“Man is, properly speaking, based upon Hope, he has no other possession but Hope; this world of his is emphatically the Place of Hope.” What, then, was our Professor’s possession? We see him, for the present, quite shut-out from Hope; looking not into the golden orient, but vaguely, all round into a dim copper firmament, pregnant with earthquake and tornado. … Doubt had darkened into Unbelief…
From “The Everlasting No” by Thomas Carlyle, 19th century essayist
Is hopefulness about life important to how you feel and live in the present? If so, and you hold religious or spiritual beliefs, do you consider them necessary to your hopefulness about life?
If you’ve rejected spiritual and religious beliefs, do you feel hopeless about life? Is that OK or hard to live with?
When I wrote the following lines several years ago, a new sense of identity, a new feeling for my place in relation to life as a whole, was coming into sharper focus for me despite how hard it is to articulate.
None of this is on my time. I resent nothing and no one. I share in the whole world by laying claim to none of it, Tasting what is sweet and bitter even in my own life Like a sample off a plate in someone else’s home. I am not here to stay and know it, and I no longer have a care Because I wish to stay sane enough to keep caring. Care like you died and kept on caring. Care without a care, almost in just the way so many other events Happen with no reflection or without meaning to, But only because you mean it so much That you are willing to be as heedless as it takes.
Not long after writing this I had a chance to put it to the test…
It was a mild and sunny Sunday afternoon late in the winter of 2002 as I pulled my aging Toyota hatchback into a space at my local Giants grocery store in Arlington, Virginia, across the Key Bridge from Washington, DC. I was disabled but still getting around. You couldn’t tell yet from looking at me that there was anything wrong – you had to be around me a little while to see the stuff I had trouble with, for example, reaching and bending.
As I painstakingly went about locking my heavy “Club” to the steering wheel and prepared to leave my car, I noticed a large SUV pull up directly behind me in my rearview mirror. It looked like this might have something to do with me, but I couldn’t imagine what, I wasn’t sure, and I half forgot about it as I concentrated on getting out of my vehicle without hurting my back.
As I stepped away from my car, the man in the SUV, who’d rolled his windows down on both sides, started shouting obscenities. After several seconds, I could hear, scattered among the expletives, that he was claiming I had deliberately taken the space he was going to back into.
It was pretty confusing. To begin with, there were empty spaces all over the place. But as the yelling continued, a vague image flashed across my mind that as I was pulling in, there may have been a large black vehicle twenty or thirty yards away with its back up lights on that must have been his. I don’t think anyone could have guessed that he was specifically targeting the space I’d chosen.
“I had no idea what you were doing,” I called out simply and with no trace of an attitude. The torrent of obscenities continued. After a pause, and without any note of sarcasm or hostility in my voice, I suggested, “Why don’t you just take it easy?”
His swearing intensified. That’s when I looked both ways and unhurriedly stepped directly in front of his vehicle toward the store’s entrance, just as if he’d politely come to a stop in order for me to cross. From the corner of my eye I saw him lurch into reverse, hauling his still swearing self out of earshot.
OK. First, I’ll admit that at one level of myself, what I did was to flip him a very special kind of bird. I gave him a really hard choice. To save face, he’d have to run me over in broad daylight with a large number of late Sunday morning grocery shoppers looking on. So my ego had it figured out that I’d probably win this one.
Second, part of my self-possession was pure disability. I couldn’t run and I couldn’t fight. I didn’t have a lot of choices.
But mainly, the choice that I made, and what allowed me to make it, was a matter of trying out that emerging sense of self that’s so hard to put into words. I’d truly felt calm, strong, and in control throughout, with only the slightest trace of an adrenaline rush. Looking at it more closely afterward, I saw that a kind of mental pulling-back had occurred in the face of his outburst that had allowed me to view the situation from a wider, almost external perspective.
From that perspective, whether he won the encounter or whether I did, meant infinitely less to me than it did to him. Because at the level that had felt most real to me, I wasn’t playing his game at all.
Stepping in front of SUVs driven by angry people who sound like they might want to kill you is still hard to come by as a regular spiritual practice, even in most major American cities. Plus it might hurt. But my opportunity that day to find out for sure whether I really had a new bottom line was irresistible and the main point of how I’d behaved. Now I had no doubt that I’d come to identify more with the One that held me than the one who was being held, and that I was capable of seeing and acting from out of that basis in reality.
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About "the One” – To paraphrase St. Paul, what I refer to here is “the One in whom we live and move and have our being” – that is, the Wholeness of the whole story that holds the story of each little life, the greatest Context that exists. Some will think of this as a Creator existing apart from creation, others as being or reality itself.
Here's a slight rewording of a comment I left on Crystal’s Perspectivesthat sums up how I experience faith:
For me it’s come down to "the fact of faith" as I call it in that chapter of Original Faith - and being OK with not knowing what might justify my faith or even being able to know that it's justified.
