In April of this year the 15th anniversary of the Port Arthur massacre occurred. In two weeks there will be the 10th anniversary of 9/11. Ground zero for Norway is presently happening.
Can organized religions with their penchant for homilies of shallow acceptance help us find “an answer” to these murders that makes any sense? Can a life of abstinence, piety or sweet innocence guarantee smooth sailing?
Go over and over your beads, paint weird designs on your forehead,
wear your hair matted, long, and ostentatious,
but when deep inside you there is a loaded gun, how can you have God?
……There is nothing but water in the holy pools.
I know, I have been swimming in them.
All the gods sculpted of wood or ivory can’t say a word.
I know, I have been crying out to them.
The Sacred Books of the East are nothing but words.
I looked through their covers one day sideways.
What Kabir talks of is only what he has lived through.
If you have not lived through something, it is not true.Kabir
What Kabir hints at is the futility of organized religion to make sense of any of this. All one can really do is enter into life fully and walk one’s lament with praise.
To love-with-fullness is not an easy task.
Compassion and deep love, however, are found no other way. To remain stable within the peaks and troughs of existence demands an engagement with dread.
More than once I have mentioned to you how my life and work have been guided by the effort to overcome the old pressures that rob us of mystery, the mystery essential to our capacity to love from fullness. Humanity has been terrified and beset by dread; but is there anything noble and gracious that has not, from time to time, worn the mask of dread?
Rilke
There was one night this past week when “dread” kept me awake. A double whammy of continued internal bleeding from recent surgery coupled with chronic back pain caused the shadowy ghoul of fear to flicker in and out of my darkened bedroom. Despite attempts to meditate myself to sleep with lovingkindness, I ended up medicating myself to sleep with codeine and valium.
In the morning, instead of reaching for the Bible for inspiration (as I would have as an naive person 50 years ago) I picked up books of poetry by Rilke and Kabir. To a troubled soul in turmoil their words were a calming wisdom that brought a sense of balanced acceptance back into my life.
I have been housebound for too long. What I really need to do is get out and walk the land. A land bursting with healing.
Land — where a true understanding of the sacred and one’s place within this sacredness is found.
Let me close this week’s blog with a short piece I wrote after the Port Arthur massacre.
Port Arthur
One can never know for certain that the blessedness felt today will be upon us tomorrow. So, how do we survive the change, the ebbing tide? And what sustains us when the moon of our being moves into those voids of the unknown, totally lost? Who or what can pull us out?
It is April 1996, the last Sunday. Morning has such a serene sweetness to it that I can be seen in my studio, not hunched over the work at hand, but looking out over the she-oak and sagg pastured landscape so absorbed into it that I just stand there doing nothing. It is a delicious meditation. Early afternoon and I am on the beach idly poking around rocks and tidal pools with a tranquility that borders on sleep.
Then the helicopters start to fly past, low and directly overhead. From Hobart towards, I guess, Port Arthur. And then back again. Then again, and again like something out of Vietnam. Not having a telephone, I walk to my nearest neighbour’s house out of curiosity. No one at home. Nor at another neighbour’s house. Roaring Beach Road, normally busy on a warm, Sunday afternoon, has absolutely no traffic on it. Back home I do the very unusual and listen to the 6 o’clock news on the truck radio.
My world in an instant unravels; its goodness vanquished by the murders of 35 people. Amongst people I know — three dead and one seriously wounded. And, as if to make the darkness darker, the next day I learn of the suicide of a friend.
A long, very long month later I wake up early, before dawn, with the full moon slapping me on the face. Knowing that I will not get back to sleep, I dress warmly and climb to the top of the hill back of the bus and out to a cliff edge that rises 200 meters above the waters of Storm Bay and the Southern Ocean. I say a prayer for the Port Arthur victims. Sitting down, I watch the yellow-orange moon with its watery shaft slowly descend way to the south-west behind Bruny Island. In the pregnant half hour of half light before the full dawn, I continue to remain motionless, content to watch the landscape and seascape and sky-scape awake to a new day and allow myself the pleasure of immersion into its beauty. Deep within, the beginnings of a heart purr are felt.
Then… right at eye level just a few meters out in front of me on its early morning breakfast run, a white breasted sea eagle ever so majestically floats past on grand, outstretched wings.
For an instant and in that moment only, the “I” and “Thou” merge and I have the sensation that I am observing myself. Myself the hungry eagle and the thunderous cloud; the fruiting tree, the sea’s water. All is One. The awesome beauty and pain of life becomes inextricably linked and all seems just. Those nights that I woke up crying after Port Arthur were as much a part of life as this beautiful dawn. The great Wheel contains it all and I am intimately fused onto it.
Within a few seconds I lose the ability to hold onto this truth, but I feel, none the less, blest. On this particular Sunday morning, nature has given me a sermon on the mount. I have tasted of the sacrament and it is good. With the sun beginning to warm up my backside, I understand that a new day has begun; that a hearty breakfast waits for me, too; that there is honest work to be done in the healing of this planet, friends to gather round and play to be had.
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