TENDERNESS NEEDS GRACE: THE WORK OF A PSYCHOPOMP

 I used to work in a hospital, in the Emergency Department, and I would take the night shift. One morning I dreamed I went to work as usual. It was the usual hospital, true to ordinary reality. I was met by a horror, a Death Metal album cover of a horror, blood and bones and howling gore and all. I did not flinch. If anything, I thought oh, it's going to be one of those nights. I followed the horror, who introduced me to a greater horror. Who led me down a corridor I had not seen before, and where I was introduced to a yet greater horror.And even greater horrors, in even stranger corridors, followed. By now I was well and truly in the Dungeon Dimensions, meeting multidimensional outbursts of ghastliness that were indescribable on paper. I did not flinch. If anything I thought, it really is one of those nights. I greeted each horror and I shook their tentacles or whatever and looked them in their many hundreds of eyes with a frank and open gaze. Finally I was led into a small room with a desk and a chair. I sat down. A panel of horrors sat behind the desk. I had passed the test. I was now given the job of looking after the thirty thousand ghosts of the hospital. From then on, after I finished my shift, I would sit on the grass outside the big white building and deal with the problems of ghosts. I would find them housing, help them communicate better with each other, arrange welfare payments, and so on. There was an endless procession of completely quotidian post-human misery every night and I did not flinch.

You know it is a Big Dream because you remember it for ever. Most dreams fade over the day, despite their richness at the time. The Big Dream remains. 

Spirits can enter our dreams and teach or warn us. This is fairly common at the beginning of our paths in Shamanic service, when we are being led by what seems at the time to be hints or coincidences. 

I describe the dream above quite lightly, but in the dream itself there was an air of importance and seriousness. This was business. There was work to be done. 

I didn't forget about the dream but I went and did a lot of other things. Life took me down many unusual paths and several pegs, and it was in a somewhat older, sadder and wiser state that I began to look at the dream again. What was I doing, being the caregiver for thirty thousand hospital ghosts?

I had already worked out two things. One was that the thirty thousand was not a literal number. In the same way the Bible uses numbers to indicate inordinate largeness or age, the number just meant 'shitloads'. The second thing was that some places are more haunted than others, and they are not what people think. What is more haunted, a prison or a graveyard? You are right, a prison. People who die in prison are likely to be unhappy, and to have died suddenly or with complications. Sometimes people die peaceful, conscious deaths in hospitals, but sometimes they don't. People tend not to want to die in hospitals. They are more likely to want to die at home, on their own terms. Hospitals can be places of disappointment and failure. So the care of the hospital ghosts is a serious matter. 

There is a word for caring for ghosts, or more specifically helping them get to where they need to be. It is psychopomp. That gets to be used as a noun and a verb. It was good for me to find that word, and for me to get some training in how to do the work of a psychopomp. Since then, I have been making journeys for those souls who have got stuck, who think they are still alive or who are too unhappy or confused to shift by themselves. It is technically easy, although it can be hard on the psyche. It requires patience, good listening, flexibility and compassion. It is work that goes completely unnoticed and cannot usually be proven, even when I am helping a known soul on behalf of a living person. I have never had anyone tell me where the treasure is, or what Uncle really meant on his death bed. I have nothing to report. When I think about it, it is probably the one thing I do in this life with a pure heart.

The souls who are most likely to get stuck are children, whose who have suffered violent or sudden deaths, and those whose attachments to this world have left them with unfinished business. I have worked with a child who had drowned in a ditch many hundreds of years ago and was still waiting to be found. I could hear the searchers in the background, over and  over, not finding him, never finding him, and sense his panic as he continually discovered he could not call out to them, stuck in a loop of fear. I have worked with a man who fell off a mountain, but who refused to go into the afterlife because he was so furious with his partner who he had cheated on. The strength of his narcissism kept him stuck on the scree with his skull split open, lecturing me about the perfidy of women. I have worked with a woman who died of a drug overdose, and who felt too ashamed of her life of addiction and prostitution. We sat and talked about what we had in common, had a laugh, and I persuaded her she would be welcome, that she was wholly loved. Each of these souls required a slightly different approach. 

I don't believe that everyone needs the aid of a psychopomp. I have heard of people who specialize in dead celebrities and I just don't know; maybe celebrities do get stuck more than the rest of us but I doubt it. It is very important not to interfere with the progress of a soul. Most souls find their way easily, guided by loved ones or their own good sense, in their own good time. When we grieve for someone who has died we often feel their presence. I think that is wholly true. It can take some time for faring well, and that is natural. 

In 2019 here in Otautahi, a white supremacist terrorist gunned down worshipers at two local mosques, during Friday prayers. I was deeply shocked. I had spoken at one of the mosques and actually got married at the other one, before it was a mosque. These were my people in my town. I thought I needed to psychopomp all of them; it seemed the only outlet for my desire to help. I was cautioned against this by a wise human. If I barged in shortly after they had died, I risked cutting across their religious rituals and the expressions of grief which are designed to help fare well the soul. As it happened, some months later I did a journey to visit some of those who had died. They were polite and hospitable and clear that they did not need anything from me. They had died in a state of prayer: they were half way there already when the gunman shot them. 

My ego had got in the way. Yeah, that can happen. 

But I do think this. That time just after the death, the time between the death and the funeral, the time that is like a maelstrom of hot grief with the dead person still and chill in the middle of it, and the soul so new and in such a state of wonder, and the whole psychic architecture is a limen, a threshold - all of this is so tender. So much can go wrong there, although it usually doesn't. But it is tender, it can be broken open by sloppy thinking or superficiality or cultural dissonance or disunity or sheer lack of giving a damn. It needs grace. Tenderness needs grace. 

I will write further on these themes. For now, here is a lychgate, because I really like lychgates and I sort of collect them.