|
|
|
In Memory of Kathleen Sleight The Spiritual Traveler
|
I
was a close friend of Kathleen Sleight for over 25 years. We
were both devoted to the path of Eckankar, and we shared some very deep
things in common, both in terms of our approach to life, and in terms
of our experiences. Those who knew both of us might find
that a little hard to believe, because we came from very different
generations and backgrounds. But surface appearances can be
deceiving. A spiritual path such as Eckankar often produces
strange friendships that are a mystery to other people. What
these individuals have in common is something that goes beyond the
conventions of ordinary life. It’s the stuff of human
mystery.
I went
through some very difficult and dark periods in my life, and during
some of these periods Kathleen was the only person I could talk
to. In that respect she was closer to me than all the other
people I have known in Eckankar, and even closer than the few members
of my own family.
Kathleen and I both took life seriously. I don’t mean to say
that we didn’t have a sense of humor, but when it came to the gut
issues of life, neither of us was inclined to mess
around. Kathleen liked to call a spade a spade, and she
never took her eyes off the ball, in a spiritual sense. I
always liked to think that I was the same way.
To a lot of people, Kathleen created problems for herself because of
this attitude. She was inclined to accept certain burdens in
her life, because she felt that was her way of being of
service. Some people said that she let herself be pushed
around and taken advantage of, but if you really knew Kathleen, you
wouldn’t necessarily come to that conclusion. She accepted
responsibility for everything that she did and everything that happened
to her. If you tried to tell her that she would have been
better off taking a different approach, she would give you sort of a
weary look. Then, with her jaw firmly set, she’d let you
know that your words were useless (if you didn’t know that
already). She basically had the same attitude as Sinatra:
she always did it her way, and she’d continue to do it her way.
The following poem, by the poet A. E. Housman, was Kathleen’s favorite,
and one of my favorites, as well. It captures Kathleen’s
viewpoint and personality, as well as a perspective that we had in
common with one another. It’s an attitude of wariness, of
skepticism, of being ready for anything, and particularly for
trouble. Some would say that this attitude of expecting
trouble only brings trouble. But as Kathleen might have
said, people can say what they like.
I to my perils of cheat and charmer
Came clad in armor
By stars benign.
Hope lies to mortals and most believe her
But man’s deceiver
Was never mine.
The thoughts of others were light and fleeting
Of lovers meeting,
Of luck, or fame.
Mine were of trouble, and mine were steady
So I was ready
When trouble came.
Kathleen was very
good at coming up with aphorisms. Often they had the same
fatalistic tone to them as the Housman poem. Sometimes I
tried to match her aphorisms with my own. For instance,
Kathleen came up with this dictum:
“The longer the road, the lonelier it gets.”
And I responded with this one:
“The greater one’s strength, the less help one is allowed.”
I wrote a poem, myself, at a time when I was going through a
particularly rough period. At the beginning, it captures the
same fatalistic attitude, but it also has a hopeful tone to it at the
end. I wrote it primarily with myself in mind, but there’s
something of Kathleen in it, too:
My life is a tangled chain
Of pity, grief, and woe
Yet there is no one to explain
What has made it so.
There is but one who could have forged that chain
It is myself, I know
And there is no one to whom I can complain
That I did make it so.
If I could set out on a quest
Unaided, all alone
To separate each link from the rest
And bring them singly home
Then I would be like stout Cortez
Who, in his thirst for gold,
Brought back with him more treasure chests
Than the world could hold.
Thus, from a tangled history
Of pity, grief, and woe
I would wrest my victory
Like the conquerors of long ago.
In October 1978,
Kathleen sent me a letter in which she had typed a brief four-line
poem. Like the previous poem, it has something to say about
history. Some people who knew Kathleen less well might be
puzzled as to what her interest was in this. But to those
who knew her, or to those with the ears to hear and the hearts to
understand, the poem and its connection to Kathleen will be clear:
One cannot on past laurels rest
Nor on the accolades of history
All of that belongs to IT
And IT remains a mystery.
In her letter, Kathleen added this comment on the poem:
“To me, the very fact that IT is a mystery and cannot ever really be
known wholly is the paradox that keeps me always ready to go on and on,
forever and ever, for millions of years, because I do so only one
second at a time. Days mean nothing. It is always
now and it is the seasons which march by.”
