In my book We Are All Innocent by Reason
of Insanity I describe how we tell a Story that defines our lives. What
I mean by insanity is ‘confusing our mind-generated reality with actual
reality.’ Our personal narratives are an example of that confusion. We begin to
tell stories about ourselves as small children. Our families and teachers tell
us stories about ourselves. We spin these stories into a personal narrative. By
the time we reach adulthood we have forgotten that this narrative is just a story
and believe it is the truth of who we are.
One of the suggestions I make in We Are All Innocent is to ‘question the Story.’
Last fall I was camping with a friend and in the evening we
had a long, lovely conversation by lamplight. She told me of a book she had
read that started with a description of a man’s life. He was an engineer and
totally uninterested in matters of the heart. He had no close friends, no wife
or children. Then one day at 40 an illness struck and he found himself in the
hospital, close to death. He spent days in his hospital bed “rewriting the
story of his life.”
I stopped my friend there—“What an incredible image,” I
said. “Rewriting the story of your life. What a powerful concept.”
My friend went on with the story: the man survived and
completely changed his priorities. I don’t remember much else about it, because
I was filled with wonder at the possibilities inherent in ‘rewriting the
story.’
This thought has stayed with me, and I have looked at how I
have rewritten my personal narrative over the course of my life.
I grew up in a family I compare to the “Leave it to Beaver”
TV show: dad worked, mom took care of the kids, no problems. Part of my childhood
Story was “I am part of a completely normal American family.” Then one day in
1974 this storyline was shattered when my father announced he was leaving. At
that time, in the upper-middle class town we lived in, divorce was still rare. My
narrative told me that being the child of divorced parents meant I was
defective in some way.
This became part of my Story. I was flawed. I was defective.
I was not good enough. My best friends for the rest of my time in high school
were also children of divorce. My husband was a child of divorce. I became
insecure about my abilities and talents and didn’t pursue the professional
career I had always expected was my future.
In my experience, grief
stimulates existential questions. An example of a question that kicks around in
my head a lot these days is: What is the point of living if we’re just going to
die? Are we born just to have kids, work a job, buy stuff, and die?
I was a little gloomy today and
brought these questions up with a friend. He said they reminded him of a scene
from the film ‘My Dinner with Andre,’ in which Andre tells his dinner companion
about a type of self-reflection where you ask
the same questions that
Stanislavski said the actor should constantly ask himself as a character: Who
am I? Why am I here? Where do I come from? And where am I going? But instead of
applying them to a role, you apply them to yourself.
The quote from the film brought
to mind a passage I’d seen recently from Vladimir Nabokov’s autobiography Speak, Memory:
The cradle rocks above an
abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of
light between two eternities of darkness. Although the two are identical twins,
man, as a rule, views the prenatal abyss with more calm than the one he is
heading for (at some forty-five hundred heartbeats an hour). I know, however,
of a young chronophobiac who experienced something like panic when looking for
the first time at homemade movies that had been taken a few weeks before his
birth. He saw a world that was practically unchanged—the same house, the same
people—and then realized that he did not exist there at all and that nobody
mourned his absence.
This is so true of my
experience. I have never worried about where I came from, and I haven’t heard
anyone else talk about that, although I’ve heard a lot of discussion about what
happens after life. Is it because the
universe exists in our reality only from our point of view? From our vantage
point the universe only truly became alive with our entrance. All that history
that happened before we were born is merely wallpaper for the events of our life. But how can the universe go on
without us being here to observe it? And who wants to become wallpaper for
someone else’s life?
When I got home my cat was
playing with her ball. I got down on the floor and played with her. She told
me: this is the point of being alive. Being. Experiencing. Loving.
My beloved husband Arthur has been dead for almost four
months now. Yet, in the last couple of months, I have come to realize that our
love affair is continuing. Obviously it’s taken a different form, but the
relationship lives on in a very real sense.
Before today I have only talked about this with one other
person because I thought it would probably sound odd to people who haven’t lost
a lover to death. I know it would have seemed odd to me not long ago. The one
person I did share it with lost her husband some years ago, and she was quite
sympathetic, as I knew she would be.
