G. O'Hall

Glors
2010-08-18 14:39:54 (UTC)

LOVING BEYOND THE VEIL

The other day I found a picture of my father’s finger
reaching for me, through the Monastery’s grill in the
cloister where I was doing my Novitiate … He had tears in
his eyes, as I do, recalling his tender longing for me. I
had chosen a monastic order, pledging a vow of silence and
death unto worldly goods, as I learned that there are no
boundaries for love. Love reached beyond the grill, beyond
the Monastery walls, even beyond the veil of death. Hence,
the title.
As a child it seemed obvious. It was easy to sense this
loving touch through the veil of the darkness beyond my
five senses; easy to feel the consolation, reassurance,
comfort and abiding company of a Love I could not see or
touch, but which I knew was present. He/she/it was made
manifest in the warm kindness I could feel in my heart. I
envisioned it as the kindling of Inner Light. With this
developing perception, limits that set people apart, with
the separating boundaries perceived by the simple eye,
were mellowed by the sweet encompassing radiance of
acceptance. This enveloping softening seemed to overflow
from the abounding abundance of Abiding Love. So, it was
easy for me, as a child, to love.
There are early pictures of me reaching out to total
strangers, in the supermarket, and on the streets. Many
were elderly folk clearly crying for contact. Empathy came
naturally as I shared with others, their feelings as I
perceived them.
But social education teaches to limit reality to what can
be touched, seen, heard..ratified by physical presence.
So the magic of envisioning desires in dreamlike trances
and hopeful wishes (which I later learned are what prayers
stem from), was relentlessly shut down.
Now in my late fifties, as soulful experience gives
meaning to memories of such, surpassing of the body, I
realize how wise I was, as a child…and what loss I
suffered as socializing into civilized ‘separateness’
effaced my natural intuition.
I became gravely handicapped, spiritually: blind to the
synchronicity of parallel realities at other levels of
experience. I groped for answers in the darkness of doubt,
hopelessness and fear. Thus crippled, I limped with
wavering efforts to love, holding on to the security of my
control over ‘giving’, in exchange for ‘receiving’. My
experience was encapsulated under the self-centered
assurance of false security, excluding spontaneity,
creativity, trust and enjoyment. Pain engrossed the
protective shield of denial with hardening of my heart. I
became insensitive, senseless, unresponsive and joylessly
flat as I grew in ‘perfection’. I exchanged ‘who I was’
for ‘what I had achieved’.
In trying, however late, to rectify, recover and
strengthen this lost inner vision, I now try to remember
experiences of touching beyond the veil.

There was the time I sat on my grandmother’s rocking
chair, singing “Cockles and mussles…alive, alive Oh!”
fully aware of the sheer enjoyment of life, with an
overwhelming sense of inner flow.
There was the innocent endearment of a five-year-old, for
the milkman, in outreach response to his loneliness…The
shy experience of undeserving gratitude as I received a
set of toy dishes from the boy across the street, at seven…
The embracing compassion for my teacher who had been
openly rebuked for jazzing up the British anthem!…The nine-
year-old who sat in loving worry, waiting for my father to
return, the day he been followed by police for making a
wrong turn on the road.
Other such experiences include…The mystical instinct (at
five!)to build an altar behind the tree in the garden, in
reverence of life and death..where I lovingly lay dead
insects and animals to rest as I built a secret cemetery.
There was the teenager who cried bitterly beyond solace as
she saw the Pietá defiled behind police barricades, giving
testimony of the debauchery that was seeping even into St.
Peter’s Cathedral.
There was the ecstasy of sunrises and sunsets with
heartfelt gratitude, skipping a beat…….Inner dialogues of
answers to questions..such as the time I was doubting the
existence of divine justice, as I was promenading in the
park, when a flower in the shadows caught my attention. In
that exact moment, the sun shifted its warmth and radiance
on it …I suddenly had the understanding of an insight that
made me realize that God will, ultimately, illuminate us
all…each in his own due time. All we need is patience.
I remember the carefree joy of a dog splattering in the
waves on the seashore, when I most needed to forget my
sorrows.
This miracle of synchronicity allowed me to give internal
meaning to events, manifest in external reality. One such
example occurred during my late adolescence while
wondering what to do with my life. The answer came when I
first found a crucifix washed ashore, the very same day I
had seen a film about a boy who had lost his father in a
shipwreck..(The film ended with the boy carrying the mast,
in the shape of a cross, as his father’s ship was washed
ashore and building a church in his memory). Was I being
called to the church? This lingering question seemed
ratified when ,I later found a miniature Christ figure
that fit exactly into the holes of the nails, in the
cross, found six months previously!!!! It seemed clear it
was a calling….which ended, when, out of the blue, I
received a letter of invitation to the Carmelite Monastery
in St Louis Mo!!! (all the while sendind applications to
universities!!) So I responded to my inner evoking,
becoming a postulant, novice and making temporary vows.
I ended up developing my innate capacity to touch those
who hurt, to ease their pain, becoming a doctor. When the
community of elder nuns saw fit that I should rather
become a missionary, instead of contemplative nun, I
returned home, again with the internal question…What am I
to do?..only to find a format to be filled out for
Medicine, on the table at home (my sister had also been
applying to medical school!) As it turned out, I now see,
(as the sun shifts to shine enlightenment upon me), that
all this was needed in preparation for me to, later, be at
the forefront of the fight against AIDS, in Mexico. My
specialization in Epidemiology, in addition to my monastic
experience gave me the needed balance between the medical
and spiritual conflicts of terminal disease and sexual and
social stigma.
I still use instinctive healing as a masseuse.
Awareness of the touch of love beyond the veil, has also
made my responses unpredictable and bizarre…stopping the
car on the fast lane to pick stray dogs, up, or helping a
man as he ran for his life, while being persecuted at
night, totally unaware of danger. I remember coming for
dinner, one day, with over thirty paupers; and another
time, inviting the chauffeur of a street bus, in, for
coffee….This innate tendency to be attracted to men with
suffering in their hearts, made me walk the roads of
despair, touching bottom with those that faced death, head-
on.
All my boyfriends were scarred by wounds either by
accident, bullets, or surgery. One of my ex-husbands, an
alcoholic, was a survivor of child abuse; another, guilt-
ridden in suffering for his son’s suicide…and of course my
marriage to the One who suffers all our sins….
All of them, still touch me with love from beyond the veil…
one, from beyond the veil of divorce; the other, from
beyond the veil of death…and my Eternal Lover, beyond the
veil of forgiveness, present always in my only daughter
born on Christmas Day!
Yes, I’ve learned that love is not limited to physical
experience, or time, or geography, or social status, age,
sex, race…
I’ve seen some of the most loving examples in brothels
where sex-workers care for each other unconditionally;
lovers who sacrifice their personal pleasure for their
loved-one’s welfare and social stability; wives of HIV-
infected men who chose to risk having babies, out of love
for their dying husbands; Mother Mary Immaculata who chose
to go on living to love in prayer, though she was
paralyzed, in confinement to a bed. Desperate family in
grieving, holding on to the hope for miracles to rescue
their loved ones from death; gay couples who adopted HIV-
infected babies…so many infinite ways of loving…

In this world of chaos and destruction, touching the love
beyond the veil becomes our only hope…our only reassurance
that all is, as it should be….and that all, will be well.




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