Life has always seemed a mixed bag, a loose collection of pieces that form a coherent whole only if I squint. It’s as if the potter dropped the vase and made dubious guesses gluing our brokenness back together. Why else is the collage so disjointed – ecstatic joy laid alongside blistering pain; splashes of beauty decorating the abhorrent?
I long to right the world, to repair this vessel we are sailing. In the long run, I know that goodness will prevail because our ultimate nature leans in that direction, if ever so slightly. But the traveling to get there is so, so, painfully slow. I want to add my efforts to help it along, to quicken the time, to run my fingers over the scars and heal what aches. In a world that is ripping itself apart, I want to fill the gaps.
Being human, I need the world to make sense. I have to find the patterns that hold it together and rescue the bottom line from utter randomness. And so I fall back on that most basic human skill, I tell a story. Am I making it up to numb myself, avoid reality? That’s not what stories do, fabricate from nothingness. They ring a bell to send a signal outward, like sonar, and if the sound hits something solid, you get a message back and know you’re heading in the right direction.
I never get the whole story all at once; it unfolds as it is told. My first draft is the simplest: the world is being ripped apart by bad people. This gives me someone to fight, even to hate. I can mobilize my anger, my hurt, my frustration, and direct it at the badness so I can resurrect the goodness. But when I tell this story, it doesn’t ring true. If I stop my anger long enough to listen, the message coming back does not lead to greater goodness. The story does not hold.
There are forces at work beyond first sight. Large cycles move through the course of history, culture, geopolitics, and the growth of human consciousness. We all play a role in these larger cycles, and my desire to hate a particular role is an understandable but mistaken line in my first draft of the story. All of us are working to fill the gaps toward goodness from within our current understanding, which is always incomplete. True psychopaths, consumed with greed, are fleetingly few; the vast majority of us are not malevolent, though we may be misguided.
What is the next draft of the story? What line can I recite that brings me one step closer to the truth? I stop and listen. You could do the same. We all have an inner compass we can touch if we take a breath and give it room. For me, I hear a line come through the static: Just Love. Is there a reason the Vedas, the Talmud, the Dharmapada, the Analects of Confucius, the Tao Te Ching, the Gospels, the Quran, the Transcendentalists, the Humanists, the visionaries, poets, and philosophers, have repeated this line throughout the cycles of our common past? It is because it has hit something solid and is sending back to us the most important message we can carry in human form.
It is a line that makes no sense to my anger, to my driving instinct to stop the horrors I see around me. It feels like an abandonment of what I want to fight for. It feels too hard. Asks too much. And yet, it rings true. It doesn’t answer every question or remove the dilemmas that trouble my daily decisions. It’s just another step. But it’s a step that guides all the other steps, and it has the power to fill the gaps and lead us all toward goodness.
Photo by Mathilde Langevin on Unsplash