“When a child is born, the entire Universe has to shift and make room. Another entity capable of free will, and therefore capable of becoming God, has been born.”
--Ina May Gaskin, Spiritual Midwifery
Recently I wound up down a rabbit hole, and found myself buying a book by Ashley Lande called, The Thing That Would Make Everything Okay Forever: Transcendence, Psychedelics, and Jesus Christ. Yeah, that was a deep rabbit hole, to be sure. While grateful that Lande wound up in a good place by the end of the book, I cannot help but wonder how fried her brain was by the copious amounts of LSD, mushrooms, and speed that she took to get there—which is all chronicled in its pages. To each, their unique journey towards truth. [1]
But this is not a review of that book. Rather, certain passages sparked within me a clearer articulation of a problem I have been wrestling with for a long, painful time. How can there ever be joy in a mother’s life again when they have lost a child, whether through death or estrangement? I specify ‘mother’ here, not to disrespect fathers, but to simply emphasize the point that mothers have a different relationship to their children. A mother carries her child in her womb for nine months; during this time, they share a physical existence. There is micro-chimerism, such that cells from the fetus will circulate in the mother forever, and cells from the mother will circulate in the child forever. The child carries in its body the symbol of that indelible connection—the navel mark. The mother and the child go through childbirth together, and lactation together. These are incredibly bonding physical and spiritual experiences. The mother’s relationship is, prima facie, different from the father’s.
And that means death or estrangement of a child affects the mother differently. I won’t try to argue the point, I’m just going to assert it. That does not mean that fathers are not also profoundly affected by the death or estrangement of a child; they clearly are. There’s just something a bit different between the two experiences: how could there not be?
Lande touches on this subject in a very affecting way. Given her psychedelic lifestyle at the time, she was surrounded by those who taught her that attachment was a problem to be mastered, and that the final liberation of the soul was liberation from individual existence into the great eternal All. She strove very hard to detach herself so that she would not feel emotional pain. The greater the detachment, the greater the joy, or so she was convinced. And then in death (or on a psychedelic trip), she could de-individuate, which would also produce joy.
All of this was upended when she had her first baby—of course:
“It all seemed groovy in the high of an acid trip or in the endorphin-flooded thrall of meditation after a sweaty yoga class—I am a part of it all, and it is all a part of me. . . I would someday be folded into the All, the blissful obliterative non-existence that was beyond differential existence. But when I beheld my son—his sweet laughing brown eyes, his perfect little nose, his flushed cheeks, his ineradicable himness—dissonance reigned supreme. More than dissonance: anger and sorrow. This couldn’t be true. It couldn’t be that his distinction as a human being would be annihilated, dissolved into something indistinguishable from nothingness. As much as I could, sometimes, accept the idea in reference to myself and my ego, I raged against the idea that he would be erased. It couldn’t be true. It wouldn’t, if I could help it.
“One afternoon I pushed Israel in his stroller to the park several blocks from our house. It had a field bordered by a stretch of woods, and that say all was light diffusing the green buds of spring. No one was around so I let our dogs off-leash and they wandered among the trees, pausing to sniff the air for all things living and dead, while Israel and I sat on a blanket in the field. At one point Israel began to totter away from me, stopping and looking back every few steps with a sneaky smile on his face testing his limits. I laughed and struggled to temper the over-protectiveness of my own mothering instinct, wondering how far I should let him toddle, knowing I had to allow him some exploration as he felt his way into this big scary world, but also knowing I couldn’t trust this amorphous, fickle deity I knew only as the Universe.
“Suddenly I was overcome with grief, a bittersweet flood of longing and sadness and unbearable tenderness all woven together. He would die, one day, this precious child, and nothing would be left of him or me or our love. We would be absorbed into the insatiable All, because he was his feet and he was the sun and he was our dog, now snuffling his snout along the ground displacing a gout of rotting leaves in his search for something foul to eat. This was supposed to make me . . . happy? Joyful? Peaceful? It didn’t. It jolted me with panic and infused me with deep discontent. What had seemed a reasonable set of beliefs before, contiguous with my psychedelic experiences, now, in the face of my precious and irreplaceable toddler, seemed totally untenable and even further—dare I say it, I who had supposedly seen beyond or at least aspired to see beyond polarities—evil?
