He
slowly opened his eyes and saw nothing. He struggled to hear something beyond
the sound of his own beating heart. Beneath and beside his hands he felt the splintery
coarseness of rough-sawn planks, but there was little room to move any of his
extremities. His lungs ached from trying to breathe, and the only scent was
that of musty earth. His brain was frantic and yet eerily numb. He tried to
decipher what his senses were telling him, and then he froze. He stopped
feeling and smelling and seeing. In an instant it flashed across his
consciousness like a meteor across the sky…he’d been buried alive!
He
had heard stories. At the time he thought they were only myths, just legends of
the ultimate mistaken identity, when the living are erroneously taken for dead.
He tried, without success to take a deep breath and scream, but there was not
enough air for screaming. Fear crushed him. Panic immobilized him. Somehow,
even though he could see nothing, some kind of blackness seemed to be creeping
over him like thick ink. He was going to die.
He
had been to only a handful of funerals in his life. He had never really given
much thought to the nightmarish possibility of being buried alive. He did,
however, have a vague recollection of stories about cords being tied to the
presumed corpse and attached to a bell above the ground, making it possible for
the “almost dead” to let those above ground know there was still life left in
the old soul. He wondered…
He
felt around the best he could, hoping to find the lifeline. Where would it be
attached? His hand? His foot? Was it even there? In the cramped quarters of his
coffin he used his last remnants of energy to grasp, to gasp…nothing. He
collapsed in absolute fatigue like he’d never felt before, but as his hands
fell to his side, he felt it. A cord, not as big as a rope but larger than a
string. A cord. He grabbed it as tight as he could and began to pull and
release, pull and release, much like you would ring the bells in a steeple. The
phantom strength with which he pulled the cord came from a place inside him he
didn’t know existed, but he pulled and pulled and pulled. He could not speak
the words with breath but he could beat them out with pulls and tugs…And so he
continued to yank, to ring the bell, and in so doing shouted… “I am not dead
yet!”
Have
you ever felt so crushed, so weighed down by life, so immobilized and unable to
move that others might have mistaken you for dead? Have you ever felt tossed out,
sidelined, kicked to the curb because others felt you had become useless? Has
there ever been a time, maybe because of your age, your appearance, your weight
or your failures that you were tempted to throw in the towel, give it up, call
it quits, retire from life? What about a time when you too, felt that some sort
of darkness was overcoming you, making you invisible to those around you?
Perhaps you have felt what St. John of the Cross called “the dark night of the
soul.” I’m not necessarily talking about suicidal thoughts. I’m talking about
feeling buried alive, interred too soon, mistaken for dead.
Reach
for the cord! Find the safety net. Ring the bell. Shout out as loud as you can…
“I am not dead yet!” Death you can’t have me. Despair you can’t win.
Discouragement be gone. I’m not dead yet! Get up, move around, get a vision,
make plans, don’t just lay there and die…ring the bell, for cryin’ out loud,
Ring The Bell!
No comments:
Post a Comment