In my years of being a friend and coach to Maria, her voice had never sounded as serious and grave as it did, on this one morning when she called me. "I have been diagnosed with cancer," she announced over the phone. "The tests reveal a poor prognosis for recovery." The import of her message took a while to sink into my brain. Those moments of silence seemed to envelope a world of zillion thoughts in my head.
Maria was in her early 40s and was a successful entrepreneur. In fact, she was successful both in her professional and personal life. Happily married with three young girls, she was finally enjoying a phase of fruition of her life's efforts, which was after a couple of decades of hardships and juggling time between her family and professional life. Central to her life, was her faith in God. It had sustained her through all her trials. Yet this unexpected diagnosis was a ruthlessness intrusion, something that she was ill prepared for. But such is the power of death that it disregards all our other appointments in life.
I didn't hear from Maria for a couple of months after that conversation as she went about exploring into every form of treatment and alternate cure for cancer. Being located far off from each other, and with certain restrictions in my own life at that stage, it was harder for us to talk with each other regularly. Every now and then, she would drop a note updating me, on the progression of cancer and how every form of treatment was failing her.
When I did eventually talk with her again, she made another significant announcement, "I have lost my faith in God." She was then only days away from her final breath. She spoke about how her expectation from God was being let down. She could no longer reconcile herself with mere words of faith and reassurance from her spiritual counselor when all that she had worked towards in her own life were now being forcibly taken away from her.
What is the role of faith in our lives? Do we cling with greater faith at the time of crisis or does crisis force us to test our beliefs, and perhaps go beyond our intellectual concepts of spirituality? Facing one's own death has to be be the biggest crisis that one faces. It is the ultimate test of spirituality.
Most of us are familiar with the oft quote bible passage from Mathew (17:20), "If ye have faith as a grain of mustard seed..." But sometimes the breakdown in faith is an opportunity for us to take take responsibility for ourselves. Words that come out of a book or from another person's realization have limitations in navigating us in our lives, especially when our own first hand experience of life reveals a different reality. Mere beliefs can only take us so far and does not always feed the thirst of our souls during times of crisis. Can we then engage in a direct inquiry into the nature of spirit-uality and its applicability in our daily life?
The next few days, Maria transitioned from her outer quest of healing towards her inner quest of a deeper understanding of life and divinity. I knew that she was on a journey of self-discovery and dared not to offer any advice that would come in the way of her own direct inquiry of life and death. Besides, how could I offer any guidance, on something that I hadn't directly faced myself! Instead, I suggested to her -- to question the surface level of thoughts and feelings so that she could go deeper into her experience and its reality. We talked about all that she feared she would lose, and the feeling of identity and ownership she had towards her kids, her business, her spouse, and finally her body, etc.
I knew that like myself, Maria had the heart of an experimentalist. More and more spiritual seekers are eager, these days, to navigate spirituality with the GPS of their own hearts and minds. The question is what does it take to operate such a GPS? If we do not know our current location and where our destination is, can we turn to Google or any other GPS software to give us the directions? Similarly, without sincere attempts to directly understand our lives, and the nature of ultimate freedom within, how can we expect any form of spirituality or faith to guide us, from our unique location in life?
I spoke to Maria's husband a few days after her passing. He remarked how through the final days of her life, she was increasingly more at peace despite her failing physical condition. I felt confident that in Maria's final trial of life, she opened up to what life, and death, was to reveal to her. That state of acceptance in the face of death could only be a result of first hand explorations into spirituality.
However, Maria's death has now left me with a couple of questions: Would Maria have been open to exploring spirituality directly if she was not faced with death? Why do we always wait until a major crisis in our life before we dig deep into our own resources of self-inquiry?