Sagebrush and the Morning Star

This post was not written using AI.

It’s not on dogmatic grounds that I reject reincarnation. It’s not even on rational grounds. Disbelievers should take the time to challenge themselves with a close examination of the work of renegade psychologist Ian Stevenson, who spent a scholarly career documenting cases of spontaneous past-life recall in children. (In fact, his work got into even eerier areas, such as xenoglossy and birthmarks.) Even the arch-rationalist Carl Sagan found Stevenson’s work worth noting as one example of research into paranormal phenomena that was worthy of open-minded consideration.

I’ve read a good deal of Stevenson’s work, so I am aware of the strength and strangeness of the evidence that can be mustered on that side of the argument. I’m more generally familiar with broad spiritual and religious arguments in favor of reincarnation: the good sense of a worldview in which our education as souls can take longer than one, often tragically truncated, human life; the built-in salutary relativity that suggests we have been many things other than we are, and thus inculcates some baseline sympathy for people who are quite different from ourselves; the sense of a common fate with the animal world; compassion for those who are suffering in conditions we think ourselves immune to in this life; the intuition of a universe of souls extending into unknown pre-incarnate and post-incarnate expanses. I sense the spiritual and existential power of these ideas to color, alter, and strengthen our presence in this life with a savor of other, larger worlds.

And yet, as I kissed my little girl on the forehead and tucked her into bed last night, and she turned over to hug her lobster (yes, a stuffed lobster; it’s the current favorite), I felt: it is all of her that is precious to me, precious beyond my ability to express. As I sang to her in The Wexford Lullaby, she is equally “flesh of my flesh, bone of my bone” and “heart of my heart, soul of my soul.”

It is her flesh that is precious to me. This little body is precious to me. Of course her soul as well: but they are not separate, they are not finally distinguishable. What is she? She is a living soul.

In the moment when the tenderness I feel for her little body grips me so intensely, I understand in my bones that any spiritualizing is an attempt to evade the agonizing and terrifying reality that immediately presents itself: namely, that her body is radically vulnerable, radically contingent, radically exposed to the vicissitudes of a world in which sickness, injury, and death are constant dark companions. We grope, personally, religiously, mythologically, for ways to convince ourselves that even if the worst should happen, “it would be all right.” Her spirit would pass on to another life, she would live again, all ills would be forgotten, the journey would continue.

It would not be all right.

This is the honest, agonized cry of humanity: it is not all right. “Oh that thou wouldest rend the heavens, that thou wouldest come down” is how the prophet pours out his human heart to God in the presence of all the dark realities that threaten us. Our first job is to stand there, in that agony of heart, in honesty; we cannot approach the Lord without that honesty.

Here is where we are animals, and where we must remain animals. I note this: animals, not beasts; let us distinguish. This morning I hiked before dawn, to put a little distance between myself and the cancer of light and noise that runs along the 101 corridor from Los Angeles to Ventura, to get up into the hills, to see the dawn touching the tall grass and to see the morning star, Venus, the goddess at whose rising I was born, shining down from a still-dark sky. But what took me was the smell: the gentle pungence of wild herbs in these dry hills. As I stepped onto the trail, I felt the brief tension and trepidation that comes when I leave the human world and step into the dark. But what drew me on, what consoled my heart, was the fragrance — always so subtle, always inexpressible — the thing you can’t convey with words, the thing you can only gesture towards, appealing to some common experience. Have you smelled these dry southland hills in their seasons and their moods? Then you know. Otherwise you cannot know. Thank God for smells: they evade the conceit of our mind and our speech, and remain uncorrupted by them.

It is the animal in us who smells. This animal is innocent. Sometimes I remember the death of a beloved pet, particularly an old dog; the sweetness and utter humility in which he died, the contentedness to be small, to be himself, to let go. The complete trust and surrender and abandonment. The animal is attuned. The animal follows God. The animal does not argue. The animal does not speak, and does not lie.

Naturally, we are animals. In our bodies, we are animals. This is the truth of us. It is only in our spirits that we can become beasts.

The animal in us is to be trusted. Not the beast in us: the animal. The animal who smells, who feels, who knows what cannot be spoken. The beast is the animal who has been caged and abused. The beast is the animal who has been broken in spirit. If we have become beast, we must return to the animal — not try to become angels. Angels can become the worst of beasts: and indeed, the Beast par excellence is an angel, is he not?

Therefore let’s cherish the way of the dying dog. Let’s cherish the way of the animal and return to it. Let’s follow the scent, not the map. Let’s find the faith that lives in the blood.

When I follow the scent, I come to the Resurrection.

The animal in me hopes for the Resurrection. It is the beast in me who suffers through the nightmare of imagining myself, alienating myself, into discarnate spirit, that can pick up and discard bodies with equanimity.

The animal in me hopes for the Resurrection of my little girl, hopes that she will live in the fullness of life, this very body of hers, this precious body of hers, this flesh, this flesh. Hopes for it, longs for it, prays for it with the prayer that is not an outpouring of words but a groaning deeper than words; as I believe, the very groaning of the Ruach in my heart, the very presence of the Holy Wind, the Holy Breath, that allows me to cry Abba! to my heavenly Father.

What is there to do on this earth where it is not all right?

I will kiss my little girl as she sleeps and walk out into the hills to smell the sagebrush and follow the morning star.