We Are Not Alone

 “I was alone. It was very quiet. It was maybe around one o’clock… I knew I was at the brink. I knew I was about to go over it. I knew it, and I didn’t care. It was too much to care. I was too  weak.  Slide on over the edge and down. Over…over the edge…it was so close…so easy…and I didn’t care. Then there was a presence in the room. It wasn’t a person. It wasn’t anything I could see or touch or smell or hear or in any manner describe, but I was no longer alone. There was something very real in the room, and it demanded my attention. It was so real, I was flooded with a feeling of complete comfort…I was told not to fear…”

   Sportscaster Red Barber was hospitalized with a bleeding ulcer when he had what could be considered a near death experience. He was on the brink, the edge, the cusp of life and death – he knew it, but was too weak to care, too depleted to resist sliding over the edge. Barber’s experience was not only an encounter with mortality, but with a life form he had never known, a presence as real as it was surreal.

     As has been true for countless others, it was a medical emergency that occasioned Barber’s spiritual encounter. But we don’t have to be at death’s door to experience what he describes; the felt awareness of “a presence in the room” is possible anywhere, anytime. Barber hints at what can make it possible to feel that presence when he states “I was alone. It was very quiet.”

     Perhaps the reason most of us fail to sense the spiritual presence that permeates our everyday existence, is that being alone and quiet is countercultural, they are conditions that are uncomfortable and from which we tend to flee. We are quick to surround ourselves with people, noise, and various addictive behaviors as a way to fill the emptiness, the void, the uneasiness of being without distractions.

     There is, according to 14^th century Persian poet and mystic Hafiz, a presence not only awaiting us, but seeking us. Referring to it as “Happiness,” he states that “Ever since Happiness heard your name, it has been running through the streets trying to find you.” A little alone and quiet time might just give Presence/Happiness the opportunity to catch up to and embrace us.