WHEN THE STUDENT IS READY...

Call it divine, call it weird - timing is everything.

(An excerpt from the memoir, “Romancing the Divine,” copyright Michael Henry Dunn, 2018, available on Amazon)

Though I was born and raised a Catholic, and later accepted a great master of India as my guru, I only realized later in life that I had never really left the path into which I was born.  It was a different kind of church, and not one easily labeled.  It wore one kind of face in public (at Mass, and at St. Edmund’s Grammar School), and a different one at home.  If I had to label it now, I would call it The Missionary New Age Church of Irish-Catholic Tribal Holistic Medicine. 

The Dunn Family, circa 1971 - author at far right with collie.

The tribal aspect were ten incessantly warring siblings, who yet regarded themselves as a race apart; the Catholic reality was standard catechism, sacraments, stern nuns, and devotion to sweet Mary; the Irish element was my mother’s volcanic Celtic temper - daily eruptions that became a sort of semi-sacred family ritual; the New Age strain was my father’s hatha yoga practice and my mother’s insistence that we all be schooled in Silva Mind Control methods of clairvoyance (leading to my vain attempts to meet my brother Mark at midnight in the kitchen – but only in our astral bodies) – and the presence throughout our hulking Victorian twelve-bedroom home of books on yoga, reincarnation, and the work of Edgar Cayce; while the missionary holistic medical aspect was the passion of our parents’ lives – a dedication to fulfilling their self-appointed role as the alternative healing court-of-last-resort for thousands of children with learning disabilities, brain injuries, and bio-chemical imbalances who would not otherwise have been helped -  with a ready laboratory of their ten offspring on whom to lovingly experiment.

Now, rather than identifying with any church (though, in fact, I am a loyal member of a spiritual fellowship) I think of myself as just a lover who yearns to personally love (and be personally loved by) Divine Reality itself.  But I was blessed with an environment which primed me to seek that love, schooled me in devotion to the Divine Feminine, taught me there were things in heaven and earth undreamed of by Sister Consolata Marie, and lifted me out of a parochial view of the destiny of souls.

But still as a young man I felt thwarted and unfulfilled, having learned enough to know that there had to be a method, had to be a teacher, but wary of the paths I had seen, the teachers I had read, and unwilling to surrender my questioning mind to the siren call of easy answers and the refuge of charismatic fundamentalism.

I had learned to demonstrate clairvoyant function (though I never did master the trick of meeting my little brother in the kitchen in our astral forms).  I had dabbled in trance-channeling, had nearly been killed in a fire by a malevolent entity (more on that later), and had experienced fleeting and terrifying glimpses of past lives.  My ego had been inflated and punctured three or four times, and I was working on the humility thing. 

I had meandered through the bookstores and libraries of Chicago and New York, had read the Bhagavad Gita, and The Cloud of Unknowing, the work of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, and the great mystical commentaries of Aldous Huxley, had developed a one-sided conversation with my Maker, and knew that to love as deeply as I yearned to love I needed a method, must somehow find the discipline to follow it, and would surely need a teacher to show me the way.

It was in my fourth floor walk-up apartment on Chicago’s North Side in 1982 that the dream came. 

You may have had dreams in which there is no preamble and no back story - just an image, indelible and steeped in deep emotion, that brings you awake in the night.  That is how this was for me:  I dreamed my way into an iconic painting.  I became a figure at the table in Dali’s “Last Supper,” and at the head of the table shone a Light, bright, gentle, and so full of Love that my body lost its density on the instant, and rose in the air to accompany my heart in its flight home.

I don’t have such dreams often.  At that time, I had never had such a dream. 

It might have been the next day, or the day after.  Wanting to visit my parents, I drove out to the old hulking tribal manse (still well-stocked with a few of the notoriously slow-to-mature Irish-American siblings - Irish Catholics tell the following joke, but do not allow others to tell it: how do we know Jesus was Irish?  Simple: at age thirty-three, He had no job, He lived at home…and His mother thought He was Jesus Christ).