Then yesterday I read an essay in the New York Times entitled I Am a
Bigamist. The author, Jill Smolowe, is also a widow, and she writes about how
her love affair with her dead husband has continued, even in the new
relationship she has with her second husband, a man who lost his wife and has
his own separate love affair. Ms. Smolowe says they discussed their continuing
love affairs before they were married. Because in her heart she is still in
love—and married—to her first, dead husband, to be married to a second man
means she is a bigamist. How beautiful; such an expansive vision of love, and
of life and death.
In “Better Angels,”
a lyrical film about Abraham Lincoln’s youth, death plays a major role.
Abraham’s mother died when he was fairly young. In the film, Abraham has a very
special relationship with his mother, and her death was difficult for him (I assume
this is based on fact). His father re-married, and there are some touching
scenes where Abraham learns that loving this new mother doesn’t diminish his
love for his biological mother.
The most moving scene for me was when the new mother went
into a field and met the ‘ghost’ of Abraham’s mother, and the two women
interacted in a loving way. What I saw communicated between the two was the
understanding that the biological mother had her part in this family and the
two women were going to co-exist. After I saw this movie, I thought, “If I ever
have another intimate relationship, that person is going to have to learn to
co-exist with Arthur’s spirit, which will always be here beside me.”
I am grateful for Ms. Smolowe for this article, helping me
understand that this experience I’m having is something to celebrate, a sign of
the great love that exists between Arthur and I. Arthur may have died, but our
love lives on.
There’s a lot of celebration for
this year’s Pi Day, since today’s date
expressed in numbers, 3.14.15, is the first five digits in the (apparently)
infinite sequence of pi.
We usually think of science and
mathematics as hard sciences that are all about dispelling the mysteries of
life. Yet mathematics can be seen as enshrining the mystery of life in a way
that perhaps can speak to our modern, materialistic world better than religious
or spiritual language.
Pi in particular is a great
reminder that human knowledge is still just scratching the surface of the truth
of what is. Computers have allowed mathematicians to compute the value of pi to
trillions of digits, and there is still no discernible pattern—it is infinitely
singular (that is, it goes on forever but can only be expressed by itself, it
can’t be condensed). At the same time, pi is derived from an extremely simple
formula: the circumference of a circle divided by its diameter.
But pi’s infinite randomness can
also be seen more as richness. What amazes, then, is the possibility that such
profusion can come from a rule so simple: circumference divided by diameter.
This is characteristic of mathematics, whereby elementary formulas can give
rise to surprisingly varied phenomena. For instance, the humble quadratic can
be used to model everything from the growth of bacterial populations to the
manifestation of chaos. Pi makes us wonder if our universe’s complexity emerges
from similarly simple mathematical building blocks…Pi reveals how limited human
knowledge is, how there exist teeming realms we might never explore.
This simplicity is what I find
so amazing about fractals: these are incredibly complex forms mimicking objects
in the real world like an ocean’s shoreline, a river’s delta, or a tree’s
branches, but the equations that produce the fractal designs are extremely
simple. Learn
more about fractals here. The website describes fractals in this way:
A fractal is a never-ending
pattern. Fractals are infinitely complex patterns that are self-similar across
different scales. They are created by repeating a simple process over and over
in an ongoing feedback loop.
How much more mystical can you
get?
There are many other examples of
life’s mysteries being beautifully expressed in mathematics. The Fibonacci
sequence describes the growth of plants (for example sunflower blossoms),
nautilus shells, and dragonfly wings. Click
here to watch a beautiful animation of how the Fibonacci sequence unfolds
in living things.
If you’d like to learn more
about how mathematics and the mystery of life are intertwined, I recommend Sacred
Geometry: Deciphering the Code, by Stephen Skinner. This interesting
and beautifully designed book shows how nature is filled with geometrical
forms: plant growth following the Fibonacci sequence and the golden mean,
crystals’ seven basic shapes, and the spirals found in shells, horns,
hurricanes, and galaxies.
The book also shows the
incredible genius of the ancient Greeks in figuring so much of geometry out,
and utilizing it in understanding the world and the stars. Mr. Skinner then
shows how the people of these ancient cultures used geometry to design their
sacred spaces—temples, pyramids, and the megalithic monuments like Stonehenge.
