I hear a voice calling out, faint, as if from a distance, saying:
“There will come a day when all of this is over. The brutal times will end, sanity will return, at least for a while. We will be moved to see people act with honor and virtue and not think it rare. We will no longer ask, ‘Where has love gone?’ We’ll shed these times like soiled clothes, pile them in a heap, and burn them. We will wash ourselves, then turn to each other, and start the work of rebuilding.”
People have been hearing this voice, or some similar version, for a long, long time, whenever wars, crusades, or other corruptions of the human spirit have run their filthy course. Some of the elders among us can remember the last great ending, when people danced in the streets, kissing strangers in random joy. A heavy curtain lifted and the morning light never looked brighter.
These seem to roll in cycles, times of darkness when humanity fouls itself by forgetting who we are, hearts closed by arrogance and greed, violence and slaughter, followed by a remembering, a coming-to-our-senses that stops the senselessness. We’ve been remembering and forgetting for millennia, for eons, forever, tides advancing and retreating, sweeping away our cruelty only to drop it back into our laps. The numberless oceans of pain that have engulfed us could make a stone weep.
I feel we are in a downward time. I am moved to act, to oppose, but what am I to do when my actions seem impossibly small compared to the scale of horrors? My answer shifts, thrashing about, depending on my strength and the news of the day, but it usually returns to a place of holding. I’m learning to hold contradictory forces – feeling the pain while also feeling the longer sweep; wanting it to end and knowing it is in cycle.
What helps me in my holding is the realization that honor and virtue and love are ways of being while I’m in the middle. They’re not luxuries to be enjoyed when hard times are over, they’re choices available at any time, in every time. I can choose to love the harmed, the ones who harm, and even, crazy as it sounds, to love the harm itself. Not love as in wanting it, but love as refusing to turn away, to hold it close. To bring the burning, piercing pain inside my heart and feel its ugly weight. Viewed from the outside, this seems impossible. But once inside, edges soften and weight finds a place it can settle. I remember that holding pain close has always been the only path to healing. It can’t be done at a sanitary distance.
There is a part of me that wants comfort from the voice in the distance, reassurance that there will come a time when suffering ends. But both I and the voice know this is not the way the world works. The voice is more longing than prediction. It meets me in my fear and rage and asks me to endure, holding me so I can hold the world. Because the way we meet suffering matters. If there is comfort, it comes in knowing that our human capacity to endure is an ocean too.
Photo by Photoholgic on Unsplash
Beautifully put and true! I agree that is a downward time. Friends and loved ones are especially important now.
Amen!
Having taught in an economically depressed community, for over twenty years, where homelessness, drug use, and familial violence plagued my students and their families, I lived with feelings of despair. The way through was to have faith that my efforts to really see each student and give them my acceptance, love, and support would somehow make a difference even though I had no proof.
Perhaps that is the nature of giving to the world in general, to put out the effort day in and day out, without acknowledgement or thanks, because it is the collective human spirit that will endure and be fortified.
I know that your loving touch was felt by each of your students, and I also believe it contributes to the greater collective. Bravo.