“All of him, gone. All of this, gone, diffused into the Great Stuffiness that was beyond form. Everything Israel and I had both gone through for him to be born into the world—meaningless, if it were finally absorbed into the All. For perhaps the first time since my inaugural acid trip, when a flash of white split the sky and subverted everything I’d ever known, that light appeared to me as great darkness.” (165-167).
Lande has a further epiphany when the little daughter of her friend dies of leukemia:
“’You start with breaking small attachments, and then you work up to that.’ The echo of my yoga teacher’s sentiment, summarizing detachment and straining to comprehend such a state of enlightenment that she might “not care” when her brother died, rang hollowly in my head.
“But I did care. I cared very much, about not only my own child but about my friend’s child. It was unfair. It was wrong. The sting of death was real, and biting like no other, and I suspected no amount of yoga or meditation or practiced emotional removal would mitigate it. Indeed, in the face of such a tragedy as Joella’s death, it seemed to even try to do so would be a denial of something essential about who I was, about who we were, about the nature of human nature itself. To do so would seem like a false solution, an answer to the puzzle that was no answer at all but an avoidance . . . is there any hope outside of detachment, which was beginning to look like no hope at all?
“’All beings throughout all galaxies—when they come into being, that’s you coming into being! It’s all continuous energy going on—and if I am my foot, I am the sun.’ I recalled Alan Watt’s words bitterly now. What does that even mean?! I wondered angrily. Where I once would have nodded and smiled beatifically if such words were uttered . . . now I bristled at the presumption of such nonsense to even address the real conundrum of existence. What kind of insipid hippie claptrap is that, anyway?! I cursed. I was mad that it didn’t really make sense, but even more I was mad that it presumed to be some kind of answer to all this suffering, all this grief, to the whole churning crucible of despair that was human history.
“Joella was in a coffin, her individual existence obliterated, her precious little body soon to follow suit. Was she absorbed into the All, the unitive bliss which there were no individuated consciousnesses to even experience, ready to reemerge as a foot or part of a celestial body? Oh, yay. How comforting . . .
“Our little Buddha statuette sat, bronze and serene, on a shelf in a cabinet near the front door of our house . . . I’d come to despise that little statuette, both because of my failure to attain its simpering complacency but also because of my doubt such a complacency truly existed—and if it did, I thought, it shouldn’t be called enlightenment. It should be called inhumanity. It should be called callousness. It should be called the death of the soul. The way of detachment made us something less than human, and I no longer wanted it, nor did I want to worship or follow someone who had nothing better to offer.” (179-180; 241-242)
Yeow! Reading these words was like drinking fire, like pulling off long-lost scabs to reveal the bloody flesh below. Lande nailed it. When a mother loses a child through death or even through estrangement, she faces a monumental choice. She knows with every fiber of her being that value, that precious value, of that one. She knows it because that one has infinite value to her. She--she alone among mortals--has counted the hairs of her babe’s head. She knows that even past birth, there is an invisible, living wire connecting the two of them through space and time . . . they are vine and fruit. She is always cognizant of that one, whether she is sleeping or waking.
But the fruit falls from the vine, whether from death or estrangement. The fruit may forget; the vine never will, even if it produce subsequent fruit. The one is simply not replaceable, not in all the eons of eternity.
What is a mother to do with that unsolvable conundrum? In a sense, when a child has died or chosen estrangement, it cannot help but feel to her as a repudiation, and the most personal one possible at that. How can life go on without that precious, irreplaceable one? One mother expressed, ‘If I saw my child toddle near edge the Grand Canyon and go over, I would go after them even over the edge. No one could stop me.”
But that, of course, means death; this is choosing death for oneself, though it simultaneously feels like being true to the love that you bear them. But when there is that welding link, it does not feel like a choice so much as it feels like a natural law of physics. Wherever you go, my child, wherever you are, I am with you always. I will always be there for you; I will be true to you.
