Hope

I know loneliness.

At the 2004 winter meditation retreat at Still Point Zen Buddhist Temple - I still remember it - I cried. I wanted to for a long time, but finally I was sitting eating lunch - broccoli soup - and I thought, "I don't want to die. I don't want anybody to die." and the tears came.

They came fairly often thereafter, and each time a pain so desperate and huge I wished it would kill me. I knew it would not. I'd weep, I'd howl if no one was around, and then I'd blow my nose and go to bed.

Dae Jin, if he ever reads this, will surely remember when I invited him to Peck Park, and sat on a bench and sobbed. The world was hurting and I was powerless. Thank god, he sat, and listened. He tried to understand what I couldn't put into words - what I didn't understand myself. He just listened.

I believed that I was like this - burdened with this pain so big it should burst my skin. I believed that any joy was a facade stretched across and ocean of pain. I thought I was always like this, and it was only rarely that I would stop denying it. I knew, at least, how great my suffering was. That was something.

I was talking to an older woman today. She was sitting in the street while we were working on her house, talking about the state of the world and so forth. She said how hard it is to know what to do.

"It's not that hard," I said, "If you listen. When you think you know, that's when it gets hard to hear."

Bruce told me that psychology had discovered that people will prefer guilt to helplessness. I always connected that to Christianity - the only religion I know where people get proud of how ashamed they are. "If I'm hurting, it must be my fault. I'm a sinner, but I'm in control."

(Standard disclaimer: I love Jesus, I think he was a great teacher and a real hero. I think the church and the preachers should crack a bible someday and checkout what the guy was talking about.)

This mentality of, "I there's a book, it tells me exactly what God is going to do," really means "God is predictable and therefore controllable. I follow the rules, and I am in control of my destiny." This thinking . . . is very destructive. The rules say killing people is okay, well, I can kill with impunity. It's all for the sake of God. He needs to be protected.

When I thought I knew, I was safe. I was in control, but I didn't have hope. Hope is a miracle, and miracles don't happen in the world if we've got it by the short hairs.

I'm finding out that I was burning through my grief - as much of it as I could take at a sitting. And that each time I wept, I was a little lighter when I was done. Turns out what I thought was the "real me" was "me at a moment in time" - when I was laughing at the sunrise it wasn't any different.

I don't know. I learn, every day I find out a fact, or face a darkness I didn't know I carried. I piss my friends off by being concerned about them, now I know there's a chance they just needed to be pissed off. Or at least, that I can't know what they need, and all I can do is love them and hope that it's good.

When I admit that the world is larger and more terrible and more wonderful than I can dream, there can be miracles. There always are miracles, but I can admit that they are there - coming out of left field, arising from some secret place in my heart, in the face of fear and death, there are miracles.

The biggest one is called hope.
-Click here to read the rest-