So celebrate Pi Day—eat a piece
of pie contemplating the awesomeness of the relation between circumference and
diameter of your pie’s original circle—and embrace the mystery of the universe!
I love roller coasters. When I
go to an amusement park the roller coaster is usually the only ride that
interests me. Many years ago, I went with my stepdaughter to Opryland, a park
near Nashville, and a big thunderstorm came through. We decided to stay at the
park and wait out the storm. Almost everyone else left so, once the storm was
over, we had the unusual experience of having an amusement park to ourselves.
My stepdaughter liked a ride with twirling swings that wasn’t too far from the
roller coaster, so I left her there—she never even had to get off the swing
between rides—and headed over to my favorite. This was a corkscrew coaster,
meaning you spent time upside down. I rode it six times in a row with no
waiting; what a fabulous experience!
Why are roller coasters and
other extreme rides at amusement parks and fairs so popular? Why do we pay to
be scared? Clearly many of us like to experience the simulation of approaching death.
Why is this, when our whole animal nature is programmed to survive at all costs?
The message of my husband and my
book, The
Game of God, (newly revised), is that one reason the universe exists is
to allow unlimited God to experience the roller coaster of life, the ups and
downs of limited existence, which eminently includes life and death. In the
first chapter (read
it here, complete with cartoons) Arthur and I imagine someone who “has it
all,” who is rich, beautiful, and powerful beyond measure, who has no problems,
who is perfectly healthy, and best of all is immortal. That is, someone who is
as close to being unlimited as possible. We ask, “Would there be any experiences this person would
miss?”
We conclude there would be
plenty of missed experiences: from adventure to learning, from falling in love
to anticipation of something new, from struggle to triumph, from fear of dying
to the joy of aliveness. Even riding a roller coaster would lose its excitement
if there were no possibility of risk:
Cartoon by Arthur Hancock, from The Game of God
Recently I saw an old Twilight
Zone episode called “An
Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge.” This is from a short story by Ambrose
Pierce set during the U.S. Civil War. The TV episode begins with a group of
soldiers preparing to hang a man from a bridge. The soldiers pull the board
that is holding him up out from under his feet, but the rope around his neck breaks
and he is free! He stays under water as the current of the creek carries him
away out of range of the soldiers’ rifles. Once he’s out of sight he climbs up
onto the bank and you can see he feels profoundly alive; he appreciates the
simplest things: breathing, smelling flowers, and the song of birds. Only at
the end do you realize that the rope didn’t break; he did die. The “escape” was
a fantasy that happened in the few seconds between the platform being removed
and his death. But in those seconds he lived.
Somewhere I heard a story about
Civil War veterans that also illustrates this idea that the edge of death
brings about a passionate experience of life (maybe it was from Ken Burns’ “The
Civil War”?). These veterans were imagining heaven, and this was their
conception: every day they would fight a battle, then every evening every
soldier—including those who had “died”—would gather and tell stories around the
campfire. On the surface this seems completely bizarre—who would want to
recreate brutal, bloody battles in heaven? But once you see the link between
risk-of-death and the buzzing energy of aliveness, their fantasy makes sense.
For these men, the most alive they ever felt was on the battlefield.
This wisdom is embedded in many
spiritual traditions. For example, the Tao te Ching teaches that we live in a
dualistic universe of opposites, and that pairs of opposites arise together,
they are linked. We begin the first chapter of The Game of God with a quote
from the Tao:
Under heaven all can see beauty as
beauty
only because there is
ugliness.
All can know good as good only because there
is evil.
Therefore having and not having arise
together.
Difficult and easy compliment each
other.
Long and short contrast each other;
High and low rest upon each other;
Voice and sound harmonize each other;
Front and back follow one another.
Cartoon by Arthur Hancock, from The Game of God
There is a Zen story that answers
the question “What
is Zen?” (see below): A man is in a jungle. A tiger spots him and chases him to a cliff.
The man lowers himself down on a vine until he hears another tiger below. As
he’s hanging there, with death above and below, two mice, a black one and a
white one, start chewing on his vine. Facing certain death, he notices a wild
strawberry plant near him and, plucking a berry and eating it, says, “How
sweet.” In other words, the message of Zen is: experience every moment fully
because death is always lurking.
