The Roots of Suffering

You probably sorted out the kittens from the stuffed animals in this charming photo in a blink, without even trying, based on what you know.  Live animals are not blue.  Kittens have heads with a pattern, noses and ears and eyes shaped like that.  But a baby would not know how to sort this out if nothing moved. If you held her over this bed she would reach her hands out for whatever appealed to her, and be astonished if it moved.

This small example goes to something much larger, and that is that we also sort people out as "real" (like me) and "other" (not me, not my brother).  That is a distinction that allows us to kill other human beings.  All of us, including Adam Lanza.  I believe that to Adam those he killed were not real in the way we commonly understand reality.  His mother had become a monster in his eyes, a threat to his freedom.  It looks like he had come to see the children as his enemies; perhaps his mother gushed over them, but didn't seem to love him.  But let's take this more generally to the issue of gun violence, and to our own spiritual work

My example is a story going around this season.  Since you can pause and read it here on Snopes, I won't bother to retell it.  As you see, Snopes can find no evidence that this is a true story.  But that's not the point.  The point is, it's a myth some people love and are circulating, not just men, but women, too.

The woman who posted this on Facebook has an adult son who is an alcoholic with a long history of problems, a guy who might, in a drunken moment, snatch a purse like the guy in the story - who is gunned down by a woman with six shots in his back.  The woman's daughter added her comment that she would commit that execution in a flash.  Maybe the waitress needed every penny that purse was carrying, she said.

This young woman is married to a soldier, and the story had come from an unsavory web site I won't give any publicity to here, which mixes hatred and pornography and violence with the conviction that Americans should have the freedom to own weapons.  Unfortunately, those things do seem to mix well.  I can tell you that page has some 70,000 "likes" while the Dalai Grandma Facebook page, which advocates spiritual practice and compassion, is just struggling toward 100.  Well, okay, there is work to be done.

A number of rights are guaranteed by the American constitution and its amendments that are all essential to freedom, including freedom of the press, of speech, and of religion.  If any of these is most important, maybe it is the right to justice, that is, to be tried for any crime you are fairly accused of, as opposed to being murdered by someone defending her purse or home as you are running away.

Los Angeles Police Chief Charlie Beck shows off one of two rocket-launchers turned in during the Dec. 26 gun buyback program. (Jay L. Clendenin, Los Angeles Times / December 27, 2012)

The above photo and accompanying story were in the Los Angeles Times and many other news sources.  But it is instructive to go to the I Acknowledge Class Warfare Exists page and read some of the comments.  There you can see the complexities of this issue, which I think actually is in part class warfare.  We have to keep asking as citizens of free countries what makes other citizens so distrustful of their government?  What makes them believe it won't protect them, that they need to be heavily armed?  Is it, in fact, the same paranoia and simmering rage that motivated Adam Lantz?  What is the rage about - having to work for a minimum wage too low to live on, and no health benefits?  This is not just their problem - it is ours. 

How to Have Happy Holidays in Spite of it All

With empty hands, I take hold of the plow

The last couple of days have been hard for me, with a major weather system blowing me away yesterday, as it can fibromyalgics.  Three days ago, Wednesday, I came home from collage to find Tom at the kitchen table looking stressed, with a bloody gauze pad on his forehead.  He had fallen and hit his head on a corner of the hutch.  He may have been saved from being blinded in that eye by the fact that his glasses initially took the blow.  We are so close that I "lose it" when I am frightened for him.  Lose my equanimity and become all a-tremble.

I was already shaken.  My beloved women friends and I had been sharing the general pain of the Sandy Hook shootings here in America - 20 schoolchildren, six teachers, and two mentally ill people all died.  The mentally ill people were Nancy Lantz and her son, Adam.  Nancy owned at least five weapons, including the semi-automatics that can kill a lot of kindergartners in a minute, whether you can aim or not.  But Adam knew how to aim -she'd taken him target shooting.  And he knew where to get his hands on guns.  Nancy was a brand of everyday walking-around paranoia, a survivalist, who'd stocked up on food and water and guns. 

A lot has already been accomplished.  I read this morning that various of the United States, including my own Ohio, have passed funding for the treatment of autism. So many of us have petitioned the White House that President Obama has replied via a video.  People are turning in guns in Connecticut, where they understand now that people with guns kill people.  But the work is far from done.

It is our work as people of good will, Christians, Buddhists, atheists, all citizens, to stay with this work, but not to let it destroy us.  I awoke this morning realizing that I need to bring myself back emotionally from too much empathy and emotion.  It is a very good motivator, but the work of change needs a clear head.  So there's a Zen koan, "With empty hands I take hold of the plow."  I can actually visualize this, hands relaxed on the plow.  (The painting above is one of several van Gogh made of ploughmen.) 

The empty hands mean we work from our understanding of the universal, of all the dynamic and potential of life.  So we need to be refreshed by spiritual practice and by celebration, by love and friendship and our understanding of the constant miracle of birth.

Botticelli, The Birth of Christ (attended by the animals)