Mercy in Action

notes on illness and spiritual experience

My husband was tired from chemo, and the kids needed watching, so I canceled a followup appointment with my own surgeon. Motherly duty, plus I felt great. I’ve missed the appearance of breasts since capsular contracture forced me to say goodbye to the implants I’ve had since my first cancer diagnosis in 2021. Questions about the relationship between Necessity and Beauty abound; I’ve gotten used to the company of such inquiry. Aphrodite will arise and insist on this or that, unwavering in her determination to be with me, to be expressed by me. I thought I’d gotten rid of our back-and-forth when I realized I could not possess her, have her, have my way with her. What I’d gotten rid of was a certain shadow. A certain shade of conversation with the Goddess had dropped off and made glorious room for a few months. A big room, with golden light streaming in, room enough for my body to rise to a level of Beauty that had nothing to do with anything that can be talked about as beauty.

Practically speaking: For the last few months, I’ve enjoyed full breaths, long runs, being able to hug people without wincing in pain, without reservation. Spiritually speaking, I discovered two dead butterflies on the limestone trail beside a sacred river. I went to the water to pray a register of prayers: for my Self, for my children, for my husband. For the river and the butterflies. For the dead. For our neighbors, our communities, the leaders of our communities. For my enemies and the enemies of God, whoever they might be, whatever face they wear. For the enemies that live inside of me, too, their pulsing confusions, the way they rile up in sharp hate even when greeted with love. As I prayed, a woodpecker and a blue heron flew East. The sun appeared behind the trees in the western forest, across from the riverbank. I felt the Goddess in a shift that you’ll have to pardon for its wordlessness and silence. In this shift was the understanding that evil, in all of its manifestations, was held in the heart of the Goddess. And as for the Goddess, well, when your life manages to take you to the center of evil, you will not find anything of significance there except for the boundless love, goodness, and mercy of the Goddess herself. I bowled myself over, my knees in the limestone, joints as dead butterflies; my own body strove to make an impression into the earth, into the silence, of the import of such thoughts, such feelings, which were neither thought nor feeling so much as seeing. Sight of spirit that I can neither speak nor use so much as participate in, myself the lower in the higher, and, too, the higher in the lower. The Goddess has always made Gods of us, the broken, the mortal, the shameful, the imperfect.

For years I kept at a distance my interest in the sickness that overcame mystics. Jung’s terrible afflictions as certain books and passages were or were not written. Tomberg’s final collapse on vacation with his wife. Weil’s pleurisy, her chest pains, her starvation. Cristina Campo’s bad heart. I could write, as a gesture toward something I was afraid to truly say, about the coincidences, and the alongsides, the scholar’s tentative take on the synchronicity of such and such, the poet’s brief seeing of the collapse of causality.

But when I awoke earlier this week with swelling and pain beneath the incision on my left chest, I allowed no distance. I let Aphrodite come to me, and I spoke to her as we traveled first to the hospital’s West complex, and I, later, alone, to the East. The incisions make two crosses on either side of my chest, where my breasts and nipples used to be. Aphrodite was enraged at the pain, at misperception of my appearance in the plastic surgeon’s waiting room, at the inconceivability that my body should sustain these wounds, that she should be so covered in the blood, and fluid, and muck of my particular sickness, my particular journey toward age and death. I spoke with my Goddess and left her there on the top floor of the Western hospital, so that she might be transfigured by humanity as I have been by the Gods. The breast care radiology department is across town. I went there to have them aspirate my chest, suck out the bloody water from the centermost point of my left Cross.

In a dream, a few months ago, a Hawk came to me and gave me the Grail cup. After terrifying me, he placed the cup in my chest, on the left side. “You may drink from it, and offer it to others,” he said to me. “But you may not use it to get ahead.”

As red fluid streamed from my chest, Aphrodite became wisdom in the West, which is to say, she became Sophia, flanked by her children, sons and daughters and of the Sun. She came to me as I to her: Mercy in Action, found in the heart of sickness and overwhelm; true sight that sees. What masquerades as power has no being of its own.