Don Juan Matus, the Yaqui Indian
shaman in the Carlos Castaneda series, taught Carlos that he should make
friends with his death.
When we deny death, ironically
we deny life. We end up taking life for granted. We don’t see the perfection in
every moment. We think of death as the worst thing that can happen to us, yet
it makes life meaningful.
The Game of God presents the theory that the first purpose of the
universe is to allow unlimited God the experience of limitation—life and death,
beginning and end, fear and hate, happiness and sorrow, ignorance and learning.
In order to have a realistic
experience of limitation, God must forget that She-He-It is God. In other
words, the universe is God…in a state
of amnesia.
The universe is a game in which
God forgets His-Her-Its identity and, in the process of playing, remembers who
She-He-It is.
Evolution is the process of God
awakening from amnesia into the remembrance of His-Her-Its true identity.
The universe is literally An
Expression Of God In Amnesia (AEOGIA). And God likes roller coasters!
Ingmar Bergman’s 1957 film, Wild Strawberries, is a beautiful story of an old man realizing that, even though he was a brilliant doctor who selflessly served his patients, he was emotionally reserved. No one could get close.
The film takes place in one day, as the old man drives to the town where he is to receive an honorary degree. Through vivid dreams he is able to experience the cost of his coldness—the loss of his first love and the infidelity of his wife. His daughter-in-law accompanies him on the trip, and she reveals the cost in the life of his son. When she told his son that she was pregnant, he replied, “Life is absurd, so I don’t want to bring any children into this world. I want to die myself.” (Not an exact transcript)
Bergman ends the film with the promise that his characters will be healing from this life-negating worldview.
The film brought to mind “The Case Against Kids,” by Elizabeth Kolbert, a review of three books about the ethics of having children. I was astounded to read about Better Never To Have Been: The Harm of Coming into Existence, by a philosophy professor at the University of Cape Town, South Africa, named David Benatar, in which he claims that the inevitability of suffering means it’s better not to be born at all.
Kolbert quote from Benatar’s book:
One of the implications of my argument is that a life filled with good and containing only the most minute quantity of bad—a life of utter bliss adulterated only by the pain of a single pinprick—is worse than no life at all.
She paraphrases more of his argument thus:
If we all saw the harm we were doing by having children and put a stop to it, within a century or so the world’s population would drop to zero. For Benatar, this is an outcome devoutly to be wished. "Humans have the unfortunate distinction of being the most destructive and harmful species on earth," he writes. "The amount of suffering in the world could be radically reduced if there were no more" of us…Benatar’s title refers to the passage in Sophocles’ ‘Oedipus at Colonus’ in which the chorus observes: "Never to have been born is best, But once you’ve entered this world, Return as quickly as possible to the place you came from." It also alludes to an old Jewish saying: "Life is so terrible, it would have been better not to have been born. Who is so lucky? Not one in a hundred thousand."
It occurred to me that this is the inevitable consequence when a culture no longer believes in absolutes: since there is no meaning to our suffering, it’s better not to exist at all.
In 1963 a British production company created a television special
entitled, “Seven Up!” Starting from the Jesuit saying, “Give me a child until 7
and I’ll give you the man,” the filmmakers gathered children from a wide
socioeconomic swath in order to get a view of Britain’s future.
Luckily for all of us, one of the members of the original production
team, Michael Apted, had the inspiration to return to these same people every
seven years. What an incredible way to test the veracity of the Jesuits’
aphorism!
The latest film in the series, “56 Up,” was released last year. I
have seen all of the films in the series; they fascinate me because it seems to
me the adage is largely proven true. The child is still there in the adult; the
essence of the person doesn’t change.
“56 Up” is beautifully edited. Each of the thirteen participants is
taken in turn, and footage from the earlier films is edited in with the latest
interview to give an overview of each person’s life. If you haven’t seen any of
the other films, don’t worry; this film is so well done it can stand alone.
After viewing “56 Up” my main feeling is gratitude towards the
people who were willing to participate over all these years. Some talked of the
difficulties they had encountered as a result of being in the films, and it was
clearly a sacrifice—your mistakes, your weaknesses, your marital troubles, your
job loss, all chronicled for the whole world to see. This might not seem so
noteworthy in the era of Facebook and Youtube, but in the years before the turn
of the century this was very public
living.
