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As wonderful as friendship, family, and romantic love can be, and each can have a beauty, a more profound loveliness is the moment of spiritual connection with another person. These other forms of sharing can serve for subtle connection, but appear more to hinder such than encourage such for most of us. In this sacralized sharing, one can be lifted totally outside the sense of a bounded self, which is still present in friendship and family and romance, and show forth a Love more loving for being free of all conventional ties, as well as feelings and ideas common to normal concourse among us humans. Here, in some sense, you are no longer present, not the you that fits in other forms of social interaction. Spiritual connection is a prelude to the out-of-body communion 'after' death, the timeless Moment that is the absence of before or after anything or anyone. So, spiritual connection always has a timeless sense, a freedom from the mundane, however pleasant the mundane may be for one. Indeed, this timeless sharing focuses time into the one present, and it defies descriptives like 'holy,' 'sacred,' 'religious,' 'mysterious,' 'joyful,' or even 'love' or 'loving.' Such is not a pleasant, or pleasing, experience, for not a feeling-experience. And I wrote above 'one can be lifted up' into this, for that is what one knows in this moment, he or she knows directly that this happened, this was not in any way chosen by him or her, not as person, for it to happen.
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Making a first visit to the home, as a hospice chaplain, I began driving up to a house sitting alone in the wood. Outside was a lovely, young woman, with a German Shepard dog. I was arriving for a first visit and spiritual assessment and, after getting out, met this young lady. I was informed she was a granddaughter of the patient. I told her the social worker was scheduled to meet with me for a joint-visit. The social worker was late, and the young lady invited me in to begin the visit without the social worker. That was fortunate, for something more important was to happen than the details of the visit, and had the social worker arrived earlier, that additional presence might have steered the visit in a different direction.
Entering the house, the patient was lying backward in a recliner sleeping. I informed the granddaughter of the purpose of my visit, which included a spiritual assessment, and I asked if we two could complete the assessment. I did not want to wake the patient, who had been declining rapidly and was sleeping much.
The young lady and I sat at the kitchen table. She was devoutly religious and enthused to know what a chaplain did and what a spiritual assessment was about. I shared with her about the assessment and about chaplaincy. In the process of this sharing at table, I saw a familiar vehicle coming toward the house. Though the social worker and I were good friends, and I preferred joint-visits with her usually, especially on first visits, this time I was not gladdened to see her arriving.
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