Revealing the Light - January 12, 2014
When I was in my young teens I was often depressed. I felt helpless to change my life, which was tinged by a kind of subtle anger, judgment and shame. The screaming matches between my parents that often included smashing walls and breaking dishes left me in a kind of perpetual trauma that simmered beneath the surface. Although I didn’t realize it until many years later, I was feeling responsible in some way for fixing my family and ashamed of myself that I could not.
This subtle essence of gloom colored everything in my life but had somehow slipped far enough below the surface of my consciousness that I had no idea why my life was so sad. When I looked back at it, the encounter that special day may have saved my life. For certain it embraced me tenderly during many dark moments from then on.
The streetcar trundled along its tracks nudging me toward my home in the West end. With each of its many passenger pick-ups and drop-offs my body would jerk forward then quickly back against the firm leather seat as it reached its next stop. When I was a young boy we affectionately referred to the streetcars that blanketed the streets of downtown Toronto like a spider web as the red-rocket and whenever there was a side-ways seat available on the rocket, I would take it. Of course the jerking back and forth was still there but now it was from side to side and it kind of broke up the monotony of the constant involuntary body shaking.
That day I was mildly pleased that I had gotten a side-ways seat and took small pleasure that I was able to watch the buildings and people slowly slide by the window across from me. The trip from downtown to the streetcar loop that met the buses which headed further West was long, at least it seemed long to me in those days and I fell into a kind of hypnotic rhythm with the jerking movement combined with the blurred panorama slipping past me.
It was during that mild comatose feeling that I felt a gentle tug coming from my right side. I slowly turned my head slightly to the right and noticed a man sitting opposite me and about three seats down toward the back. He was alone sitting closest to the window on a two seat bench and was staring directly at me as if he knew me.
I turned my head quickly back, unnerved by his familiarity. But soon the pull of his gaze drew my eyes back and I found myself staring back at him. He had the look of someone who may have come from Mongolia, a country in central Asia. His face had large high cheek bones, slightly slanted eyes and a kind of muscular tightness. His skin coloring was bronze like but did not have the weathered look that many photos of people from that part of the world have. He looked very out of place and yet somehow exactly where he was supposed to be.
His body was also muscular and strangely powerful … something beyond physical strength that I didn’t understand. His features didn’t register like a list of characteristics describing the appearance of someone rather it was a feeling that was just there all at once. I didn’t know this at the time, only years later as the encounter played over and over again in my life did I remember the special experience of just ‘feeling’ his presence.
Then something incredible happened that you would not see in today’s world … he began patting the empty space next to him silently ‘inviting’ me to come over and sit beside him. No one on the crowded red rocket seemed to notice. Even more incredibly, I hesitated only for a moment then stood up and took the few steps from my bench to his and sat down. There was no fear … it felt completely natural … the thing to do.
His faced beamed as I approached his bench and the moment I sat down he placed his left hand on my right knee. There was no hint of ‘anything’ improper … it was like a loving father greeting his son and again, it felt natural. His hand never moved and he didn’t speak a single word during the rest of the trip. The forward-backward jerking of the streetcar dissolved and I fell into a subtle and peaceful reverie I had never experienced.
When we reached the loop we got off together and he joined me while I stood waiting for my bus to arrive. His hand had mysteriously slipped into mine and remained there until my bus arrived. I got onto the bus and sat in a window seat directly beside where we had been standing and then it happened.
He placed his hand on the bus window beside my face and looked up at me with such a powerful radiating love shining from his eyes that I could hardly look at him. My heart swelled like it would explode as the bus pulled away. I turned away for a moment in the direction the bus was headed out of the loop and when I look back he was gone. Where did he go so quickly I wondered but the powerful experience overwhelmed the question.
I had no idea what had just happened, all I knew was that something wonderful had entered my life, something that mysteriously diluted the misery, the sadness and the depression. There was no thought about it … it was just there like a magic wand that had been waved over my life and somehow brushed away some of the clouds … enough that I was able to see the sky and seeing the sky eventually led me to my search for the heaven within.
Angels are said to be Messengers … like emails from God without a return address. They are depicted as great Beings with wings but I feel that each one receives these messages in exactly the perfect way and at the perfect moments when they will have the perfect influence on their journey to Truth. For me it was those shining eyes that wonderful day.
