Thoughts on MECFS as a Spiritual Teacher

Salvador Dali's "Skull of Zurbaran" is a profound meditation on 1) the duality of religious experience as both a stairway to the life of the divine as well as the means by which humanity enslaves itself to death and destruction and 2) mortality as the greatest teacher of spiritual truth and the doorway to divine presence. For me, it has become a metaphor for life with ME/CFS. 


One of the advantages of having an incurable illness is that, as the saying goes, I've got 'no fucks left to give'. OK, I've got a handful of fucks, but those are for my family whom I love deeply.
I have found emotional and spiritual freedom and a corresponding detachment to the 'things of this world that have grown strangely dim' that no amount of meditation, contemplation and prayer could have led me to.

I wouldn't wish #MECFS on anyone in the world. And yet, I wouldn't trade what I've learned from it for anything in the world.

Life with #MECFS is like having died, but yet remaining conscious. Living with dreams never to be fulfilled. To take a walk in the hills just one more time. To write that book that you have hundreds of pages of notes and years of research stacked up sitting there on your desk.

Life with #MECFS is a waking death, a living nightmare, endless pain and exhaustion, all invisible to everyone but those closest to you who are willing to believe you and not to shame you.

Life with #MECFS is a cruel and unrelenting teacher of limits. What will I do today, shower or cook dinner for the kids? I can't do both. Or can I? Maybe today is the day I can sneak in a shower and still cook dinner. I'll try it. I'm not that sick. Boom. #MECFS has its own ideas. I did too much again. I crash. Not hard. But I lose a whole day the next day. I sleep 16 hours. I sit on a couch when I wake. Not even the Warriors game can cheer me up.

#MECFS sings to me, "Oops. You did it again." It forces me to constantly think through my limits. Can I walk to the kitchen, 15 feet away, and get a glass of water, or will that knock me out? I hold out until I have to use the bathroom. Then I only have to get up and walk once.

But #MECFS' constant cruel teaching of limits opens me to a greater vista that can hardly be described. I can see what matters in this world with eyes that only a handful of spiritual leaders that I have known in my life (and I have known many great ones) can see.

#MECFS teaches me the foolishness of grasping. "Vanity. Vanity. It is all Vanity" as the Hebrew teacher of wisdom pointed out regarding the limits of human achievement, ambition, and even of wisdom itself.

#MECFS teaches me to cherish truth and to despise falsehoods. To give no quarter to the lies of my false self or the mask wearing of hypocrites (from the Greek word for 'actor' or 'thespian') the thin, cheep veneers of self-righteousness, performing 'goodness', and reputation.

But most of all #MECFS teaches me that spiritual reality is more real than can be taught in words - it must be experienced in love and compassion and in a fearless embrace of truth, even truth that strips one to the core, even truth that pushes you to the abyss.

It is here, at the edge of the abyss that #MECFS teaches me to hold on to love. Nothing else endures. As the Greek philosopher taught, as the Apostle John wrote, the substance of reality and of the divine realm is love. I would not trade the experience of this truth for anything. (March 8, 2018)