A Life of Being, Having, and Doing Enough (10 page)

Mercy and Acceptance

A
nthony de Mello was a Jesuit priest, born in India in the 1930s. A gifted writer, speaker, and devoted priest, de Mello was deeply influential in uncovering the heart of Jesus’ teachings within the practices of Hindus, Buddhists, and others. He was an early pioneer in melting painful barriers between faith traditions, creating a safe place for authentic interfaith dialogue.

Before his sudden death in 1987, de Mello shared this prayer, following communion, in a church in New York where he had been teaching the Way of Sadhana, one of his most popular courses. In this prayer, in his final recorded words, he counseled:

Don’t change. Change is impossible, and even if it were possible, it is undesirable. Stay as you are. Love yourself as you are. And change, if it is at all possible, will take place by itself when and if it wants. Leave yourselves alone. The only growth-promoting change is that which comes from self-acceptance.

This self-love, this radical self-acceptance, requires a great deal of mercy. While the judging mind is relentless in its criticism of our every thought, word, and deed, the merciful heart
meets us with a gentle loving-kindness, a spacious and forgiving acceptance of who we are, just as we are.

This ancient tension between judgment and mercy is found everywhere in the world. While we may experience it most immediately in our own minds and hearts, this tension informs our medical systems, our political ideologies, even our religious beliefs. If people are basically bad, defective, broken, then they will need to be fixed, shaped, purged of sin, and punished. If, on the other hand, people are essentially good, then we need to be nourished, supported, encouraged, and taught.

The model of the suffering servant, popular in some Christian circles as the purest model of generosity, was never actually espoused by Jesus. On the contrary, in response to religious authorities who criticized his ministry, Jesus dismissed them, saying,
Go, and learn the meaning of this: I desire mercy, not sacrifice
. Mercy, not sacrifice. How often do we take this prescription to heart and offer ourselves genuine, loving mercy?

When I was fifteen, my friends and I would get up early every Sunday morning and play music for the folk mass at the Catholic Church. I wasn’t Catholic, and few of my friends were particularly religious. But we loved any excuse to play together in public, and in the late 1960s even our local church was nominally involved in the antiwar movement. We would always sneak in an antiwar song whenever we could. And the priest would always chastise us after Mass. But we also noticed he never asked us to stop.

The opening song was always the same. The
Kyrie. Kyrie eleison, Christe eleison, Kyrie eleison
. We had no idea what it meant. We just knew the words and music—and the ever-important cue to start singing it. It was years later that I
learned the phrase
Kyrie Eleison
was from the Greek, undoubtedly used in pre-Christian ceremonies, only later incorporated into the Catholic Mass. But more powerful for me were the implications of beginning the Mass with these words: Lord have Mercy, Christ have Mercy, Lord have Mercy.

This very first prayer, our opening invocation, the door through which we must first pass before we can honestly open our hearts safely and faithfully to the divine, is our heart’s confession, our ache for this welcoming sacrament of mercy.

In the many years since then, the meditation teachers with whom I have been blessed to study have been those who spoke most directly to my own heart, eloquently and often, of the absolute necessity of mercy whenever we begin any practice of mindfulness. In meditation, just as in therapy, we will meet feelings, thoughts, ideas, and memories that we can so swiftly condemn as horrible, bad, defective, sick, or broken. Paradoxically the more we choose to name ourselves, our thoughts, and our feelings as terrible or pathological, the more we actually give them strength, space in our lives, and power over our behavior.

There is a saying among Native Americans in northern New Mexico where I live: If you have two wolves, the wolf you feed will be the wolf that grows. When we focus relentlessly in harsh, unyielding judgment upon our imperfections, our sins, our shortcomings, those are the qualities most likely to grow in stature. They will increasingly dominate our thoughts and feelings throughout our daily inner life. But if we focus instead on our essential wholeness, the light of the world, the kingdom of heaven within us, our innate natural perfection, with soft
eyes and a merciful, loving heart, those are the qualities that will flourish within us.

