Naomi's book lead me three times to Jesus.
With the Gospel in mind, I spent some time thinking about something else that had caught my attention: the need for repentance and the forgiveness of sins. Having Jesus as the perfect role model, I soon realised I was rather far from faultless. Whereas prior to experiencing the Gospel I had difficulty seeing how I might have offended Jesus, afterwards it was clear to me that I did things I needed to stop doing and failed to do things I needed to start doing. I understood that, much like an ill-maintained car engine, I was due for an overhaul.
Could I carry out the repairs myself? The energy healers I had met certainly thought so. They all agreed that by accessing the universal life force energy, anyone can achieve physical, emotional as well as spiritual healing and growth. In their view, the ultimate goal is to achieve a greater awareness of and connection with one's higher self: the part of you that allegedly has access to all wisdom amassed over the course of the many lives you have lived. That higher self is essentially God, the eternal, omnipotent and intelligent being who is one's real self. Simply put: we are all one, everyone and everything is connected and divine, and the real you is actually God, which means you have the power to create yourself and the world around you. Within this framework it was possible to come up with reasonable answers to quite a few of my questions. For example, the notion that Naomi's spirit, before choosing to become incarnate as our daughter, had decided to lead a life in which she would suffer, was indeed reasonable. Another reasonable explanation was that Paulina's spirit and mine had chosen to become incarnate as husband and wife with a child that would suffer. Combining these explanations was reasonable as well. The bottom line was that we were actually in control. Yes, we suffered, but only because it was our own choice to suffer as the experience would lead us to greater spiritual growth. In that sense, the New Age thinking is very positive. So positive in fact, that there is no room for negative concepts such as evil or sin. After all, our higher selves are divine and therefore good. Sure, our incarnate spirits can do bad things, but only for an ultimately good purpose. Just like you could be a healthy person in one life and very ill in the next, you could be killed in one life and be a murderer in the next. The point is to experience it all in order to learn and grow. I could not accept this sort of wisdom.
I realised the Gospel and New Age are polar opposites. As New Agers do not believe in evil, they do not believe in sin either, which makes repentance and the forgiveness of sins irrelevant, which in turn makes Jesus, who died for the expiation of our sins, irrelevant as well.
After reading the Gospel, the New Age philosophies simply felt wrong and I wondered why I had put my hope in it in the first place. Strangely, what now appeared so obvious had not at all been obvious to me before. In hindsight, my doubts, increased anxiety and generally uncomfortable feeling should have been dead giveaways but at the time I guess I simply wanted to believe it was the right way forward. I wanted to believe we were somehow in control and that it was possible for us to heal Naomi. Now, these energy healing practices, as well as the New Age beliefs they were based on, plainly felt misguided. Compared with Jesus, they lacked authority. I wanted nothing to do with them anymore.
I right away stopped BodyTalk and the other local energy healing activities and then pondered how best to ask my mother to cease her efforts as well. I felt uncomfortable with Reiki and the other distance healing efforts but I did appreciate my mother's desire to help Naomi recover. It bothered me that I felt both comfortable and uncomfortable at the same time. Comfortable because I trust my mother and uncomfortable because I could not trust what she had put her trust in. Based on what she had shared with me during the past year, it was clear that my mother's thinking largely aligned with the New Age thinking, even though she does not consider herself a New Ager. My mother's beliefs were, as she explained, based on her own experiences and discoveries. Only when she started to explore what other people with similar experiences believed, she found the New Age philosophies matched and confirmed her own beliefs.
What concerned me was that if I believed in Jesus, and my mother believed in New Age doctrine, and the two could not be combined, then one of us was being deceived. My mother had a different view. She told me that religion in itself did not matter. You may follow a religion or you may not. Which specific religion you choose to follow is not important because all religions have the same purpose: to help you become "God conscious". Once conscious (with or without religion), you can start working on becoming a better person and as a result also a more rounded spirit and ultimately, after many lives, reach perfect enlightenment, nirvana, heaven or whatever you wanted to call it. In other words, even though my mother and I travelled on different roads, it did not matter because just like many roads lead to Rome, in the end our roads would converge and lead us to the same destination: God. Could my mother proof she was right? No. Could I proof she was wrong? Also not. My mother was absolutely certain that what she had told me was, as validated by her own experiences, the truth. I just could not feel the same way. Therefore I phoned my mother and told her I wanted to stop Reiki and the other distance healing efforts. She felt misunderstood but respected my decision. I felt awkward but glad we had talked.
