I have been in a whirlwind of thoughts and feelings this past month. Passing along messages of thoughts I found heartening has been much of my email traffic. Focusing on "Seeker" has been difficult. Someone suggested I just write two sentences for my column. But I have many thoughts, and I've heard a number of speakers this past month.
I heard Matthew Fox speak about what people could be doing in the face of these American war politics. I heard Terry Tempest Williams read from her latest book, Red, and also an essay which she wrote of her experience in Washington, DC, the day of September 11. I saw a home-grown play, The Vow, written by David Tresemer and Laura-Lea Cannon, two of the people who began Starhouse, All Season Chalice in Boulder, Colorado. I watched the film, In The Light of Reverence and listened to the discussion following it at an assembly on the CU-Boulder campus.
In some ways, it's been quite normal; in others, not normal. I unfold the front section of the Denver Post every morning, wondering what the next move has been and not wanting to read it. Since I've moved from living with my daughter's family, I don't have a television and I don't have a radio in the house. So, once I'm home from work and turn off the car, I don't hear any more news…although I expect that my daughter would call me if something horrendous happened that she heard about.
I go to sleep at night with sentences forming in my head: ones I want to send to the President, the Congress, telling them that I do NOT support this retaliation. Telling them that it is insane to believe that bombing a country, which has, in effect, little government, will bring positive results, will cause the ruling faction to willingly turn over the person which our government wants. Would we, if some nation was making such a threat to us? What makes our leaders think that the Taliban would do so?
One morning I woke up with a diatribe ready to pour into the journal book:
"Do any of your [Bush] advisors read anything other than how-to-make-war manuals? Are any of them actively seeking to understand the Taliban/terrorist mind? Do they listen to people who do? I find your decision to bomb Afghanistan hopeless. It certainly does not make me feel more secure to know that you have done the one thing sure to harden anti-American feeling in the world. Have you forgotten that we are a nation governed by rule of law? It is appalling that not one of your spokespeople has suggested bringing your evidence to the World Court. It appears that that venue is sufficient for the likes of Milosovich but not for those who have the gall to attack Americans on their own soil.
And the sop of dropping some food packages! "Bombing them with butter" was a metaphor. We should be enabling the humanitarian aid workers already in the field and whose caravans of food have been held up and displaced because of our bombings, instead of killing the aid workers with errant bombs. We should be pouring aid into the refugee camps on the Pakistan border, and not just food but methods to bring potable water, housing, and creating ways of earning a living.
With all your vaunted desire for globalization – did you truly want the globalization of hate against America? That undercurrent exists beneath the outpouring of world sympathy, the sympathy that we could have capitalized on to our greater benefit if we had chosen to wage a war against terrorism without resorting to the military "solution" of bombing."
Well, that was my early morning diatribe.
Back to Matthew Fox. On the morning of September 11, in his class in San Francisco at the University of Creation Spirituality, there were three Iroquois women. As soon as the news reached the class, immediately they turned to a ritual of grief and healing. Afterwards, the three Iroquois said that it was very important not to dwell overmuch on the events, not to watch the seemingly constant replays, but to move on into the healing and the lesson-taking.
Lesson-taking? What are the lessons for us and what are our hearts saying, asked Matthew Fox. Here's what I heard him say:
Now that so many hearts have broken, we experience the interconnectedness.
Out of grief, compassion is the fruit if the suffering is handled with grace.
We want to go deeper into our potential as a human and get down to our real life.
Get beyond the comfort; forget safety; live where you fear to live.
Spiritual warriors are needed more than ever; we've all been wounded, but how do we experience those wounds as gifts? We are challenged to take the wounds from these events and purify our own hearts and values in becoming spiritual warriors. Remember we all experience good and evil within ourselves.
To recycle the painful energy we are to become warriors of compassion.
Meister Eckhart (early second millennial mystic): the soul grows by subtraction, not addition.
Fox discussed biophilia (love of living) and necrophilia (love of death), that we should ask ourselves what seeds of biophilia have I planted today.
He said the lesson of the modern age was rugged individualism which led to the killing of community. With our grief, we are re-experiencing community, moving beyond nation states and denominationalism. He reminded us that everyone is living a story and asked, why not live it generously? We need to take in the lessons of gratitude and not waste our gifts nor live lives of self-pity and to honor compassion and service as being the essence of our humanity.
He called this a wake-up call for our culture to face issues of purpose and purposelessness…to discover what matters. Evil takes us into the dark night and moves us beyond the rational. It looks at the shadow side of our culture where despair lurks and gives birth to the most violent of all crimes.
He offered that this is potentially a moment of great creativity, which is the heart and the essence of humanity, its strength and weakness. We need to honor creativity and steer it with the direction of compassion so that it serves the real needs of humanity and not the greed of the comparative few.