Make no mistake: There will be endless streams of people, family members, religions, and institutions that will happily judge how good or bad we are, how imperfect or sinful, how competent or unworthy. But as seeds watered by the rains of spring, we fare best when nourished deeply and well by the simple, daily nourishment of genuine acceptance of who we are, mercy for who we have been, and unconditional love for who we will become. Under these conditions, the fields of our soul are set free to provide a rich and abundant harvest.

If we choose to practice
eleison
, or mercy, as the first word we speak aloud, the first prayer we utter to greet our life each morning, we may gradually come to feel ourselves as children of spirit and grace—and perfectly good enough, at that.

Loss and Impermanence

In a dark time, the eye begins to see
.

THEODORE ROETHKE, “In a Dark Time”

E
verything dies.

Our culture is obsessed with the false promise of perpetual youth, endless progress, and limitless self-improvement. We are comforted by the notion that one day, when we have done the perfect thing, landed the perfect job, spouse, and house, then everything will finally go well from now on. All struggle or strife of the past will be behind us, clear sailing as far as the eye can see, we’re in the money, happy days are here again, let the good times roll, here comes the sun, and it’s all right.

But eventually, inevitably, something will happen. In every life there are moments that are completely unexpected, uninvited, unwanted, in which something precious breaks. Most human lives contain many such moments. There is a terrible reversal of fortune, some horrific violence, a broken dream, or the sudden loss of someone we love, someone so deeply entwined in the fabric of our hearts that we feel we, too, have experienced death.

This is the way of all things.

Working with the dying, I sat beside daughters and sons who held the hands of their dying parents, clasping palm to palm, reluctant to let go. In housing projects, I sat at kitchen tables with families who had lost their jobs, their dreams, and even their essential sense of human dignity. Working with gangs in southern California, I sat with mothers and fathers who buried one after another of their barely teenage sons.

In prisons I met men who had gambled and lost their freedom, their identity, their entire future—along with any sense of inner goodness or value. Working with abused and neglected children, I saw in the eyes of the young and innocent a frighteningly blank darkness devoid of love, trust, or hope. Today, more and more, I meet men and women, good-hearted, hard-working folk who simply cannot keep ever-evaporating jobs, pay their mortgages, keep their homes or their health care.

This is the way of all life. Everything dies. Every living thing, every person, tree, animal, fish, and bird, since the beginning of time has, before we were born, taken birth, lived its life, and experienced its death. And it is not only our lives but our dreams, our wealth, our plans, all we are and all we have will sooner or later pass away. The Buddha calls this the Law of Impermanence. The preacher in Ecclesiastes taught that for everything there is a season—a time to die and a time to lose.

At the same time, there is an equally powerful, tidal sweep of life and light that washes over and through these very same lives. For every moment of loss there is a corresponding moment of unexpected joy, celebration, healing, success, beauty, grace, and love: A time to be born, a time to seek, a time to love. The Buddha taught that every human life would experience
ten thousand joys and ten thousand sorrows. Is this not true for all of us? Some of our dreams come true, others do not; some people stay close, others move away; some get sick and then get better—while others wither and die. Some people we love remain faithful and loving our whole lives, while others abandon or betray us. Relationships and friendships come and go, businesses succeed and fail, fortunes rise and fall, people we love will die, and we will grow old, get sick, and die. As William Stafford says, “Nothing we do can stop time’s unfolding.”

In that inevitable, excruciatingly human moment, we are offered a powerful choice. This choice is perhaps one of the most vitally important choices we ever make, and it determines the course of our lives from that moment forward. The choice is this: Will we interpret this loss as so unjust, unfair, and devastating that we feel punished, angry, forever and fatally wounded—or, as our heart, torn apart, bleeds its anguish of sheer, wordless grief, will we somehow feel this loss as an opportunity for our hearts to become more tender, more open, more passionately alive, more grateful for what remains?

Make no mistake. This will happen. It may have already happened, perhaps more than once. With our heart shredded, tender, without armor, and laid bare, we are face to face with how we will choose to live. We must sort out how to respond, to be fully and completely vulnerable to this relentless impermanence: Shall we choose the bitter residue of a sleep-walking life, or be broken open, excruciatingly awake to feel, taste, touch the extraordinarily real joys and sorrows of this magnificent human life?

