I insisted, in my anger at God, that I should at least remember his name. “Wouter” came the small voice, instantly. Wouter —a Dutch variation on Walter—was a name that had popped up before but I had not been able to place it in the right context. “Wouter” insisted the small voice. Every time I asked, that name came in answer. His name was Wouter. And, I believe he was from Alost, a town in the province of East-Flanders.
Some time ago, someone asked me to personally relate to them the details about my little friend whom I had lost when he was seven years old, and I was nine. Entering back into that space to share, I uncovered more dirty truths. Afterwards, I was unwell, and the following day had to cancel an appointment, overcome with nausea, headache, grief and anger—again.
I could not understand why the grief for this particular loss would return as though through the decades, no healing had ever occurred, and I asked the question which so often has people lose faith in the face of great human tragedies: Why did God let this happen? How could a God of love allow this to happen?
In the years I have counseled survivors of satanic ritual abuse, I have often heard of beautiful, deeply personal experiences these survivors might have had as children with Jesus, whose presence might have been felt in the darkest moments, appearing in a vision, bringing consolation, or a message. As a child, I personally never saw Christ, but did have instances in which I felt a benign, loving, sweet presence, guiding me.
Not during the murder of Wouter, though. I had felt no guidance, no awareness dawned on me to offer greater understanding; there had been no presence, no vision, no vibration—nothing to give me a sense of the light and truth beyond the ether. My experience was the sight and sounds of his painful demise, covered in layers and layers of my guilt and shame for not being able to protect him.
Christ is one of the gurus of Self-Realization Fellowship, which is my path. We have yearly Christmas meditations that last all day, invoking the true spirit of Christ. My connection is deeply personal and precious, and to speak of it feels like I would give something away that isn’t mine to give. I am also protective, coming from a liberal background, because many people I know are atheists, or don’t even believe that Jesus is a historical figure. I also don’t need to be embraced and accepted into Christian groups. I respect them. That said, I regularly receive condescending messages from Christians who pity me, assuming I have not yet “found” Christ.
When I write about yoga, Christians may comment that it is satanic. Yoga does seem to have been coopted by satanists who reduce everything to the physical. However, it is no better to take all verses of the Bible literally, or to believe that to reach Christ all one has to do is to accept him just once. This creates as great a by-pass and hypocrisy than those yogis feeling spiritual when their practice is focused entirely on the body. Both end up dogmatic, feeling “better than” and placing themselves above others, which is exactly what Christ never did. Yoga is about practicing techniques to personally experience God, not to blindly believe a doctrine. To feel above anyone else, to think you know better, to judge others, only helps the ruling psychopaths keep divisions among us strong, and the division between yogis and Christians is very strong. How will both camps get out of the head and into the heart, respecting each other as equals, and seek similarities instead of focusing on differences?
In speaking with a liberal friend of mine who loves Christ, I was sharing with him that I had been holding Wouter in my arms when I had learned that he was to be sacrificed. I had found out that I, as the girl, had been the intended sacrifice, but this perpetrator decided that Wouter should be taken instead. He considered Wouter inferior because he was special. I urgently pleaded that he take me and save Wouter, holding on tight to my little friend as I pleaded for his life. Even though I was fervent and determined, this perpetrator treated my offer as an annoyance to be entirely dismissed. He ordered the handlers to take the boy, and they ripped Wouter from my arms.
The friend with whom I was sharing cried out that in the moment I had offered my life for my little friend Wouter’s, Christ had already won. His words seeped into my consciousness, and for the first time since the event fifty years ago, I considered that I had been ready to give my life to save his. It had been an instant, natural response that had never before been mirrored by someone who understood the goodness and bravery of the action.
In the days following this conversation, I reconsidered the events surrounding Wouter’s death, and questioned, for the first time, how I could have shifted from having witnessed his brutal murder, to making a connection with this perpetrator right afterwards, to then become deeply attached to that man. During Wouter’s torture, he had raped me. After the ritual ended, the bloody remains of my little friend lay on the stone altar, and I was crying. The perpetrator eyed me threateningly, and I intuitively gathered that he suspected I was crying because he had raped me. All of this was in line with the monstrous behavior I had observed so far, and I thought it ridiculous that he could be this self-centered, and believe I cried for what he did to me, when he had been the one to order Wouter be pulled out of my arms. I laughed at him. My laughter would have been caustic and could have cost me my life, and in that moment I didn’t care. Only, when I laughed, something came over me. My laughter became light, and had the quality of Wouter’s lightness—as if his spirit, which had just left his body, was wafting through me. That lightness was followed by an elevated consciousness entering me, that had me observe this perpetrator with Christ-like eyes, seeing all his insecurities, seeing the little scared boy he himself had been, when he had felt slow, afraid he couldn’t follow along with the other kids. And I saw that Wouter had represented that part of himself, which he had needed to kill, over and over, to never feel that that way again.
I realized that I could never have seen this perpetrator with this great love from my own, small ego-consciousness. Not with what I knew of him. This was how Christ had manifested in me, by merging his expanded consciousness that understands everything and everyone, even the worst perpetrators, with the greatest love.
The perpetrator interpreted the experience of receiving Christ’s love through me, as that I must be sophisticated. He instantly took an interest in me, and then set about to maximally exploit the love he had received in that one instant.
When in recent days it became clear that Christ had worked through me, I was suddenly connecting to other subtler truths, and felt that Wouter had been welcomed and embraced by Christ, and that from the moment he had left his body, he had been relieved and happy to leave behind his challenging little life.
I remember grieving my little friend Wouter in the 1990’s, crying over his death and my inability to save him. Since I coudn’t remember his name, he was Sean, after John Lennon’s song “Beautiful Boy.” My tears would flow, and they would for decades—as long as it took to reach the ultimate purpose of grief, which is to grasp the greatest context of our suffering that brings us to truth beyond appearances—the subtler truth that life is eternal, and that the great benign forces of God and Christ are indeed with us and can guide us out of our limited, delusive state, if we only allow it.