Your body rebels, of course, against death. You keep on breathing, your heart keeps beating, at some point your body even coerces you into eating again. The life force within your body will not be overruled.
And then, of course, you find yourself in that great wasteland, neither here nor there. Alive, but still “with” someone who is not alive or who has chosen to leave. More specifically, how can (her) life go on without choosing to detach from that precious, irreplaceable one? Is such a detachment not a betrayal of the one, a returning of repudiation with repudiation?
It is a question of Hamlet-like proportion—to be or not to be? To grieve forever in testament to love, or to choose detachment for the sake of all that is good which is not wrapped up in the one? And is it really even humanly possible for a mother to choose detachment? Would she even want to live in a state of detachment, or would it feel, as it did to Lande, inhumane, callous, even evil?
I confess I do not have the answers to these questions. All I have are thoughts, seriously incomplete thoughts at that. Take them for what you will.
1) The destiny of human beings is not to be detached from one another, but to be attached eternally. We are taught that the sealing ordinances of the temple are the crown jewels of the Kingdom of God. We are promised we can be forever—forever!—with those ones to whom we are sealed. And we are also told that the entire purpose of the earth is fulfilled when the complete human family, from Adam and Eve down through all generations of time, have been sealed together.
I take from that Church doctrine that the incredible grief a mother feels on the passing or estrangement of her child is not deviant. It is in fact the completely appropriate feeling to feel, for it is the same way our Heavenly Parents feel.
2) We are taught that we are all literally God’s children, and we are taught that we have a Heavenly Mother. Our feelings as mothers here on earth echo those of our Mother in Heaven. But we are also taught that Heavenly Mother is estranged—apparently permanently—from at least a third of Her children.
I take from these Church teachings that these painful earthly mothering experiences can help me know what my Heavenly Mother knows. She has apparently trodden this path before--so there is a path to tread. And She is apparently still able to feel joy and happiness. So that must be possible for me and all mothers facing the death or estrangement of children as well.
3) Christ taught, “He who loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me.” (Matthew 10:37).
I take from this that any emotion not rooted in Truth will lead one astray and also, in the end, that emotion itself will wither and die. While I am the vine, in one sense, to my child, I and my child only live as we are both attached to the True Vine. Our love must be rooted in Truth to last. And when it is not, love will inevitably die.
4) And yet our mandate as members of the kingdom of God on earth is centered on the one. For example, we must find every last soul born to a mother and offer them the ordinances of salvation and exaltation. The Truth validates the preciousness of the one, validates how mothers see the one. Christ even leaves the ninety and nine to find that one. If there had only ever been one human being on earth, Christ would still have laid down His life for that one. If a child toddles off the edge of the Grand Canyon, Christ will also go with that child. You could not even think you could stop Him.
I take from this that there are only ever Ones, not an All. Joy only lives in Ones welded together. There is no purpose to God without Ones. Our destiny is not to be subsumed into an All, just as it was never the destiny of Christ or our Heavenly Parents to be subsumed into an All. They are Ones who are one because they are united in purpose and in heart and therefore their love for each other is evergreen. We were not created to be subsumed. We were created to be ones, because it is the joy of our Heavenly Parents that we be such. Ones—but welded.
Perhaps at this point you are expecting me to take these four truths and wrap them up and put a bow on it for you. I cannot. All I can say is that I believe the Restored Gospel ratifies and validates the perspective of mothers. Lande is right—detachment is inhumane and it is not our destiny. It is a lie that detachment should be any type of aspiration for a disciple of Christ. The “ones” really are at the center of the Gospel, as mothers have always known.
At the same time, I feel that the Gospel is also telling me that while the mothers are intuiting the real end or telos of the work of God, mothers in mortality must also grow, through earthly experience, to more fully understand the process necessary to reach that real end. Though the way is simple and straight, paradoxes abound nonetheless. Consider Jesus’ words in John 12:24-25: “Verily, verily, I say unto you, Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone: but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit. He that loveth his life shall lose it; and he that hateth his life in this world shall keep it unto life eternal.” There is something about our relationship with our children that is like that, though I do not yet fully understand.