This is the moment to reinvent economics at a level which can sustain the world equitably. Such transformation cannot come from the marketplace, now known for its manic production and consumption. Our economy is a powerful reflection of our values, however the values of the corporation have not been human values. We need to take responsibility to create economic, educational, and religious systems worthy of our species.
He asked the questions: is our species a sustainable one? Do we have a future? He believes it is conditional, that there is no insurance policy, as we are living in a great mass extinction of other species from the actions of our species. And we will not be a sustainable species if we let tribalism, greed, violence, nationalism, injustice, consumerism, compulsion to control, hate, arrogance, anthropocentrism, addictions, and envy rule.
He spoke of fear: how do you feel about living with fear at this time? He quoted Martin Luther King, Jr.: you have to love something more than you fear death, if you want to live, and from the Lakota Sioux: fear is the door in the heart that lets other demons in. Indeed, fears are the basis of all fundamentalism.
For billions of years, he said, this universe has been birthing beauty, and this is where we get our heart and courage from, this is what connects our human psyche to the universe. We need to build our hearts strong with what we cherish, with what gives us joy.
The Vow is a history lesson constructed through dreams/memories of a group of people of the present or slightly future day. It is the story of the Cathars of southern France who were scourged from the earth by the Roman Catholic Church. The Cathars were a sect of the Catholic church that did not believe in the Pope, did not deem wealth important, and were known to be compassionate in their actions with other folks. The play touched on the Knights Templar and their role in carrying out the first intra-European genocide mission for the Pope and the birth of the Inquisition to finish the job which the Templars did not accomplish to the satisfaction of the Church.
This is the third play which David Tresemer and Laura-Lea Cannon have written, beginning with the story of the Sumerian goddess Innana, and followed by My Magdalene. Last year they felt a strong draw to the country of southern France and the intriguing snippets of the Grail tradition which fills the Langue d'oc, and went exploring the stories of the Cathar "heresy."
As I was driving home after the play, the words "remember your true vow" kept repeating in my consciousness. The phrase was the dramatic device in the play of a "voice of conscience" heard and finally heeded by a Knight Templar to help a Cathar couple flee the last round-up by the Inquisition. As I sped by the darkness of the fields east of Boulder, climbed the hill, and saw the brilliantly lit hillsides of Superior and Broomfield, I kept wondering what would be my true vow.
What would be a true vow, a voice of conscience within me? At last, this phrase settled in: to be true to the holiness within one's self.
Soon the words of Shakespeare rolled through my mind and off my tongue: "to thine own self be true, and it must follow … thou canst not be false to any man." (When I think of all the truths which were so well spoken in Shakespeare's works, I think sometimes that he must have been an old soul returned to teach us.)
What does being true to the holiness within one's self entail? What is holy within you?
Terry Tempest Williams: I had an opportunity to hear Terry three times in 24 hours this past week. She is a woman who writes straight from the holiness of her being, and who doesn't hold back.
At the Boulder Bookstore, she read an essay written the weekend before, of her experience — no, Terry doesn't experience, Terry filters all her impressions, all her feelings through that deep heart space from which she writes — of being in Washington, DC, on September 11. She was at the Corcoran Gallery of Art for the opening of an exhibit of photographs. The exhibit was the result of The Nature Conservancy asking specific photographers to go to specific natural places with which they were unfamiliar, and usually in a part of the country in which they usually did not work, and return with images.
After the plane crashed into the Pentagon, they were hustled out of the building and in that leaving, she heard someone say, "our work is now irrelevant." Terry wrote of six people crowding into a taxi and the driver calmly asking "Where would you like to go?" …as if all the choices were open, …of getting back to the hotel to find it cordoned off, …of the gridlock, at first frustratedly honking horns and then gradually quieting. She turned back to the statement regarding the images of wildness being now irrelevant, and worked with that thought. Unfortunately, I can't say more about her essay because I wasn't writing down notes. I hope that she will publish it.
By request, she closed with reading the last little piece in her collection of essays called Red (2001, Pantheon Books, New York). It is called "Wild Mercy," and its opening sentences are what I wish to leave you with:
"The eyes of the future are looking back at us and they are praying for us to see beyond our time. They are kneeling with hands clasped that we might act with restraint, that we might leave room for the life that is destined to come."
Now is the time to act through the eyes of the future.
Matthew Fox has written a number of books including Original Blessing, A Spirituality Named Compassion, and Manifesto for a Global Civilization (with Brian Swimme), and established the University of Creation Spirituality.
Terry Tempest Williams has written (among others) Refuge, An Unspoken Hunger, and Leap.
To view some of the images exhibited in The Nature Conservancy's special exhibit at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, visit this website: In Response to Place.
To read more about The Vowand the Cathars and Templars, visit the website of The Starhouse and click on the section about The Vow.