There was nothing profound on my mind, and I sat down in the kitchen to fix myself a snack.

I have always been an obsessive reader.  My mother taught me to read at a very young age, and time spent eating alone without something to read has always seemed to me time wasted.  So there I sat, my sandwich hot and ready to eat, my many siblings not in evidence, and I looked around the kitchen for something to read, something to feed mind as well as body.

There was a bookshelf above the radiator – old copies of National Geographic and some other magazines.  No, I thought, not that. I walked into the breakfast room – four full shelves of books: Prevention magazine – lots of those – books on how not to get cancer, old Readers Digests, a miscellany of World Books’ Book of the Year.  No, I thought, I need something better tonight.  On to the former playroom we now called The Office – many books there.  I plowed quickly through them all.  “No, not that.  This one won’t do.  Not that. Something better.   No, not that.” 

I had become obsessed and my sandwich was now quite cold.

It was a large house, and had always had many books in its many rooms.  When there are ten children who have each been given their own bedroom so that they might grow up to become truly cantankerous, self-engrossed, and eccentric members of The Missionary New Age Church of Irish-Catholic Tribal Holistic Medicine, over a quarter century or so such a home will accumulate a goodly and eclectic store of books.

The Dunn Family home at 333 N. Euclid in Oak Park, Illinois.

Down to the basement – three bedrooms. Books musty and mildewed, of dubious provenance.  Nothing there.  Back up to the second floor, five bedrooms there, all with bookshelves – surely in the Study (the bedroom of my teenage years) there would be something.  Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire?  No, it’s just a sandwich, not a three-day banquet.

By the time I impulsively ran up the stairs to the five bedrooms on the third floor, I should have realized something strange was going on.  Yes, I love to read and all that, but I’m usually fine with yesterday’s paper, or even a book I’ve read a dozen times, just to content my eyes with passing over the written word.

I may have sprinted up the stairs with the intuition that there was one room on the third floor that was sure to hold some one book that might meet my strangely high standards this particular night - my oldest brother’s room.  It had briefly been mine one summer, and his closets were crammed with books.  Chris majored in history, had an interest in politics, and worshipped Churchill.  That would be my salvation.

But no.  Churchill was there, but he would not do. Many dozens of titles were quickly glanced through, and all discarded.  I was now on my knees in front of his closet, worn out with my weird search, surrounded by a pile of apparently unworthy books.

The Lover will occasionally require some eccentric behavior of you.  Not always, but sometimes.

And then my eye fell on what we called The Dwarf’s Door. In the far corner of the room, it was perfectly proportioned to be the stately entrance to a manor, but it was only two feet tall, and led to a closet that might have held a wardrobe for a hobbit, but could accommodate only a few dozen human-sized books.  I crawled over, opened the door (as a child I’d always done so in terror of dwarves), and went through my last due diligence in this fevered search.

I discarded them all.  Save one.

The last book, on the last shelf.  A very slim volume, no more than five inches high, with its title facing away.  I had to pry it out of its hiding place and turn it round to see what it was.

Now, I promised you that I am not here as a proselytizer for any one teacher or path.  Yes, I’ve brought you a long way up to this third floor bedroom, and built up a lovely suspense as to what marvelous book could have been the sequel to so powerful a dream.

But if I tell you now what book it was, this little story I’ve told you will become all about that book and its author, who became my incomparable guru.  But what I really want to share with you is that there may be one path, and someday, perhaps, one special teacher, one lovingly chosen route that the Lover has mapped out for you in your journey home, and no other will do.  And it may not be the one that waited for me behind the Dwarf’s Door.  But it is surely waiting for you somewhere.  You just have to be willing to discard all the others, and follow that one alone.

Michael Henry Dunn

(An excerpt from the memoir, “Romancing the Divine,” copyright Michael Henry Dunn, 2018, available on Amazon)