You could say that my personal re-formation hasn't been about "Justification by faith alone" but the discovery that "Faith stands alone, requiring no justification."
Faith is a function of being. Belief does not create it. Disbelief cannot abolish it. There is only being more or less present to something already presenting itself to you.
Into that kitchen, electric with the clock’s ticking, I came at 4 AM And found nothing but the dirty cup, The empty table and the vacant seat, All immovable, all silent, As silent and immovable as objects ever were.
I left that empty place. Back up the stairs I climbed To my room. Inside its black space I flipped a switch And stood starkly in the light That showed the radiator grinning stupidly, The sheets crumpled agitatedly, The decrepit Venetian blinds Yellowed and dented. The thin staccato tapping of the clock Penetrated to the space behind my eyes, Alerting me. I directed sleepless senses to the stain on the floor Near the bed Where the turtle was torn to tiny green shreds By the cat And the smell had sickened me. I saw that even that spot had grown cold and narrow, As narrow and cold as the shoulders of my chair.
(Only thing I ever wrote for a creative writing class that turned out OK! Back in 1978, my senior year of college.)
A view from flat on my back and thirty years later…
“Gosh, it sure is cold Mr. Martin. My grandma says it’s cold enough to get frostbite!”
“Yeah…” I said a bit absent mindedly. As usual, I was listening to what Hazel was saying with divided attention. I had recess duty and was scanning the treeless brown rectangle of frozen ground for trouble spots. And as usual, Hazel had waited a polite three minutes before approaching me to talk.
Hazel. It was an old-fashioned name. My impression was that she’d probably lived with her grandmother for as long as she could remember. Maybe her grandma had named her.
“David – David!” I hollered.
I excused myself. “Sorry about that Hazel…”
“That’s OK Mr. Martin!”
I walked over to where David, one of two students who was emotionally disturbed as well as cognitively disabled, was bending to pick up another rock.
“David, you know the rule about throwing rocks…” He dropped the stone, glared at me, and headed off in another direction. I headed back for the center of the playground where I could maintain a full three hundred sixty-degree view of events. As I returned to my place, I noticed Hazel approaching from the corner of my eye.
She was fourteen or fifteen. I was twenty-six and an assistant teacher in her self-contained special education program. As someone who’d grown up prior to special ed and who in childhood had only heard “retard” used as a pejorative, this position was an eye-opener for me.
The kids’ personalities were as diverse as that of any other group of people, and they had a wide range of cognitive abilities. While some of them would clearly never be able to live independently, a few, like Hazel, had IQs in the upper seventies and had just missed the cut-off of eighty for a low-average IQ score. For them, the future appeared uncertain and the possibilities disconcerting. Most of their families were poor. While they were capable of work, they weren’t going to be climbing any career ladders.
“I’m having so much trouble with fractions!” Hazel exclaimed, looking up at me with her light, clear eyes as I looked down from scanning the playground. “They’re complicated!” She stomped her feet in a gesture that was one part frustration and one part trying to keep warm on a cold January morning in New Hampshire. Recess could get uncomfortable, but it was also refreshing to get outdoors away from the stale air of the school’s two prefabricated buildings.
“I know,” I replied. “Fractions were complicated for me too.”
“Complicated” was a word that Hazel used a lot for things she found difficult. Hazel herself was not complicated. She was outgoing and friendly, and although she seemed a little insecure – you could see her making an effort to reach out – there was a transparency to her face and demeanor. You could see at a glance that she was honest, trustworthy, and kind.
It also hadn’t taken more than a glance early in the school year to see that she had a crush on me. When she looked at me her eyes lit up with I like looking at you! I like talking to you! Though I assisted in her classroom, she didn’t happen to be assigned to any of the small groups I taught. Playground duty was our only chance to talk.
“That Hazel…” Claire, the other assistant teacher in our classroom, began. It was after school and she and I happened to be alone in the classroom. “A fella sure could do worse than Hazel.”
“That’s true...” I replied with careful disinterest.
This was the second time that Claire had dropped this kind of hint. Each time my unspoken reaction had been Are you out of your mind?
Hazel was obviously a sweet girl, but wasn’t it equally obvious that she and I were a complete mismatch – intellectually and in terms of where we were headed in life? How could a middle-aged woman possibly not understand this? The year before I’d received a master’s from the University of Chicago Divinity School. I’d started writing seriously. I had plans. And it didn’t help that Hazel was attractive to me. Her crush was staring me in the face every day. I was twenty-six and single and I really didn’t need someone pointing out that an underage girl liked me.
But I always ended up being more discomfited than irritated at these remarks from Claire. She seemed unaware of their inappropriateness and completely well meaning. Besides puzzlement, I felt some sympathy for her. She was an unattractive woman with a cleft palate, single, in her mid-forties, and working at a low-paying job. Maybe her thoughts about me and Hazel were vicariously meeting a need for romance in her own life? I had no idea. Too complicated...