Last week in my backyard I found this daffodil growing up through a
leaf. I loved the way the four leaf blades were twisted so I went and got my
camera.
I think of spring as the season of emergence, and I love taking
photos of flowers surfacing through the winter’s leaf litter. To me this
symbolizes life conquering any and every obstacle.
For a long time I dreamed of having a life without obstacles. I thought
I’d be happier. I think a lot of people feel this way; that’s why there’s such
an obsession in our culture with celebrities and the rich, and why lotteries
are so popular. Our fantasy is that if we get rich and/or famous then all our
problems will disappear.A cursory glance at any magazine in the grocery store checkout lane
will dispel the myth that the lives of the rich and famous are obstacle-free,
but somehow we still go on believing it will be true in our life when that happy life-transforming day arrives.
Recently I watched a film I made with my husband Arthur just after
we got our first video camera twenty years ago. We went to a number of
different locations in the Atlanta area and asked people, “What, in your
opinion, is the meaning of life?” We got a wide spectrum of answers, and the
film is a fascinating look at the variety of personalities in any given
population.
After watching it this time I thought about how I would answer if
this question were asked of me. “To grow, to expand, to learn,” I thought, “If
I ever stop growing it’s time to die.” Obstacles are crucial to growth. Without
obstacles we would stay stagnant. We wouldn’t have any incentive to change. Obstacles
make life interesting.
I could easily have torn the leaf off of the daffodil and let it
unfurl like the other daffodils around it, but I found myself thinking, “is
that in the daffodil’s best interest?” For all I know, overcoming the challenge
of this leaf could lead to a stronger breed of daffodil that could help
daffodils survive into the future.
As unlikely as that may be, the point is that obstacles and
challenges aren’t things to be dreaded or avoided or hated; they are necessary
ingredients of an interesting life.
pink ladyslipper
In fact, I believe that the universe exists for the experience of
overcoming obstacles. In The
Game of God, co-written
with Arthur, we proposed that the Unlimited (which most people call God),
created the universe for the experience of limitation. The attributes usually ascribed
to God—omnipotent, omniscient, immortal, omnipresent—can be summarized as
“unlimited.” God has no limit in power, knowledge, time, or space. In other
words, God has no obstacles.
But, we observed, if
God couldn’t have the experience of
limitation then God was limited after all: the inability to experience
limitation would be a limitation!
crocus
We concluded that the universe is
God, experiencing life-and-death as if his-her-its life really depended on it.
The universe is a game created for the fun of experiencing obstacles and
overcoming them.
Many years ago I looked with wonder at some plants growing on a
sheer cliff at Point Lobos, San Francisco, right above the pounding Pacific
Ocean. I had lived in San Francisco for a couple of years and knew the force of
the winter storms that came in off that ocean. How could anything survive in
such a brutal environment? Those plants convinced me that nature would overcome
anything that humans could throw at it. No matter how many obstacles we create,
like climate change, pollution, radiation, etc., nature will triumph over them.
We might not; our civilization might crumble if we push too hard, but nature
will be fine.
[Note: The Game of God was published in 1993. In the intervening years we
have changed our thinking about one aspect of this theory:
We no longer hold God to be a
willful or deliberate creator. One of the most basic aspects of the Supreme
Being must be that it is free from desire. The unlimited, infinite,
all-powerful, all-knowing source of everything would already have every thing.
Where would desire come from? If you have everything what could you want? Where
would the desire to create something come from? The logical conclusion is that
the dualistic universe is an aspect of Supreme Being, not something “created”
by She-He-It. This just deepens the connection between God and us: we’re not a
game God is playing, we are God in
the most meaningful sense.]
We’ve reached the tenth
anniversary of the launching of the Iraq war. It’s easy to look back on that
time and blame the Bush administration, various politicians, and media pundits
for selling the war to a credulous population still reeling from the attacks on
September 11, 2001.