Then she added, typically, “You take it from there.”
Well, I took the poem and, with Kathleen’s permission, expanded to
eight lines. This is the way my version came out:
One cannot on past laurels rest
Nor on the accolades of history.
Each day we wake to brings another test
Of our endurance and self-mastery.
Our imprint, in the sands of time impressed
Must vanish with the tide of yesterday.
Yet we remain, the guest
Of God, in the presence of ITS mystery.
Not long before
this, I had stumbled upon a poem about death, written by T. E.
Lawrence, a historical person in whom Kathleen and I were both
interested. It was written from a point of view that did
not reflect an awareness of life after death. Instead, it
was concerned with the notion of being remembered by
history. Death, in this poem, is just a final state of
rest:
When you are dead, when all you could not do
Leaves quiet the worn hands, the weary head,
Asking not any service more of you,
Requiting you with peace, when you are dead;
When, like a robe, you lay your body by,
Unloosed at last: - how worn, and soiled, and frayed: -
Is it not pleasant just to let it lie
Unused, and be moth-eaten in the shade?
Folding earth’s silence round you like a shroud,
Will you just know that what you have is best: -
Thus to have slipped unfamous from the crowd;
Thus having failed and failed, to be at rest?
Or having not to know? Yet O my Dear,
Since to be quit of self is to be blest
To cheat the world, and leave no imprint here: -
Is this not best?
I sent the poem to
Kathleen for her comment, and she gave her interpretation in the same
letter I quoted from earlier. The first four lines of the
poem, she wrote, talked about a resting period, a respite from
activity, which could be likened to a ‘rest point in eternity’, a
phrase that Paul Twitchell, the founder of Eckankar, used in some of
his writings to describe those points that come between our earthly
wanderings. The next five lines, she said, depict the
individual, or Soul, as still in control in the process of giving up
the body. “You release yourself from the physical
limitations of the body,” she wrote, “and it, being released, is left
to return to its elements.” The tenth line, ‘Will you just
know that what you have is best,’ she wrote, expressed the awareness
that is Soul, and the fourteenth line, ‘Since to be quit of self is to
be blest,’ was Soul speaking to Soul.
On the line, ‘To cheat the world and leave no imprint here,’ she
commented, “Any adulation is hollow glory from a spiritual point of
view. Saints and Masters do not think of themselves as
such. They know the magnitude of the whole and realize how
small their contribution (is) to what is yet to be.” Of the
last line, ‘Is this not best?’ she wrote that the writer “ends with a
question. The day will come,” she added, “when you will have
no further questions. This has just come to me as of now.”
Kathleen wrote numerous poems of her own, but they mysteriously
disappeared, and were never recovered after her death. The
only one that her daughter Sibyl managed to find was one that she wrote
for Tom Flamma, a prominent high initiate in Eckankar, just prior to
his visit and lecture tour to the Detroit-Ann Arbor area in June
1973. She sent it to him in a letter dated February 1974:
In some far off forgotten place,
Beyond the ken of time and space,
Beyond Mind-
Lies that which Is
Primordial Source,
Its Essence Pure,
Undaunted.
No thing,
No form can hold nor stay
Its Flow.
One only can be still
And Know!
I don’t think I’m
alone in feeling that Kathleen is most certainly now in that place that
she spoke of in this poem. Paul Twitchell also speaks of
this place in his book Stranger by the River:
“If you know that death is only an illusion, then there is little need
for thee to have cause for fear. Truth sustains you and this
clay temple is dissolved when the physical body wears out; but Soul,
which owes its origin, life and growth to God, will remain forever in
the highest Mansion of the Lord.
“God is a boundless ocean of spirit and love, and man being a drop from
this ocean, it follows that he can never die and will always be as the
fish in the river, forever swimming in the ocean of God’s mercy and
love” (125).
I
cannot close this account without mentioning one of Kathleen’s favorite
aphorisms that she was so fond of repeating:
“There is no shame, blame, fame, or sin in the pursuit of truth.”
And her ultimate piece of advice:
“Say that everything will be all right.” |
|
|
Date Submitted:
1/2/04 |
Copyright Information:
Copyright © The Spiritual Traveler, 2001 |
|