Stephen Colbert on Grief

I am a fan of Stephen Colbert. I haven’t seen him on the Tonight Show yet, and I only caught the Colbert Report rarely. When I did see his show I felt his heart was enormous and his joy infectious.

My favorite part of the show were his interviews. I thought he had a sensitivity lacking in many other talk show hosts, and in addition, Colbert asked interesting and unusual questions.

Not long ago I read an interview with him, published in GQ, and felt like I got a sense of why his heart is so open. Colbert is the youngest of eleven children. His father and two of his brothers, the two that were closest to him in age, were killed in a plane crash when he was 10. All of his other siblings were in college or living elsewhere, so Colbert lived alone with his mother for many years.

One day, when he was 35, Colbert had a revelation while walking down the street: “The world it’s so…lovely. I’m very grateful to be alive, though I know a lot of dead people.”

I loved hearing him say that about the loveliness of the world; what I call the ‘bounteous beauty’ has helped carry me through this year of grief.

The article says he used to have a note taped to his computer that read, “Joy is the most infallible sign of the existence of God.”

Here is the section of the article about his experience with grief [This is towards the end of the long interview.]:

“I was left alone a lot after Dad and the boys died.... And it was just me and Mom for a long time,” he said. “And by her example am I not bitter. By her example. She was not. Broken, yes. Bitter, no.” Maybe, he said, she had to be that for him. He has said this before—that even in those days of unremitting grief, she drew on her faith that the only way to not be swallowed by sorrow, to in fact recognize that our sorrow is inseparable from our joy, is to always understand our suffering, ourselves, in the light of eternity. What is this in the light of eternity? Imagine being a parent so filled with your own pain, and yet still being able to pass that on to your son.

“It was a very healthy reciprocal acceptance of suffering,” he said. “Which does not mean being defeated by suffering. Acceptance is not defeat. Acceptance is just awareness.” He smiled in anticipation of the callback: “‘You gotta learn to love the bomb,’” he said. “Boy, did I have a bomb when I was 10. That was quite an explosion. And I learned to love it. So that's why. Maybe, I don't know. That might be why you don't see me as someone angry and working out my demons onstage. It's that I love the thing that I most wish had not happened.”

I love the thing that I most wish had not happened.

I asked him if he could help me understand that better, and he described a letter from Tolkien in response to a priest who had questioned whether Tolkien's mythos was sufficiently doctrinaire, since it treated death not as a punishment for the sin of the fall but as a gift. “Tolkien says, in a letter back: ‘What punishments of God are not gifts?’” Colbert knocked his knuckles on the table. “‘What punishments of God are not gifts?’” he said again. His eyes were filled with tears. “So it would be ungrateful not to take everything with gratitude. It doesn't mean you want it. I can hold both of those ideas in my head.”

He was 35, he said, before he could really feel the truth of that. He was walking down the street, and it “stopped me dead. I went, ‘Oh, I'm grateful. Oh, I feel terrible.’ I felt so guilty to be grateful. But I knew it was true.

“It's not the same thing as wanting it to have happened,” he said. “But you can't change everything about the world. You certainly can't change things that have already happened.”

I hope that one day I can get to the experience of love for that thing I most wish had not happened, and I am grateful to Stephen Colbert for his example.

Grace

Grace is a concept I have struggled to understand. I was raised as a Christian and learned in that context that grace was something God gives to undeserving human sinners. When I rejected the religion of my youth I rejected grace too, and thought no more about it.

When I developed my HACLG (hac-ul-gee) system for my spiritual path (honesty, humility, acceptance, compassion, love, gratitude) I would say, “gratitude is as far as I’ve gotten and it wasn’t easy for me to get to gratitude!” [I used to call this GLACH; read my blog post about it.]

Then my beloved husband Arthur died, and there was an aura around his death that could only be called “grace.” I couldn’t think of another word to describe what I was witnessing. What I saw was a profound alignment with the way it was, a dropping of all resistance and opposition to the flow of the universe. And it was so beautiful. Arthur was graceful, in every sense of the word.

I saw then that grace was a second ‘g’ to add to my system. When you have gotten to the stage where you accept reality so fully that you are grateful for the way it is, you become filled with grace. You are in synch with reality; you are flowing with the stream of reality, not fighting against it.

I like this definition of grace from an online dictionary: “Seemingly effortless beauty or charm of movement, form, or proportion.” That effortlessness can only come about from the complete lack of resistance to the flow of reality.

Yesterday I listened to President Obama’s eulogy for Reverend Clementa Pinckney, who was murdered in his Charleston church. I was awed by the fact that Obama took grace as his theme.