But according to Chris Hedges
this would be a mistake. Mr. Hedges was a war correspondent for 15 years, and in
his 2002 book War is a Force that Gives Life Meaning
he tells how war brings a sense of purpose and comradeship to people. He
noticed that at the end of a war, people felt a sense of deflation. Even those
who were the victims of the violence felt this emptiness. Yes, life is safer
when the war is over, but it seems flat and stale. There is an intoxication to
war, an addictive adrenaline rush of living life fully.
Mr. Hedges shows how leaders
bring about war to solidify their position or prop up a failing regime, but he also
shows that it is wrong to think that citizens are blameless in the calculus of
war and peace.
For most of human history, the
force that gave life meaning was survival. Since the very beginning of life on
this planet the meaning of life was to survive and to reproduce.
At a certain point religion emerged
as a force that gave life meaning. People believed that the gods had arranged
the world and everyone had their place and purpose.
When nation-states emerged five
centuries ago, kings learned that there was nothing like war to solidify a
people’s identification with the concept of “country.”
We saw it in this country after
9/11. Anyone too young to remember Pearl Harbor finally got a lesson in how an
enemy attack can bring a country to an almost complete unity of purpose. I can
remember thinking, sometime right after the attack, that this was blowback for
the things the U.S. had done in the Middle East over the previous decades. But
this thought was unsayable at the time. Bill Maher was kicked off television
for a couple of years for daring to say that flying into a skyscraper was not
the act of a coward.
Mr. Hedges writes about living in
Argentina before the Falklands War in the early 1980s. The ruling junta was
faltering, and there was widespread and open discontent with the regime amongst
the educated classes. But as soon as the army invaded the Falkland Islands and
claimed them for Argentina, all dissent ceased and the entire populace united
behind the government. No one spoke against the junta, even in private, and Mr.
Hedges felt that, as a foreigner, if he had said anything negative he would
have been physically attacked.
The sense of victimhood and
unity brought by 9/11 was exploited by the Bush administration to sell the Iraq
war. My husband can clearly remember how CNN had the sound of war drums
accompanying their news stories during the “march to war” ten years ago.
Obviously leaders of governments use their power to
manipulate people into war, but we the people are manipulatable. Why? Because so
many of our lives are empty of meaning and purpose. This emptiness is reflected in the large number of people taking anti-depressant and anti-anxiety medications in this country.
The human race desperately needs
a new vision, a sense of purpose that is constructive, not destructive like war.
How about working together to build a sustainable global society of opportunity
and equality for all?
As a coda, in this time of
budget deficit hysteria, let’s not forget how much the Iraq war has contributed
to the federal debt. The Bush administration estimated the cost at $50 billion
(do you remember officials saying, “it will pay for itself with oil revenues,”
and the firing of the person who estimated the cost at $100-200 billion?). In
2008 economist Joseph Stiglitz estimated that the true cost of the war would
be $3 trillion when long-term care for veterans and interest on the debt were
factored in. In 2010 he wrote an op-ed
in the Washington Post saying $3 trillion was looking optimistic.
Brown University's Watson Institute for International
Studies released a “Cost of War” study that raises the price tag to $6
trillion. Mother Jones has a graph that
breaks down where the money goes.
The Bush administration and
Republican-controlled Congress never included the costs of war in their budgets
so all of this is going on the national credit card. Just remember this when
you hear a Republican talk about fiscal responsibility.
Recently I got an email from a friend who had just spent some time with her
ex-husband. She wrote: “That whole energy seems so...odd to me now....and it's
simultaneously tragic and beautiful...like life, I guess.” [I didn’t cut
anything out; that’s how she writes.]
Simultaneously
tragic and beautiful. Yes! Lately I have been seeing how everyone’s life
has some tragedy or sadness in it. I’ve met a lot of people in the last six
months and everyone seems to have some sad story to tell. Many are recently
divorced, another’s foreign wife took his children to her country when the kids
were 5 and 7 and he’s never seen them since, a couple others have children in
jail or addicted to drugs, another found out the woman she thought was her
mother wasn’t…
Most of us operate under the
illusion that there are people who don’t suffer. We think there are people who really
have their act together and don’t have the problems we do.
The news that Mother Teresa lived with depression for
years shocked me, and I imagine, most people. We think someone with that kind
of spiritual dedication should be beyond the sufferings of ordinary people like
us.
