dissolved into it. The light expanded until I was weightless and weighted, whirling and still, together and alone. I wasn’t even confused by the opposites, because neither turmoil nor words existed in this space. There was only perfect peace.
Prisms of rainbow light danced around me, and I understood that each point of light was a soul. I saw them all over the world, kneeling before their God in one form or another, submitting their prayers and songs and beads and candles and bare feet with the same beautiful intention: to reach the Divine.
Within each point of light a scene sparkled: children danced around a fire, monks chanted stoically, men prostrated, women bowed their heads, priests made the sign of the cross, choirs swayed and clapped, groups gathered in awe of nature. Each scene became a thousand scenes, then ten thousand. The points of light constantly moved—bending, bowing, laughing, sitting, kneeling, singing, crying, and dancing—and the scenes combined, dissolved, and recombined in time with their worship. Worship, another word I had disliked until right then, when I understood that God was everywhere, in everyone, whether they knew it or not. We were all connected. I heard the bells and gongs and voices and chants blending together in a harmony without beginning or end. All of humanity created one joyous song heard by I AM and recognized as beautiful. Rituals that seemed so incomprehensibly different, so resolutely at odds, played together harmoniously in the pit orchestra of the Godiverse.
The points of light emanated from a round diamond with incalculable mirrored facets—a Divine Disco Ball. Without words, I understood this was a picture of God and humanity. I was seeing it because I was it: one little mirror, a small yet essential piece of the Whole.
Every soul was a mirror: each reflecting light and dark; each joined with others to form this beautiful picture of Truth that is too large for any one of us to understand alone. Our placements and angles—our beliefs and non-beliefs, practices or non-practices, histories, experiences, and personalities—were distinct, so our individual perspectives differed, but the Divine Disco Ball shimmered with commonality. We cannot experience God without each other, because God is love. If faith is love in action, God is love in action times infinity.
I understood the Disco Ball as a way to stop judging and start loving. By recognizing that each soul had its own part to play, its own perspective, its own light to reflect, I could release myself from judging the judgers. I didn’t have to like them or understand them, and I didn’t have to allow them in my daily life: They were simply on the other side of the Disco Ball, playing a part in the larger Truth that spins between us.
No differences existed here because no differences can exist at the heart of Infinite Love.
The Divine Disco Ball’s innumerable diamond mirrors pulsed with light and life, and the entire Godiverse sparkled before me—a brilliant, fiery diamond, spinning in the space where separateness stops and unity begins.
From somewhere far away, a gong signaled the end of meditation. The rainbow lights dimmed, and I became conscious of the weight of my body, which felt curiously heavy. My eyes fluttered open as if waking from a dream. I’d been elsewhere for a full thirty minutes: my cheeks were stained with tears; my body was so numb from the waist down that I had to use my hands to uncross my legs.
People bustled around me, talking and clearing the room, but I just sat, awestruck and silent, until only I remained. I never wanted to move from this cushion where the Divine was still near enough to taste on my tongue and smell on my skin. Eventually, someone returned to ask if I was okay, but I was still too dazed to answer. He left me alone, probably because my glassy eyes and dazzling smile made me look as if I were (A) on drugs, (B) among the criminally insane or (C) both A and B.
With the knowledge that what I had seen could never be undone—not by a church, not by a person, not even by my own doubt—I sat in rapture until I knew it was time to go. While stretching my arms over my head, the full exhilaration of the experience sideswiped me and I began to laugh. In exactly the manner of a slaphappy teenage girl with a backstage pass, I squealed aloud: “I just saw the Godiverse! And it looks like a Divine Disco Ball!”
I then performed a spontaneous, ecstatic dance that was 50 percent Ellen DeGeneres, 50 percent Napoleon Dynamite, and 100 percent terrible. But what can I say? Sometimes the most reverent thing you can do is dance.
Pulling a final, Travolta-esque pose, I suddenly remembered the Christian Spiritualist pirate who’d told me I was supposed to “dance more.”
“Like a jig?” I’d asked.
“Dance the disco, baby,” he’d replied. “You’re going to dance the disco.”
I can’t be certain of this, but I think Psychic Jesus and the Great Lamas shared a smile.
BEFORE BREAKING MY FAST, I wrote one last journal entry:
This fast was like tearing up a yard that had been overtaken by weeds. The act of forgoing food turned the soil of my heart over, and brought to light soft, moist earth that had been buried for too long. Fasting was simply an implement; other tools might have worked, but for me the fast was the right tool at the right time, tilling my heart for peace and faith.
I started this fast asking the wrong question: “What am I made of?” I’m only made of fluff and straw and a little heart. The right question is, “What happens when I come to the end of what I’m made of?” This is similar to the same question that drove explorers to the edge of the known world: “What happens when we come to the end?” They found out the end of the world doesn’t exist, and so did I. Where I stop, an unfathomable Source of strength begins. Never again do I have to fear coming to the end of myself, because there is no end; there is only ever a continual, beautiful, beginning.
AT SUNSET, TRENT AND I drove to the Urban Monk’s church. In a formal conclusion to my fast, the Monk blessed me and said: “Now go forth and eat!”
“I have never been so hungry in my life,” I joked to Trent on the way to Max & Erma’s restaurant. “I know people say you should ease back into eating after a long-term fast, but those people have more selfdiscipline than me.”
“What are you going to have first?”
“Everything on the menu . . . and then some.”
That night, I fell asleep with a stomach full of tortilla soup and a heart full of gratitude.
I dreamed that I stepped inside the Divine Disco Ball, and Psychic Jesus—he of the Christian Spiritualist Temple and my mother’s painting—was there petting his lambs. In my waking life, I would have guessed the center of the Divine Disco Ball contained metaphysical nougat: the lovechild of Snickers, raindrops on roses, and those tiny sweaters people knit for penguins caught in oil spills. (It’s a real thing; Google it. You’re welcome.)
But my mom’s Jesus? He was the last guy I would have expected to see here.
Still, he sat patiently on a bench, as though he’d been waiting a long time. I opened my mouth to ask all my existential questions, but the room glowed warm with a rush of the aforementioned nougat, endlessly multiplied. It took my breath away.
Of course it’s you, I knew in an instant. It couldn’t be anyone else. No one else lived closer to God in my Christianish heart than Jesus, a representation of the most beautiful love: Love that would give itself up for you, for me, for all. If I were a different person, it might have been someone different. But I only am, and can ever be, me. So it was my mother’s Jesus, the Psychic Jesus, the Jesus I couldn’t quite reconcile, who smiled at me.
Jesus held up (tattooed!) arms in a gesture I named, “Peace, be still,” and I knew why the storms had stopped when he told them to. I was still, because everything in me and around me was still. The whole Godiverse was still. My questions mattered not, because I already knew the answer to all of them: