Sunlight & Innocence

My first experience that I later recalled as a "spiritual" experience happened one day when I was about six years old.

It was summertime, and I was about six. At the time my family had recently moved into a new-to-them house in Pleasantville, New York. It was just the kind of house you'd imagine they'd have in a place called Pleasantville-two-story clapboard frame house, painted white with dark green shutters. There was an attic and dormer windows and it had a wide front porch and a freestanding garage at the end of the driveway. A large maple shaded the front yard, and there was an apple tree suitable for climbing in the back.

On this particular day, my family was outside. It was a sparkling day. Bright green leaves shimmered in the light breeze. The grass had been freshly mown, and there was a badminton net stretched across the backyard. A doubles match was underway-my father and sister Beeby on one side, my older brother, Brent, and Polly, my other sister opposing them. My mother cooked hamburgers on the concrete grill, and my little brother Robert, who was just a year old, played in the grass nearby.

I watched all this kneeling on my bed, looking out the open window. I'd been there ever since school let out and I came down with a illness it was a major accomplishment to say, much less spell. But I did. M-o-n-o-n-u-c-l-e-o-s-i-s. They called it Kissing Disease for short, and everyone teased me about who I'd been kissing to get it. It was beyond me! All I knew was that the treatment was rest, rest, rest - I'd been consigned to my bed for the entire summer!

Meanwhile, life in my family went on around me. I could hear the feathery plop of the birdie being volleyed back and forth, then my father's beery voice teased someone for missing a shot. The smoke from the sizzling meat wafted in my direction. Soon the burgers were ready, and my mother called everyone to get one. No one looked up at my window to see if I was there.

Apparently, they did just fine without me. But I missed them. Oh, I knew they'd all pile into my room at some point during the day. The older ones, home from college would stop by to tickle me or otherwise cheer me up. Mommy would bring me something light to eat and, before it was even dark out, daddy would tuck me in for the night. But now, when they were all outside, having as much fun as our family could have, I was alone.

And tired. The main thing about the mono was that I didn't have any energy. I couldn't have played outside even though I wanted to. It was completely exhausting just to go downstairs to the dining room the times my mother thought I could give it a try. So, to the sounds of the family outside, together, without me, I started to fall asleep.

I distinctly recall the feel of my head resting on the pillow - its smooth coolness. But it's also as if, in remembering what happened, that I am watching this scene as a witness. A small curly-headed girl, dressed in a t-shirt and some frilly underpants, sprawled face down across the bed, with no sheet as cover. A stripe of sun crosses through the window opening. The girl turns over, not from restlessness because she is very relaxed. Her arms rest above her head now, open. The angle of the sun shifts slightly, and now a wide beam spreads slowly over first the head and then the entire body of this child.

I was not asleep as that beam of sunlight enveloped me. It was more like I was in a reverie or a trance. Yet the quality was not of other-worldliness, but of something very close to home, even closer really, than any home I'd known in Pleasantville.

As I basked in the warmth of the sun, it was as if love itself embraced me. All feelings of being left out because I was ill, because something was wrong, dissolved. Left in the place of any concern was a deep knowing of Innocence. And this understanding: Who I am, as I am-is enough! Nothing is required, all is already given, and in this moment of openness, received as well.

Then I did fall asleep, feeling safe and warm-held in an invisible embrace. When I woke up someone was tousling my hair. It was time for supper. There was a small hamburger, along with the creamy cole slaw my mother always made to go alongside. A glass of milk. I was eager to eat, I had an appetite for life - illness would come and go and come again-I would live through it all. I was strong, and the light of the sun had blessed me with the courage to go through times of fear and weakness.

Looking back, as I do from time to time, I remember this blessing. It's only too easy to forget how fearlessly the sun shines in moments when a dark mood pulls a veil across the window of my mind. So we can help each other recall such times in our lives, I often ask people, when we are gathered together to share, if they can remember a similar kind of experience in their own life-the first time they knew there was Something More. Inevitably, there is.

One man spoke of nearly drowning in a pool when he was sixteen and showing off. Someone pulled him out, but no one got a look at his face or knew who he was. Whoever he was disappeared immediately. This man felt it was an angel.

A woman tells how she first encountered what she called Spirit. She looked in the mirror one day and unexpectedly saw the depths of her own soul reflected back. She was very obese at the time, and in this moment of looking in the mirror, she remembered for the first time that someone in her family had abused her sexually. As she continued to look at herself, a sense of unconditional love poured into her from the image she beheld, and, in that moment the contempt she held for her excess weight transformed into complete acceptance. She says she fell in love with herself that day, and eventually found a way to deal with an eating disorder in a 12 step program.

Another woman described stepping out her back door to hang laundry on a line-her clothes dryer was broken. The wind, as it filled the billowing sheets, filled her with a previously unknown feeling of lightness and well-being. She called this her visit with God, and has always enjoyed drying her things outdoors ever since.

Sick and tired and alone, one beam of sunlight made all the difference for me that day. A simple moment of awakening-it was complete in itself. But such moments so often are fleeting ones, and one is left wanting more. It's like they are visits from a lover who lives a far distance-we didn't know before how much love there could be. But now they arouse in us a longing-for reunion, for oneness, for the experience of being who we really are-that must somehow, someday be satisfied with the continuous presence of this innocent state of pure being.

Anyone who has felt that longing, knows the memory of the experience that awakened it pales by comparison with that which first aroused it. Yet the longing persists, not for that experience but for that experience now, and now, and now. And so begins the search, sometimes a demand, for what so often seems to elude us-the only thing worth having ever again-our own deepest and most essential Self.

The Sufi poet Kabir says: "It is the intensity of the longing that does all the work. Look at me and you will see a slave of that intensity."

Even when it seems we are most alone, most alienated or betrayed, the intensity of our longing burns an opening in our heart, through which the light of the ever-present sun can shine as you, as me, as One.

Copyrighted, NCM Press, 2002