I spend a lot of time alone. After a while, solitude becomes a silence, and then a space which “speaks” to you. Ideas and thoughts come to me, as if blown in by the wind. It is fascinating to watch. I am never bored.
Some thoughts are like thorns that I am stuck on. One is “they watched me die.”
The “they” is my parents. Both of them were emotionally numb, and what this amounts to is that when you send an impulse of actual emotional need, there is no reactive surface for it to land on, which sends you the signal back that someone is out there. The cry for help just travels on, to infinity, passing right through them.
And so much of human life is unconscious. None of us can ever not communicate. In fact many observers have said most of our communication is non-verbal. There is one predominant form of communication that occasionally supplements words.
And that predominant form is what is heard and remembered, particularly by small children. Words don’t matter at all, except as warnings.
Aliveness is being all reactive surface, it is seeing and feeling and hearing and touching and tasting and smelling and thinking everything. You are not blind. You are not numb. You are alive, not dead.
Now, in the Bible the specific verse refers to a disciple who wants to bury his father, but here is what “burying the dead” means to me symbolically: those who are numb are happy to welcome those who have lost their spark. They are happy to no longer be reminded of what is possible. They are happy to resonate with you when you are sending out defeat and dissociation, and eager to dispute with anyone retaining life within them, anyone still fighting to reconnect with laughter and light.
They don’t want to remember. They are grateful dead. That name has always seemed significant to me. The Dead Heads I have known are outwardly happy, but when you get to know most of them, they have huge dysfunctions largely papered over with drugs and pretense.
Letting the dead bury the dead describes this process, of the dead welcoming back into the midst the new arrivals, those who have lost their faith.
And Jesus, in that specific verse, might reasonably be thought to have had a very good suspicion that if that man went to bury his father, he would never see him again. That disciple would have rejoined the dead, and never left.
So few of us really feel what it might be like to feel alive. It is a disease, and one that is difficult to cure. I have not cured it in myself, but I have hopes that I will one day. I work at it daily.