Immediate Aftermath: Feelings ... Thoughts ...
Tuesday 11 September 2001
At first, there is no "appropriate response" to something like this. Tears, fear, anger, bewilderment, shock, numbness — we feel what we feel.
Terror is the intended result, but that builds after the event. Unless you are right there, one has to think a bit for the threats, connections, and implications to sink in and terrify. We will have lots of time for that later.
Slowly, as we come back to our more ordinary awareness, we can begin to send our compassion and prayers to those who died going about their ordinary business, the many wounded, those with missing loved ones, those who suffer as they learn their dear ones were killed, and all those injured in their attempts to help. Horribly there are many, many to pray for. May our hearts be with them, even if we cannot fully understand what they are going through.
As other feelings and thoughts come in, what will we do? I pray that we will not react too quickly or hot-headedly. I deeply hope that we as a country and our leaders at all levels will think carefully and clearly. Our future is at stake.
Our country has been attacked. More have died than during "the day of infamy" at Pearl Harbor or any conventional military attacks on this soil — even the bloody hell we did to each other during the horrible battles of the Civil War, like Antietam Creek. Our lives in America will not be the same ever again. This feels like the largest event of my lifetime, at least for Americans as a nation. How we respond will reveal our character, heart, and intelligence.
Patriotism can be messy business, but it’s wonderful to love one’s country, warts & all, just as we love family & friends who are far from perfect ... not to mention loving ourselves who are so imperfect. Pray, however, that we never let this love for one’s own become hatred towards others.
This was a monstrous act of terrorism. The minds & hearts of those who are responsible are beyond comprehension. Are they filled with hot hatred? Or cold calculating logic driven by ideology run amok, as in Lenin, some of Hitler’s henchmen, or Pol Pot? Whichever, it is mind boggling? We don’t yet — if ever — know who they are or were, so we can only guess at their motives and states of mind. What they have done is beyond comprehension. Cold intellect may make some sense of it, but the heart cannot grasp such inhumanity. I cannot help but feel some pity for the poor souls who committed suicide in such a ghastly way. What a horrible waste of one’s life!
I fear that "America" will take a non-Christian eye-for-an-eye response, which Gandhi has pointed out leads to blindness everywhere. Surely, more blindness is not what we need. Though I have become a Buddhist, I still honor my Christian roots, love my Christian friends, and deeply respect Jesus and all the genuine saints inspired by him. The justice, love, and selflessness of his teaching is needed now, not the corrupted Christianity of crusades.
May the peaceful sides of Islam and Judaism also inspire us. Buddhists, too, as well as Hindus, the "Primal Religions," and other religions have a roles to play lifting our civilizations further out of the darkness to which hatred and revenge bind us. This will require deep honesty; our religions must rise above the usual hypocrisies.
The effects of terrorism are not only targeted at its direct victims. In this case, they were not tortured and the horrendous suffocation that some suffered was not drawn out for days, weeks, or months. They died terribly, but they are not terrified now. The terror effects those who are left, both those who have lost loved & dear ones, and those who will be living with increased fear, insecurity, mistrust, anxiety, anger, and hatred.
If we are to conquer this horrible crime against humanity, our conquest must include such fear, insecurity, mistrust, anxiety, anger, and hatred. If these master us, if we react in quick or plotted anger, usually masking anxiety and fear, then the terrorism succeeds. The quality and maturity of the country’s leadership has a vital role to play. What will the conquer? And how?
Years ago, an Indonesian friend explained that jihad means to struggle against all that is ungodly in ourselves. In Buddhist terms, that would be our tendencies towards egoism and self-centeredness, which manifest fear, insecurity, mistrust, anxiety, anger, hatred, hypocrisy, and the like. My friend insisted that jihad never attacks others, especially the innocent. We are called to struggle against our own inner demons.
If we respond only with military thinking and might, the terrorists will have succeeded. They will have provoked our inner demons and we let them win. I am not saying a military response has no place, but it cannot be the only or even the main response. If it is, the brutality and cold-blooded calculation of the terrorists will stick to us and corrupt us. They will have succeeded in causing us to live under the terror, violence, and secret police security-state that we have largely escaped even as people in many countries have had to live with them. Do we want to hand them their success, their revenge, on a silver platter?
We call upon religious leaders and local leaders to work against demagoguery, hatred, scapegoating, blame mongering, and the like in their communities. With wise, compassionate leadership, local neighborhoods and communities — the real ones, not the virtual — can grow stronger and provide the emotional, spiritual, and even physical protection that we need. Without them, a stronger military becomes oppressive. With them, we need not become enslaved to our own security.
Personal healing: Dhamma & Nature
Friday 14 September 2001 (evening)
The following words were influenced by watching the national prayer service at the National Cathedral.
I’ve just returned from a visit to my favorite temple — the Cathedral of Nature. Since the 4th of July, I’ve been blessed with a patch of woods to live in and a pond to live besides. I enjoy them in many ways; today the joy was different. Infusing it are the 5000 plus victims who will never be able to enjoy such beauty as I was blessed with today.