After learning about Jesus and stopping all energy healing, I noticeably relaxed and realised that all this time I had been restless. I also realised I had made a very sudden U-turn: away from New Age and towards Jesus. Was it really Him who had send me that "It's all right" message?
I reflected on why I had concluded that Jesus was the sender. Was it just because the publisher of Naomi's book happened to share its name with a saint? I chuckled and shook my head. How silly. I needed a far more direct link to Jesus to confirm it was Him who sent the message.
Another busy day followed and I had no time to collect my thoughts. At night, when everyone was sleeping, I went to the study room and again picked up Naomi's book, or rather booklet, as it just had a handful of pages. Staring at the sun on the cover, I wondered why she had picked this book. "The Wind and the Sun", read the title. Then, for the first time, I actually read the story, which was about a contest between the wind and the sun to decide who was the stronger of the two. The challenge was to make a passing traveler remove his coat. However hard the wind blew, the traveler only wrapped his coat tighter, but when the sun shone, the traveler was overcome with heat and took off his coat. It was a simple but appealing story, so I went online to learn more about it. A quick search lead me to a Wikipedia page which offered the following interpretation of the story: "While superior force leaves us cold, the warmth of Christ's love dispels it." I was taken aback by the direct reference to Jesus. Was this the confirmation I was looking for? Keen to find out what else was said about the story, I continued reading and found the following further down the page: "This fable has also been proposed as a parallel text in comparative linguistics as it provides more natural language than the Lord's Prayer." Unfamiliar with this prayer, I did a quick search for it. It turned out that the "Lord's Prayer" (also referred to as the "Our Father Prayer") was the prayer Jesus had taught his disciples when they asked Him how to pray!
It had taken a long time (a lifetime, in fact) but I finally found myself on the right path. I was 3am but I felt more awake than ever. I was amazed and marvelled at the fact that this little book, chosen and brought home by Naomi on the very day of her cardiac arrest, had lead me to Jesus – not once, not twice but three times. All clues flashed by: the tune, the message, the book, the song, the sun, Jester's suggestion, Saint Rigby, the Catholic Church, the Gospel, Jesus, and now, to top it all, the Lord's prayer. How extraordinary. It left me no doubt as to Whom I should indeed turn to and how to reach out to Him: through prayer.
I looked for the Lord's Prayer in my Bible and found it in the Gospel of Matthew (6:9-13):
Our Father Who art in heaven, Hallowed be Thy name. Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread and forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us. And lead us not into temptation but deliver us from evil.
After reading this prayer several times, I drew four conclusions. First of all, we had to recognise and honour our Father in heaven Whom, as Jester had correctly pointed out, we had ignored all this time. At least, I surely had never paid attention to Him. Now I took comfort in knowing that we indeed had a Father in heaven. The fact that we could call God our Father also reduced the distance I felt between Him and myself.
Secondly, what Naomi's book had made clear to me was that I, much like the wind, could blow as hard as I wanted (by turning to energy healing therapies and all other things I had been preoccupied with in our battle for Naomi's recovery) but that in the end, I would not be able to forcefully achieve my objective. It felt as if I was living that story of the contest. Just like the wind ultimately had to accept that only the sun could make the traveller take of his coat, I realised there was no way I was going to outdo the sun either. As Jesus had taught His disciples, it should be our desire that not our will but the Father's will be done. I then understood that we could not do this on our own; not with our own might. What we needed was the warmth of Christ's love.
Was it our Father's will for Naomi to suffer? I did not believe so. Why did she suffer then? Why did we suffer as a family? Did this suffering have a purpose? Was it somehow necessary? Strangely, I felt it was. I did not know for what, but according to this prayer it seemed to me there was no need to despair because, third conclusion, each day we could ask our Father for what we needed. Not for what we needed sometime in the future but for what we needed today. This felt like we were to take care of one day at a time instead of being excessively anxious about the future, even though that is easier said than done. There appeared to be a clear condition, though: that God would be merciful to us as long as we would be forgiving towards others, which prompted me to make an effort to reconcile with those whom I had fallen out with.
Lastly, we could ask our Father not to lead us into temptation. At the time, I did not understand what that meant but found another translation of the Lord's Prayer that read: "Lead us not to hard testing". That, I understood, and immediately remembered what someone had told me a year or so earlier: that the will of God will not take you where the grace of God will not protect you. We were not alone. God was with us and would help and protect us if only we asked Him for His help and protection. As long as we remained by His side and not be tempted to go our own way again, He would surely not let us suffer more than we could endure.
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