Seeing the larger trajectory of souls (dying to bring forth fruit, hating our life here to have life eternal there, going away in order to return) does not to diminish their precious one-ness. The one sheep, the one coin, the one prodigal son . . . these ones are what is of value in Christ’s parables (Luke 15). Christ is explicitly validating the perspective of mothers in these core parables, I believe.
But the parables challenge our maternal sensibilities. The one must die to live. The one must go away to come back. The one must be lost to be found. The true potential of the one must be accomplished by the one. It cannot be achieved in any other way. It cannot be achieved for you by another, even a loving other, even your mother. Or your Mother.
And it must be accomplished in freedom, even though that includes the freedom to leave us. Hartmut Rosa, a sociologist, has reminded us, “If my cat were a programmable robot that always purred and wanted to be cuddled, she would become nothing to me but a dead thing.” We mothers know we do not want our children to become dead things to us. God loved us so much that He gave us each the power to repudiate Him entirely. God isn’t looking for love from dead things, and neither are earthly mothers. But, oh what joy, when the children turn to us in freely chosen and sincerely felt love, and thank us for our love for them! There can be no greater treasure in the entire universe for our Heavenly Parents, or for earthly mothers.
Is it radical to think that our Mother so believed in you and I as ones that She would let us go, let us be lost, let us die, that our precious one-ness be fully realized? Did She so value the one that each of us are, that She preferred to one day call us Friend, and not Child? That the navel mark is a promise of the future and not merely a token of the past, a future in which our full one-nesses can finally fulfill that promise of eternal attachment with Her and all others who have reached that stage?
That would not be a repudiation of caring, it would be no inhumane detachment . . . it would be, paradoxically, the height of caring for the one, a cherishing of the promise of a full and loving and eternal attachment with the one. This is no choosing of death. This is no wasteland. This is a moment of poise (“suspense or wavering, as between rest and motion or two phases of motion: the poise of the tides”). We hear the echo of the concept of poise in Paul, where he says, “The entire universe is standing on tiptoe, yearning to see the unveiling of God’s glorious sons and daughters!” (https://www.bible.com/bible/1849/ROM.8.19-28.TPT )
In this time of poise given us here on Earth, we mothers should choose to live for the promises of the mark in our children’s flesh. All heaven is yearning for the very same thing we ourselves yearn for. All that heaven can do to help, heaven has already done or will do—because our Parents love our children’s one-ness even more than we do, and because they love and respect the earthly mothers of Their children. For our children to find us again, we their mothers must stand fast, we must live, and we must do what is in our power to do, as the woman swept and continued to sweep for the lost coin. We must endure this time of poise as Heaven does, though our hearts “stand on tiptoes.”
In short, we must believe the promise of motherhood as it was revealed to us by God in pregnancy and childbirth and lactation, in the temple that is our womanly body. How utterly and completely right that the resurrected Savior appeared first to a woman, a representative of all mothers, of our Mother.
It don’t know if these thoughts do any justice to the path our Mother treads. I am still trying to see Her path more clearly. But writing this short piece has offered me solace in this time of poise. I see now that mothers have not got it wrong; they feel a reality that is fully justified by the Restored Gospel of Jesus Christ. And that is an encouraging thought.
NOTES:
[1] Though I was gobsmacked to learn her journey was profoundly affected by the works of a classic-era sci-fi writer named R.A. Lafferty. That same writer played an outsized role in my own spiritual progress. Her book by him was The Annals of Klepsis. Mine was Arrive at Easterwine. Now that is a very odd coincidence. Hardly anyone knows this writer today. Even in his heyday, his was a fringe voice.
[Back to manuscript].
Full Citation for this Article: Cassler, V.H. (2024) "Poise: The One and the All," SquareTwo, Vol. 17 No. 3 (Fall 2024), http://squaretwo.org/Sq2ArticleCasslerPoise.html, accessed <give access date>.
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