Perhaps they are all in a more glorious heaven, as Billy Graham preached today (at least the faithful Christians among them). Maybe, but I don’t know; I don’t share Billy’s belief system. Maybe the victims are transmigrating according to their karma, but I don’t really know about that either. What I know is more basic, more simple, more here. So, I’d rather not speculate about the fate of the victims.
I know my heart is sore and my intellect overwhelmed. There is no point in trying to make sense out of what is profoundly senseless. Yet, we as human beings are condemned to try to make sense of these lives within this Samsara. So we formulate and cling to beliefs about it. We are lead to believe that the terrorists in their warped, violent, tormented way also sought to make sense of this world and its travails, or believed that they had the answer and a quick ticket to heaven. Needless to say, I have my doubts about such beliefs.
My heart is sore like an open wound that is beginning to close. For the last couple days it has been numb, apparently with overwhelm and shock. As the numbness has eased today and life’s inner juices begun to flow more vigorously, it has felt like time to move into the next phase of this new old world. It has never been "normal," and there was never a "world to go back to," there is just the ceaseless forward movement of change.
This shift was accompanied and encouraged by the shifts seen on TV ...
../03-06/03-05_idx.htm
../03-06/03-05_idx.htm the political-military establishment at prayer service, putting some closure on the grieving even as it gears up for war../03-06/03-05_idx.htm ../03-06/03-05_idx.htm the rain cleaning the air in NYC even as most hope is lost of any survivors being dug out from ground zero../03-06/03-05_idx.htm ../03-06/03-05_idx.htm Americans expressing patriotism with flags, T-shirts, and idiot attacks on Muslim- and Arab-Americans.../03-06/03-05_idx.htm So, I visited the Blessed Temple of Nature and Dhamma.
I pushed off in the canoe for a slow, meandering pilgrimage about the pond. As Fall cometh, there are some new flowers, such as bright yellow daisy-like things somehow growing out of the water around water-sodden logs and branches. Then my eyes were drawn to a brighter golden-yellow of some drooping head of granules like a full head of wheat. It’s beauty pierced the sore wound of my heart as my thoughts drifted to the dead in NY and the slaughtered Jews of Auschwitz and the millions of deported & butchered Cossacks & kulaks of the Don & Ukraine and the tortured Thai peasants who a friend saw burnt cruelly by a military armed, financed, & advised by the USA and the hundreds of thousands in Iraq who die slowly through the unfathomable partnership of Saddam Hussein’s brutal power politics and the brutal power politics of those in the West, primarily the USA & UK, who seek to bring down his rule. How can my heart take such striking beauty in such a terror ridden world? How can my mind find meaning midst such irreconcilable disparities?
Yet the juices of life flow. I am human like the millions and millions of victims of barbarism and terror over the past one hundred years. Human like the Lenins and Maos and Hitlers (however inhuman they may seem) ... yet, also quite different my heart insists — I have not signed death warrants for millions. Like the Bushes and Clintons and Blairs and Powells and other wielders of power who can never be fully innocent once they seek & accept the power to deal death no matter how construed as just or justified. Like the grieving, aching families and friends of the 5000. Like the wonderful firemen, cops, nurses, ironworkers, soldiers, bureaucrats, and citizens who have given of themselves so freely, spontaneously, and magnificently.
There are delicate purple flowers behind the yellow ones. The beauty again stabs into my heart. I’m not kidding. Maybe because I don’t usually allow myself to feel deep emotion, this really hurts, yet is good.
A lone spider weaves a web between two dry branches of a drowned tree. A bird calls from up in the woods. The wind rustles leaves overhead. The pond’s surface ripples gently. White flowers draw my attention next, then the pale sky, and more violet flowers. How can there be such beauty here? It is so big, just like the sadness.
The most painful stab of all is a solitary bird’s nest abandoned in a clutch of willows along the shore. No bigger than my hand wrapped around the knob of this canoe paddle, it somehow stabs more deeply, more piercingly beautiful. Sad, yet it did its job. Abandoned now.
I love this temple. It is a home blessedly lent to me for a break from wandering homeless. I don’t deserve it, haven’t earned it, but here it is. Dhamma’s Grace, even in Samsara.
I love humanity. I love each face I bring back to mind — a dead bond trader, an exhausted fireman, a distraught sister, even George W. This is likely to pass. Alas, I am still human. I’m not good enough to love consistently and universally.
Yet for some moments I can love. It is painfully beautiful. And I pray that there will be no more killing even as weary knows-too-much head doubts the cycles of killing and retribution will ever stop.
The juices of life are flowing. I paddle back to the landing. May this heart cherish its wounds and not let them heal callously. May this mind track its meaning forward to something worthy. May we all live in peace and justice midst the beauty and ugliness of Samsara.
May this temple ever be our refuge.
Created 07 Jun 2006 © by Sravasti Abbey at Liberation Park