It’s nearly thirty years later. Severely disabled and mostly bedridden, I’m thinking about all this – one of the numerous walks down memory lane that someone in my position takes. And I remember something that I might never have thought of again if it wasn’t for spending so much time staring at the ceiling every day.
At the end of that year working in Hazel’s classroom, I’d found a better-paying position for the following year teaching English as a Second Language. And it had been a couple years after that, with Hazel now in her late teens and me in my late twenties, that the principal had invited me to her class’s graduation ceremony.
I remember only a few things about it. First, I’d felt awkward about going. I’d been teaching in a different school district and meanwhile had had no contact with my former employer or any of the students. I felt obligated to go, but had the feeling that with the passage of so much time I’d find myself irrelevant even to the several kids who’d seemed to particularly like me.
Second, I think I arrived late. I don’t recall anything about the ceremony itself and see myself arriving on the grounds of the school afterward, not far from the playground that I’d once supervised. Students, family, and staff were already milling about and intermingling. I felt out of place and wondered who I’d run into. I recall a brief, perfunctory exchange with a tall student named Gary and seeing him in profile as he walked away toward people who now held more significance for him.
Next thing I knew, Hazel had stopped a few yards away from me. I hadn’t seen her coming and was only beginning to realize who it was in the same fraction of a second that I heard her calling to me. I saw that she’d turned toward me to speak and yet – it seemed a little odd – was keeping her distance.
“I had a baby, in case you didn’t know…”
I just stared back for an instant. I had to replay the sentence in order to process it. This definitely wasn’t being delivered as good news. There was an edge to Hazel’s voice that I’d never heard before. She spoke heatedly, fiercely, apparently indicating that this was something that I, in particular, ought to be aware of. After firing off her statement she paused just long enough to take in my uncomfortable congratulatory platitude, then disappeared back into the crowd.
It’s a question that most of us have probably asked ourselves at one time or another. Notice that the question assumes that good people shouldn’t suffer.
Maybe this assumption is partly founded on how as children we’re rewarded for good behavior and punished for bad behavior by the adults in our lives. There are rules. There are consequences. There is the idea of fairness. Even when the adults in a child’s life are actually inconsistent, unpredictable, and unfair, I’d imagine that most of them still reference ideas about the child’s having been “good” or “bad” when meting out rewards and punishments.
As adults, we learn that it’s not unusual for good people to suffer and that often the cause of their suffering is the actions – or inactions – of other people. If you removed the human causes of suffering, life on earth would look almost like heaven! We’d still be mortal, but imagine our quality of life if even a fraction of the billions of dollars that humans spend on warfare were spent instead on the environment, medical research, education…
Saints and Heroes
“Saints” and “heroes” are basically religious and secular versions of the same thing: a person who’s passionately concerned with the wider world, the bigger picture – others as they exist independently of one’s own needs and desires. In human history so far, such people have been more the exception than the rule and so we’ve needed these special words for them. Maybe good people suffer because that’s the best we can do as a species and our fatal flaw is that generation after generation we’ll never be able to produce more than a small fraction of folks who truly care about life beyond themselves.
Or maybe not. Maybe our species will learn better. But it’s becoming pretty clear that if we’re up to that, then the only way we’re going to learn is probably the hard way and that coming generations will see suffering on a massive scale.
A Second Question
“How do you stop being deeply troubled by suffering?”
This is a different question. The answer has to do with a change in perspective and a new sense of identity that’s hard to put into words. I may have posted what follows previously, but it suggests the kind of thing I mean:
Being Here
What is, is. Let me be a piece of that, Amid the horror, explosions, shatteredness, The strands of sense and beauty, the irresolvable whole. WHAT IS is, and I shall be myself. Contradictions are not resolved, yet I begin to resolve The contradictions. I do not feel the tension any more. The Whole is doing what it does, and I Am wholly doing what I do. In the crosshairs now, I see WHAT IS. I cannot miss! Desiring nothing for my splintered self, I am being every inch something. I care, but do not care. I let go of my stake in all former aspirations; Aspiring to nothing, I am occupied, every inch, with being something. The worst cannot undo the act of what I am doing, and the best Cannot change it. I am here. I am desperate, wise, strong And live now beyond the land of my own dreams. None of this is on my time. I resent nothing and no one. I share in the whole world by laying claim to none of it, Tasting what is sweet and bitter even in my own life Like a sample off a plate in someone else’s home. I am not here to stay and know it, and I no longer have a care Because I wish to stay sane enough to keep caring. Care like you died and kept on caring. Care without a care, almost in just the way so many other events Happen with no reflection or without meaning to, But only because you mean it so much That you are willing to be as heedless as it takes. Become as ignorant of the parts and the frictions between them As you were once so conscious of them in relation to yourself. Be aware of being who you are in the arms or in the teeth of what is. Forget all that might have been or might not be and there you are.