President Obama spoke (at about 18 minutes into his speech) of how the (alleged) killer couldn’t see the grace surrounding Rev. Pinckney because he was blinded by hatred. Obama continued that he’d been contemplating grace the whole week, including the grace of the families who lost loved ones, and then he recited the first verse of the song, “Amazing Grace.” The crowd went wild with delight. Then he said, “As a nation, out of this terrible tragedy, God has visited grace upon us, for he has allowed us to see where we’ve been blind. He has given us the chance, where we’ve been lost, to find our best selves.”

He kept returning to the theme of grace, and then ended with this thought (about 34:00): “the path of grace requires an open mind, but more importantly an open heart. That’s what I felt this week, an open heart. That more than any particular policy or analysis is what’s called for right now, I think…if we can find that grace, anything is possible. If we can tap that grace, everything can change.” Then he paused and said, “Amazing Grace. Amazing Grace.” And he was clearly moved by the concept of grace…and then famously he began to sing, and the whole crowd leapt to their feet to join him.

I thought at the time the singing might have been spontaneous, but according to the New York Times it wasn’t. However, the fact that grace was the central theme was President Obama’s idea:

Mr. Obama expanded on a short riff in the draft about the idea of grace, and made it the central theme of the eulogy: the grace family members of the shooting victims embodied in the forgiveness they expressed toward the killer; the grace the city of Charleston and the state of South Carolina manifested in coming together in the wake of the massacre; the grace God bestowed in transforming a tragedy into an occasion for renewal, sorrow into hope.

…

He also inserted lines from his favorite hymn, “Amazing Grace,” as a refrain, and, on the way to Charleston aboard Marine One, he told his advisers that he might sing some of those lines “if it feels right.”

I may disagree with President Obama about the meaning of grace, which he defined in the standard Christian context, but I am grateful that my president could leave politics behind and fill this important speech with such moral power.

Grace. So now my path is: H₂ACLG₂. Starting to look like a chemical equation for a spiritual life!

GLACHH

Recently someone asked me to describe my spiritual path. First, I dislike the word “spiritual,” because I’m interested in being a more loving and caring person; I have less interest in connection with the divine. I think of my path as being more about consciousness; becoming more aware every day.

The basic components of my path are: acceptance, love, humility, compassion, honesty, and gratitude. For fun I thought I’d make an acronym to remember them better, and the best sounding word I could come up with is GLACH₂.

Gratitude: This has been a tough one for me. I seem to expect a lot from the world, and since my life hasn’t been perfect (according to my expectations) for most of my life I couldn’t see many reasons for gratitude. However, the foundation of my path is this concept: reality, as it is currently manifested in this moment, is perfect. This moment is whole and complete. The more I experience this, the more I feel gratitude for the way it is (no matter how it is!). I feel like I have a lot more to learn about gratitude, and perhaps that is why it ended up first in the acronym, to keep it present in my awareness.

Love: My definition of love is “the experience of unconditional acceptance of what is.” Loving what is means I am seeing the perfection of this moment of now; I’m not bitching about it and wanting it to be some other way. Loving what is dissolves the boundaries between the world and me.

Acceptance: My ego-identity fights to survive just like an animal, with fight/flight behavior. It seems like the world is almost never quite right, so I have to either battle to get my way or run from what’s happening. There is an option, and that is to face the world as it is, to bow to the reality of the now. This doesn’t mean I become a doormat, it just means I’m not rejecting what already is.

Compassion: Another foundational premise of my path is that everyone is insane (We are ALL Innocent by Reason of Insanity). Crazy people do crazy things. In addition, free will is a cruel myth. People don’t choose to do mean, cruel, or hurtful things, they are driven to do them by their mental programming. The only sane response is compassion: seeing another’s limitations without value judgment.

Honesty: I used to hide myself because I believed that if people knew what I was really like, what I really thought, they’d start laughing or run screaming. But then I felt like a fraud, and hated myself for my weakness. I began seeing how I was hurting people by not telling the truth. As a simple example, say you’re about to give an important presentation. I notice you have a piece of food between your teeth. It’s a little embarrassing for me to tell you about it, but wouldn’t not telling you the truth hurt you?

Humility: This is another one that has caused me some trouble. I used to confuse humility with humiliation. I couldn’t understand why anyone could want to be humble, it sounded weak and pitiful to me. I tried hard to never make mistakes and to do everything perfectly, because I believed that only if I was perfect would people like me. I couldn’t laugh at myself when I made a mistake. I’ve come to realize that humility is extremely powerful because it’s just recognizing the truth of my limitations.

Every moment is an opportunity to experience/express GLACH₂. Every moment I'm not experiencing/expressing GLACH₂ is an opportunity to learn about what I'm still attached to, afraid of, or angry about.