Several religious traditions have some concept of God as mystery. I have written and spoken at length about "Not-Knowing" as a place where we know we don't know but we are consciously seeking the Truth. Ambiguity reigns. I've called "Not-Knowing" the most quintessentially spiritual state that we can hold. These ponderings--and they truly are ponderings--come from that place of "Not-Knowing," where I know two things that appear to contradict each other. AND, I have not yet reached a higher level of Truth where I can see how both are true.
Two or three times a year I adopt a few spiritual statements to guide my growth over the next few months. I recently adopted seven new ones. Four I can get my head around, but I am still learning to live them. Three are really stretching me:
- I am Love.
- The Truth is: We are all Love.
- The Truth will set me free.
I believe it was the I Ching that first said, "When the student is ready, the teacher will appear." Apparently, this student must be ready, because before the ink was dry on my affirmations, my Socratic teacher began presenting questions. Three big questions have presented me with the opportunity (translate that as hard spiritual work) to discover the Truth that will set me free. Lest you think I've gotten there, spirituality is a journey, and right now I have no idea where this one is going.
I've often had people ask me after an address or presentation, "How can you say that someone like Adolf Hitler is Love? How can you say that we should want to connect with him?" Twenty years ago I hadn't really "gotten" exactly how complex and ambiguous the Mystery could be. I would often reply that what Hitler did was horrible. However, because things were so horrible, we now had the United Nations where we could work things out and hold dictators accountable over a conference table instead of a battleground. (OK. I admit that was naïve even in the mid-90s when we thought that global transformation was right around the corner.)
Now, I ponder. There are people who do evil things. Genocide does still exist. Dictators continue to kill their own people. One ethnic group kills another on a massive scale over and again. On a smaller scale, individuals walk in with guns and regularly shoot a dozen others (or more) before they are stopped. Individuals steal pensions or homes from hard-working individuals. Other individuals lie, cheat, and steal to intentionally harm others. Can they and I both be Love?
In my as-yet unpublished book Choice Point--Seven Keys to Living with Intention I quote columnist Tom Ehrich from his "On the Journey" newsletter:
"...As Hannah Arent wrote in her disturbing study of Nazi German, that evil empire could not proceed unless evil became banal, or common. For something obviously wrong to proceed, multiple consciences must stop working. Entire communities must grow numb and choose not to see any connection between abusive behavior and oneself."After the recent gassing of 1300 people in Syria, I was incredulous that polls showed that most Americans could see no reason for our involvement. We could only have grown numb and chosen not to see any connection between the chemical attacks and ourselves. (I am delighted that a diplomatic alternative to military action emerged. My issue is that a large percentage of people--70 to 80 percent-- were unable to connect the dots between what was happening in Syria and the harm we were allowing to ourselves as part of the larger human community.)
I am a pacifist by nature, and I have opposed most military actions of this government in my life time. I think there can almost always be a better way to resolve a problem than war. Solving violence with more violence has never made sense to me on either a micro or macro level. Violence is self-destructive. From my ribbon of love perspective, violence injures what connects us. When we hurt others, we hurt ourselves. Yet I have been horrified as I have watched several genocides where the world saw fit to do nothing. What are we to do?
The more immediate questions that my teacher has presented are much more personal. The second troubling question was presented almost as quickly when one more mentally ill man who had acquired a gun shot a large number people and did so not very far from where I work and live. It is much easier for me to have compassion for someone with mental illness than it is for all the people that crossed his life (or those of several before him over the last few years) and chose not to show him the compassion to insist he get help. I have to go back to what Arent said. Have all of our consciences stopped working that it is easier to turn the other way than to insist than to get help for someone? And perhaps the bigger question is why it is so difficult to get help for someone before they commit massive acts of violence. If the Truth will set me free, what am I to do with this?
On a much more micro level, the third question my teacher has presented to me is how to relate to a person with whom I must interact almost daily who engages in behaviors which are destructive to others. I am keenly aware of the consequences in saying something: the history and career trajectory of whistleblowers is ugly. Yet the consequences of not saying something is even uglier: think of all the people who lost everything in scandals like Enron and the 2008 financial melt-down.
I am grateful that I have been blessed with extremely high integrity bosses and those business owners that patronized my business were almost always scrupulous about doing the right thing. I don't know if I had just been lucky in the past or if things have changed, but clearly some of the people around me in recent years have been aiming lower.
A few years ago I sat in a meeting and listened to my boss lie to a client. When we walked out of that meeting, she literally looked at my colleague and me and said, "It isn't ever going to happen." When I probed more, "Everyone does it," was the answer. I wrestled with what the right thing to do was, but about that time the client retired and I was offered a different assignment. I started to write that it was easy to just forget. That is not the Truth. I never forgot. That I did nothing and didn't know what to do still eats at my soul.
Just a few months later, the same boss was misrepresenting what we could and would do to my new client. I knew I couldn't continue to work in that environment. I was just beginning to recover from the havoc the dot.com bust had wreaked in my life: I needed the job. I began praying for a door to open, and at warp-speed one did. Within an hour, I had a job offer, and they wanted me as soon as possible. I was able to get out of the situation, but once again the fact that I didn't do anything has eaten at my soul--pinpricks in my integrity is what I called this in The Game Called Life. In both situations people and organizations were hurt. I am certain that I couldn't have stopped the behavior in either case. If I am Love, and my clients are Love, how could I do nothing? A few months later I contacted the second client, met him for lunch, and apologized. He said that he knew it wasn't me. That felt a little better. But I am back to Arent's proposition that multiple consciences have stopped working for us to get to the point that doing bad things is OK if everyone else is doing it.
Once again I am in a situation in which I am witness to bad behavior, don't know in advance to stop it, and observe deaf ears from those who could and should stop it. Ugly personal consequences to me resulted when I attempted to stop it. I could live with those consequences if something changed, but they didn't. Things got worse instead of better.
Thank you, teacher. I am really grateful for this lesson. ;-) How do I act from love and compassion, how do I avoid injury to others including the perpetrator, and how do I feed the ribbon of love in this situation? I am certain the Truth will set me free. Sooner would be nice.
What I know in my heart today is that knowing the right thing to do isn't always apparent or easy, but staying in the Mystery to allow a Higher Level of Truth to become clear will set me free.
No comments:
Post a Comment