St. Francis of Assisi is one of the best-known saints of the Catholic Church,
widely admired today for his humble embrace of poverty and his peaceful
attitude towards nature. Statues of St. Francis are ubiquitous in gardens. Here
was a golden life, without tragedy, right?
St. Francis with Sultan al-Kamil Wikimedia Commons
A review
of two new biographies of St. Francis of Assisi in the New Yorker reveals the tragedy in the saint’s life. [“Rich
Man, Poor Man: The Radical Visions of St. Francis,” by Joan Acocella, New Yorker Jan 14, 2013] Francis was
from a wealthy family, and when he was about twenty-one, in 1202, he went to
war. His side lost and he spent a year in prison. When he came out he was
changed; he was no longer interested in partying with his friends, but spent
entire days praying.
By 1206
he had renounced his inheritance and gained two followers. He believed that
property aroused envy and conflict and was, Ms. Acocella writes, “the one thing
most destructive to peace in the world…To be part of the [Franciscan] group, a
man had to sell all his goods, give the money to the poor, and, like Francis,
sever all ties with his family.”
In ten
years his order of friars became incredibly popular, and grew to number in the
thousands. Francis began sending friars to France, Germany, Hungary, Spain, and
the Middle East.
St.
Francis went to Egypt in 1219 to try and convert the Sultan of Egypt, Syria,
and Palestine to Christianity in order to end the Crusades. He returned (the
Sultan didn’t convert) with malaria and trachoma, a painful eye infection. He
was also vomiting blood. During the last six years of his life he suffered
tremendously from the pain of his physical ailments.
Just recently I saw a Robert Frost quote on a Quote of the
Day site: “In three words I can sum up everything I've learned about life: it
goes on.”
This brought to mind an experience I had a number of years
ago when I looked at a genealogy chart of my family. I was going through some
trouble in my life (although now I can’t remember what it was!) and as I looked
at the names, and their dates of birth and death, I thought, “these people went through
crises like I’m going through now. They somehow resolved all the crises of
their lives until they reached that final crisis, death, that has only one
resolution.”
This realization has given me a lot of comfort ever since. Before,
when I was in a crisis I would feel as if I were drowning; it felt like life
couldn’t possibly go on because this crisis was too hard to solve. It was like
a paralysis.
Now I think: it’s just another one of my crises, one in a
series. It too will pass, like all the others, until I reach that final crisis
in my life. Then I will pass, and that’s all right too, because that is also
part of life going on.
I saw the
film “The Tsunami and the Cherry Blossom” on HBO recently. What an amazing film
about the power of humans to transcend tragedy, as well as the resilience of nature.
The filmmaker, Lucy Walker, was going to make a short film about the Japanese fascination
with the cherry blossom, which is evidently a very important part of their
culture. Then the tsunami hit, and she integrated the two stories in a
fabulously beautiful way.
Some of the
Japanese interviewed say the cherry blossom is revered because of its ephemeral
nature—it blooms for just a few days and then is gone. They even love it when the
petals fall from the trees; among their many names for the blossoms is one for
“fallen petals in water.” A man who raises cherry trees, who is descended from
a long line of cherry-tree growers, said, “perceiving transience heightens
appreciation.” This is the message of the film: life is short and when we think
it’s going to go on forever we take things for granted. When we are in touch
with the truth that life can be taken from us at any moment, we appreciate
every moment. That may sound trite, but this film says it in such a graceful
way it feels fresh and powerful.
The film
begins with a stunning video of the tsunami coming towards the camera, taken
from a hillside above a town, with residents of the town all around exclaiming
as they watch the destruction unfold. At first you can’t really see anything
happening, the wave is so far away, and then you can’t believe your eyes as it
comes towards you and it becomes clear how vast the devastation is. The wave
ends up almost reaching the hillside and the sense of panic is communicated
through the voices of the people all around; it’s an emotionally gripping
experience.
The beauty
of Japanese culture comes across in the second half of the film as the cherry
blossoms begin to open among the destroyed houses: the reverence across age
groups and gender for the beauty of a flower. There’s the sense of a poetic
nature that seems to me to be totally missing from American culture, and when I
see a depiction of a culture that has it, I really feel the lack.
