The Spiritual Mentor as Crazy Person

When I wrote the following lines several years ago, a new sense of identity, a new feeling for my place in relation to life as a whole, was coming into sharper focus for me despite how hard it is to articulate.

None of this is on my time. I resent nothing and no one.
I share in the whole world by laying claim to none of it,
Tasting what is sweet and bitter even in my own life
Like a sample off a plate in someone else’s home.
I am not here to stay and know it, and I no longer have a care
Because I wish to stay sane enough to keep caring.
Care like you died and kept on caring.
Care without a care, almost in just the way so many other events
Happen with no reflection or without meaning to,
But only because you mean it so much
That you are willing to be as heedless as it takes.

Not long after writing this I had a chance to put it to the test…


It was a mild and sunny Sunday afternoon late in the winter of 2002 as I pulled my aging Toyota hatchback into a space at my local Giants grocery store in Arlington, Virginia, across the Key Bridge from Washington, DC. I was disabled but still getting around. You couldn’t tell yet from looking at me that there was anything wrong – you had to be around me a little while to see the stuff I had trouble with, for example, reaching and bending.

As I painstakingly went about locking my heavy “Club” to the steering wheel and prepared to leave my car, I noticed a large SUV pull up directly behind me in my rearview mirror. It looked like this might have something to do with me, but I couldn’t imagine what, I wasn’t sure, and I half forgot about it as I concentrated on getting out of my vehicle without hurting my back.

As I stepped away from my car, the man in the SUV, who’d rolled his windows down on both sides, started shouting obscenities. After several seconds, I could hear, scattered among the expletives, that he was claiming I had deliberately taken the space he was going to back into.

It was pretty confusing. To begin with, there were empty spaces all over the place. But as the yelling continued, a vague image flashed across my mind that as I was pulling in, there may have been a large black vehicle twenty or thirty yards away with its back up lights on that must have been his. I don’t think anyone could have guessed that he was specifically targeting the space I’d chosen.

“I had no idea what you were doing,” I called out simply and with no trace of an attitude. The torrent of obscenities continued. After a pause, and without any note of sarcasm or hostility in my voice, I suggested, “Why don’t you just take it easy?”

His swearing intensified. That’s when I looked both ways and unhurriedly stepped directly in front of his vehicle toward the store’s entrance, just as if he’d politely come to a stop in order for me to cross. From the corner of my eye I saw him lurch into reverse, hauling his still swearing self out of earshot.

OK. First, I’ll admit that at one level of myself, what I did was to flip him a very special kind of bird. I gave him a really hard choice. To save face, he’d have to run me over in broad daylight with a large number of late Sunday morning grocery shoppers looking on. So my ego had it figured out that I’d probably win this one.

Second, part of my self-possession was pure disability. I couldn’t run and I couldn’t fight. I didn’t have a lot of choices.

But mainly, the choice that I made, and what allowed me to make it, was a matter of trying out that emerging sense of self that’s so hard to put into words. I’d truly felt calm, strong, and in control throughout, with only the slightest trace of an adrenaline rush. Looking at it more closely afterward, I saw that a kind of mental pulling-back had occurred in the face of his outburst that had allowed me to view the situation from a wider, almost external perspective.

From that perspective, whether he won the encounter or whether I did, meant infinitely less to me than it did to him. Because at the level that had felt most real to me, I wasn’t playing his game at all.

Stepping in front of SUVs driven by angry people who sound like they might want to kill you is still hard to come by as a regular spiritual practice, even in most major American cities. Plus it might hurt. But my opportunity that day to find out for sure whether I really had a new bottom line was irresistible and the main point of how I’d behaved. Now I had no doubt that I’d come to identify more with the One that held me than the one who was being held, and that I was capable of seeing and acting from out of that basis in reality.

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About "the One” – To paraphrase St. Paul, what I refer to here is “the One in whom we live and move and have our being” – that is, the Wholeness of the whole story that holds the story of each little life, the greatest Context that exists. Some will think of this as a Creator existing apart from creation, others as being or reality itself.