The Disappointments Will Be Piling Up

At this point in the pandemic, a year-ish in now, it’s safe to say the disappointments will be piling up. Maybe there has even been a time or two where you have been disappointed in yourself. I know I have been. It’s easy, as they say, to be a buddhist at the top of a mountain or in a cave, but it’s trickier to practice buddhism among non-buddhists.

By now you’ll have lost loved ones, attended a Zoom funeral, had fallings out with people you thought were friends, gotten hate mail, and you’ve also had to confront the fact that we live in a time where a great many people think it’s okay to just sacrifice old people, people with health conditions, people living in poverty, houseless people. A great many people think it’s okay to be racist. And so it’s not surprising that a lot of people have been talking about hitting yet another wall. Or is it just the same wall we’re bashing into again? For me, it’s not the isolation, or the taking care, or the mask wearing that’s getting to me, it’s all the people who are blatantly not.

I’ve read articles and listened to talks on finding the courage to have nuanced conversations in these difficult times and in all honesty I’m so down with that from an academic stance. But in reality, I’m exhausted. I feel like I’ve spent the last decade seriously engaged in all sorts of conversations with all sorts of people, and also writing about these things here and in my novels, and yet here we are. It’s like having all our work erased and then asked to do it all over again, with angrier, more careless, more entitled, more ill-intentioned, and more misinformed people than before. Like, okay, sure, I can do that. After I nap for a thousand years.

So, all that said, I listened to a podcast on On Being with the wonderful Krista Tippett, that made me think, okay, okay, I need to start coming at this whole thing from another angle. (What I have been doing is re-reading Gitta Sereny’s book on Albert Speer where she spends years talking to him and trying to come to some threads of understanding of his crimes in what the book jacket calls the moral and psychological enigma of his life). So anyway, KT says, “I’m intrigued by this question that I hear rolling around the world right now, even in the most secular of corners: What do religious people and traditions have to offer and teach as we do the work ahead of repairing, renewing, and remaking our societies, our life together? I’m interested in the theological and mystical depths that are so much richer and more creative than is often imagined, even when that question is raised.”

I would recommend listening (rather than reading the transcripts as I usually do) to this particular episode with Ariel Burger, titled, “Be a Blessing” partly because the voices are so good and compelling but also because it seems important to hear voices in a good and deep conversation. For me, a lot of the conversations I have these days are behind a mask, and that itself takes both some physical and psychic energy. These masked kinds of conversations are going to be shorter, breathier, and less expressive. So being in the presence of this kind of nuanced and generous talking is really a boon right now.

One of the things talked about in the conversation with KT and AB is the idea of the silent majority of goodness which is something I needed to remind myself:

“And I think there’s this language of the “silent majority,” which was used in Germany, and it was used in the ’60s, and it’s been used in American politics now. But I’ve always felt like there’s also this silent majority of, I believe, of goodness; of generativity. And I think this language of witness, of moving from being a spectator to being a witness to a kind of more visible, courageous orientation — this is wonderful language to think about mobilizing that.”

So thinking about witnessing, even if we can’t get to the conversations we want to be having right now…that seems helpful to me.

Here’s a funny thing. Not really funny, but you know. So I also have been thinking about Joseph Campbell’s lines where he says, “Even God doesn’t have unconditional love. He throws people into hell. I personally don’t even think that unconditional love is an ideal. I think you’ve got to have a discriminating faculty and let bastards be bastards and let those that ought to be hit in the jaw get it.” (I assume he was speaking metaphorically about the jaw). And I’ve always found that passage to be comforting because there are some people it just isn’t in my power to reach, given the tools that I have, and my own need for self-preservation. And also, that there are lines to draw. It’s reasonable and ethical and morally sound to draw some lines in the sand. I don’t need to love racists and anti-maskers, I really don’t.

But then. But then, I always read that passage in the Joseph Campbell Companion, and I turn to the very next page and he leads into a discussion of the Grail, you know that holy one. And he says that the Grail, that’s unconditional love. And that the key to the Grail is compassion. So, if you’ve read my book, Rumi and the Red Handbag, it’s about the idea of being able to ask the question of someone, “what are you going through?” It wonders why we don’t, what are the conditions we need to meet so that we can ask someone that? What happens if you do ask? What if you don’t?

Campbell says,

“The question is: “Can I open myself to compassion?” Compassion for me is just what the word says: it is “suffering with.” It is an immediate participation in the suffering of another to such a degree that you forget yourself and your own safety and spontaneously do what’s necessary. I think this has something to do with what’s meant by the image of the Grail, since the thing that effected the healing of the Grail King was the spontaneous act of asking that question and not withholding it. Often you feel that such a spontaneous act will make a fool out of you and so you don’t do it — I will look like a fool if I do that. That’s the failure in the Grail Castle.”

So look, yes, the disappointments are piling up. I myself know not quite what to do with them. I have closed myself off a little from compassion, I do know that, and it’s going to take a hot minute before I’m ready to open up again. In the meantime, though, I’m staying with all these thoughts and possibilities. Sort of like the roses I got last week and saw them through to the end. Trying to be a little less of a curse, and a bit more of a blessing….

February 22, 2021