On Father’s Day, I Recall Memories of my First Spiritual Teacher

One Saturday morning on a weekend of my 200-hour yoga teacher training program, the guest instructor arrived with a poster board of an image I had seen regularly in my childhood.  She was there to teach the weekend module on anatomy, and she used this image to give an illustration of the physical, subtle, and causal bodies.

I couldn’t wait to speak with her during the break.

This image was so familiar to me, bringing back memories of my father setting himself up for meditation in his bedroom. He would lean the poster board against the cabinet doors of his walnut bureau standing it on the lip of the shelf that came out from under the cabinet doors and set his folding chair open in front of it.  He would close his bedroom door; my sister and I would know he was meditating, and he was not to be disturbed.

I shared memories of my father’s devotion to the St Germain Foundation, his commitment to his spiritual practice, with the guest instructor. 

She asked me, “What was it like, growing up in the Light.”  I paused.  I had never thought about it.  “I… I don’t know,” I said lamely.   

My earliest memory of my father is of him lying next to me on my twin bed as we looked past our feet through the open doorway into the hallway at the single light fixture in the middle of the ceiling.  I would gaze at the light because he said, “God was Light.” 

I never knew a God who punished or a God to blame or a God to fear.  God was Light.  God was Love.

My father tried to punish me once.  It was a Friday night, and I wasn’t allowed to watch the Brady Bunch.  He couldn’t go through with it.  In the end, I was able to watch my show.

I was never afraid of my father.  Never, ever.  Not once.  He never struck me.  He never said a cruel word to me.

When my sister and I were still quite young and couldn’t be left alone at home without a sitter, we had to go with my father on his errands or second jobs when my mother was working.  One time he was helping to move items from the sanctuary, his place of worship, from one location to another.  There was a woman, quite old, who was directing the move.  She kept calling him an angel.  “Claude, you are such an angel.”  My sister and I mimicked her the entire ride home, “Clauuude, you are such an aaangel,” rolling our eyes and giggling in the backseat.

My father’s second job was mowing the church and cemetery lawns.  It was my mother’s family’s church.  My father did not go to church.  He went to the sanctuary.  There was only one passenger seat in his truck. My sister and I took turns riding in the back, perched on the wheel cover, next to the lawnmower. 

While he cut the grass, perched on top of the riding lawn mower, we played among the gravestones stopping to gaze at the one with the little white angel for the little girl who died so very long ago.  After, we always stopped for soft serve ice cream on the way home.  My father loved soft serve ice cream.

The poster he meditated on was an image of the Magic Presence.  A study of our connection to the Divine.

My father saw the Light in all of us, in everyone he touched or touched him.  Later in his life, he would struggle with his own humanity, becoming at times frustrated with the world.  He grunted more and stopped using his words as much.  He talked of returning “home” on a regular basis.  But from the time he arrived here, in his body, and until he passed, he did his best to live as a good man.  He shed Light on me, his family, friends, and colleagues.  He passed as he lived, with peace, resolve and courage, if not always with the most compassionate expression. 

After he passed, I took his cellphone from the hospital room – to somehow keep his energy with me a little longer.  I saw the final text to his sister Janet, also a devoted student of St. Germain.  He writes, “Tried the meds and nothing is working. Nothing left to do.  Time to pull the plug.”  I am at first appalled, thinking, have some compassion Dad!  And what does my dear aunt, in her divine wisdom, text back, “I love you Claudeee.”    

And in those last hours with him that love was palpable.  It was all that remained.  And it was more real than anything else.  I was again reminded of the question from the guest instructor, “What was it like, growing up in the Light?”  Now I knew the answer.  Transformative.

Belief in a higher, loving intelligence was one of the first and consistent lessons I learned from my father.  It is from which we came and to which we will return.

These are the words of one yogi, Michael Singer, in his book The Untethered Soul. “ In the mystical Gospel of John, Christ says, ‘That they all may be one; as thou, Father, art in me, and I in thee, that they also may be one in us… I in them, and thou in me, that they may be made perfect in one…’  So it was taught in the Hindu Vedas; so it was taught in the Jewish Kabbalah; so it was written by the great Sufi mystic poets; so it was taught in all the great traditions of all time.  Such a state exists; one can merge into the Universal Absolute.  One can merge into God.”

I did not say goodbye to my father.  Even at the end.  It did not seem appropriate.  It was from him that I first learned there is no death.  Only death of the ego and the body, at which time, we simply return home.  It was my job to see him through this transition.  In his final lucid moments, before palliative care arrived to administer the next dose of morphine, I sat back on the chair beside him, smiled, and said “See you on the Other Side.”  He smiled back.