Multiple Realities

Hope arises when we embrace a sacred reality.  That vision is not a dream, but a goal.  What we project into our future through faith is not just the wishful thinking of dreamers out of touch with reality; it is the blueprint for a future our faith sees clearly before us.  Hope is not a wish, but an intention. Most of us do not think of ourselves as heroic agents of change, but if we have enough hope in what we see, then we find the strength to make change happen.  When our hope is linked to the hope of others, we become even stronger.  Hope builds on itself.  It grows.

From Ladder to the Light, Steven Charleston

Wednesday, May 26

Today is the day we move my mother-in-law into memory care.  It’s been clear the last few weeks that this move should have happened at least six months ago…but that was when we all were still in the throws of the pandemic, no vaccines, limited travel and very likely we’d have had a difficult time finding a facility able to accept her.

Yet now at ninety-four she’s well down the road with ‘age related dementia’ as one doctor calls it—or Alzheimer’s—either way, it is a maze of circular talking, not really communicating.  Getting through to her is well nigh impossible most of the time.  She has a way she sees ‘it’ and that is her reality…yet it is not the way we—the rest of the family—sees it.  If that statement sounds confusing, it just an attempt to describe the situation we are living with not unlike so many other families of the elderly.   

The truth is, there are different realities, different ways of seeing things.   Our situation with mom is a microcosm of the world we’re all living in right now.  Fed by conspiracy theories and false dogmas, there are many out there living in a different reality than others of us.  And trying to communicate is very much like trying to talk with mom.  She gets angry and belligerent declaring we are calling her a lier. She tries to convince us how it is…for her, which only serves to frustrate her all the more.  She and I were talking about turning off the television yesterday.  She has a remote that works with an on/off button at the top.  I tried the button several times and it was working but she declared the only way to turn the tv off was to move a heavy chair next to the tv console using the on/off switch on the power strip—cutting the power off.  She declared that if she didn’t do it that way, the tv would come on during the night scaring her that a man was in the house.  Trying to give her some credit for what might actually be the case I tried to think of what might be happening—that the tv is REALLY coming on by itself in the middle of the night.  It reminded me of years ago when my mother was hospitalized with a brain tumor. One morning she declared to me that there was a man going around the hospital at night having sex with women.  That is far fetched, but not an impossibility.  Trying to understand their reality means momentarily getting out of our own—not the easiest task. 

Much of our own realities are driven by what is inside our own heads. Our beliefs ultimately define our personal reality primarily—and our fears and anxieties to often command our realities. We don’t see things as they are, we see things like we are.  Change can be frightening and unknowns spook us.  Like Charleston says hope is embracing a sacred reality…a dimension that is beyond what we immediately see daily in our three dimensional world. This other dimension is what the scriptures and other spiritual paths teach us. We’ve been told that in the cloudiness, the shadows, in the darkness of life there is a Kingdom within us…an eternal Light. Those of us who’ve seen that Light and believe in its’ reality—particularly the mystery of it—have been labeled mystics throughout the centuries.  It isn’t something to be physically grasped yet we can ironically hold to it, trust it.  For those who’ve not ‘seen’ it, experienced it, known it, their path is the same—one of faith—but just a couple of steps back. For those of us who have known it, we are here to assure others. 

It is understandable that mom is frightened today, leaving the house where she’s been for decades, the place her husband of seventy-five years passed on three years ago.  Then there is the fear, even dread of what she’s going to—the unknowns there.  So today I pray for a calm, a peace for her—for all of us.  There is nothing easy about all this.  There is a sadness, a pall over these days. It’s a path we all eventually must go unless we quietly die in our sleep which I’ve come to see as quite the blessing. 

We will see how today goes.  The rental truck is in the drive.  We head to mom’s in a couple of hours.  

Glad today for the promise of Presence…that can be known, and felt.