If we indeed choose a life awake, we will embark on a journey not of our own making. It is a journey that may lead us
deep into the country of kindness, loss, beauty, heartbreak, love, honesty, and friendship. In this landscape of the joys and sorrows of a human life, the touch of a tiny hand, the impossible blue of a crisp winter sky, the fragrance of jasmine, can take our breath away. And every one of these tiny surprises, these unexpected miracles, become, in each moment, without a doubt, enough.

Grief and Speed

T
he more we live in this way—unflinchingly awake, more and more aware of how many things we do lose, whether big or small, every day, every year, in every life—the sheer enormity, the crushing weight of grief as we lose people, friendships, opportunities, hopes, heart’s wishes and desires can at times feel so overwhelming that we cannot imagine remaining open to all that arises and passes away.

What can break our heart? Almost everything. A child is sick, and no one knows if, how, or when he will recover. We lose the love of our life, perhaps slowly, over years, or suddenly, the tearing, shredding, crumbling sound of your whole inside life dream crumbling all at once. An accident, a death, a mother taken too young from her children, a lonely father lost in grief and love and despair. A family evicted, suddenly homeless, rootless, without safety or sanctuary. A young man using drugs for too long to find some elusive strength or balance, drugs that rob him of health, vitality, even his life.

The ways sorrow comes to us are endless, as varied as the myriad shapes of a human soul. Then, there are other things, the ways we look at ourselves and the world, the things we carry: fear, grief, loneliness, weariness, shame, self-loathing, mistrust, anger, rage. Unbearable sadness, depression, the
nearly absolute deflation of any real vitality or life-giving spirit.

And if we choose to remain attentive to such things, to notice—if even for one single day—each time our hearts feel torn, empty, disappointed, sad, broken open, pinched, or aching, we can easily fall prey to a deeply rooted terror, an unquenchable fear that anything, anyone, at any time, could simply be taken away, wrenched from our loving embrace. If we really tasted our bitter grief whenever we felt the loss of anything precious, beautiful, or hopeful, we might well become paralyzed. We might turn to stone, unable to move, speak, act, or do anything at all except weep, melt, grasp our aching hearts for the searing pain of feeling our hearts shred a dozen, a hundred times a day.

We are not taught to live like this, so awake, so attentive, so purposeful. We are taught instead to move faster, to strive, grasp, hurry, claim, protect, defend, accomplish, accumulate, and then keep count of all the things that still belong to us. That is, until the moment we learn in the most painfully insulting way that nothing, no thing or person or relationship or fortune, will ever belong to us. It is all on loan.

But rather than face and acknowledge our constant stream of losses, we choose instead the other thing we do when we lose things: We go faster. We speed up our lives, move so much faster, so the thousands of tiny losses dissolve into an unrecognizable blur under the speeding train of our important work. Or, as if a flat stone skipped across a pond, we hope to somehow make it to the other shore without getting wet, without sinking, without descending into the watery depths of inevitable heartache.

“There is more to life,” said Gandhi, “than increasing its speed.” We take refuge in speed, we avoid the searing burning in the heart by chasing swiftly this way and that, we become a moving target, so it is more difficult for those unbearable feelings to find us. Besides, we impress and satisfy others, get more done. But of course we are never quite done. So we refrain from rest, refuse even to pause.

But here is the rub. Love, kindness, generosity, companionship, joy, delight, happiness—these are all beautiful, precious gifts and blessings that grow in the very same soil from which we harvest sorrow, pain, loss, and heartbreak. The greater our heart’s capacity for joy, the more we will learn to truly bear our sorrows.

Here is the final thing we must know. We carry within us a fierce grace that will not be extinguished, does not break, cannot ever leave us comfortless. It lives in us. This life force, whatever it is that allows a blade of grass to push up, up through concrete to reach for sun and warmth, this lives in us, this is what we are made of. If we trust in this impossibly resilient capacity to bear all we are given, and recalibrate our speed in such a way that we allow ourselves to feel the searing burning loss of something or someone precious, then we can stand passionately and honestly before one another and offer our most deeply impossibly suffering heart’s fearless, honest, loving kindness. And it is from this shared kindness, born of our own sorrow and loss, that we find, with and for one another, in shared, loving companionship, some tender budding fragrance of enough.