Today is Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. Yesterday the cease fire in the Gaza held and the first three hostages were released. And today also is the Inauguration of, as Jon Kabat-Zinn says, who knows what, maybe the end of democracy, maybe something else unknown, surprisingly better or just different, unimaginable in our today’s thinking.
So this is an extraordinary time. We honor Martin Luther King, Jr.’s memory, courage, sense of justice, wisdom, urgent leadership. We crumple in gratitude and compassion for those at the center of the cease fire and hostage release. But how do we respond appropriately, wisely, heartfully, to this Inauguration?
I listened yesterday to an on-line session called AWARENESS IN ACTION: Poly-Crisis, offered by Upaya Meditation Center during which Jon Kabat-Zinn talked with Roshi Joan Halifax and an audience of over 1200 people. Poly-Crisis is a term the UN is developing to describe the increasing environmental crises we face. Over 1200 participants is 40 screens on zoom and another couple hundred on YouTube - remarkable as these things go, testament to the strength of feeling out there at this time. All these people, mostly meditators from all over, gathered together to listen to what the father of Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) had to say about this moment in time and how we fit into it, what we can do, how we can be. He has continued to be a radical leader in the world of mindfulness in relationship to ourselves and to the larger world, reinventing himself in the most natural and gently expansive way to support us and also to urge us to regard ourselves called to this moment to contribute something we are uniquely suited to contribute.
Tonight we will listen to a bit of the introduction to this session and to the guided meditation he offered to the group. I think you’ll find it inspiring and calming. He also offered, in conversation with Roshi Joan Halifax, a wider perspective on the forces propelling this world in this direction at this time. He cited the creation of a dynasty about 4000 years ago that was destroyed 3600 years ago. It lasted 400 years - a long time but was, as are all things, impermanent. "Never forget the 10,000 year view,” he quoted. At least backwards, who knows how long the view forward will extend. He also reassured us that, “On a million different levels, you are not alone.”
It began with a quote from Martin Luther King, Jr.:
“Power without love is reckless and abusive, and love without power is sentimental and anemic. Power at best is love implementing the demands of justice, and justice at best is power correcting everything that stands against love.”
He ended with this well-known quote from Howard Zinn, his father in law:
“TO BE HOPEFUL in bad times is not just foolishly romantic. It is based on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty, but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness.
What we choose to emphasize in this complex history will determine our lives. If we see only the worst, it destroys our capacity to do something. If we remember those times and places—and there are so many—where people have behaved magnificently, this gives us the energy to act, and at least the possibility of sending this spinning top of a world in a different direction.
And if we do act, in however small a way, we don’t have to wait for some grand utopian future. The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory.” ~~ Howard Zinn
In Buddhism, Kabat-Zinn reminded us, monks were often instructed to go meditate in the charnel grounds, surrounded by deceased bodies burning and decaying, to help them understand and come to know deeply the finite-ness of this life and the urgency of living it as wisely as possible. Today, he said, Gaza and the Ukraine are our charnel grounds.
As I scanned the zoom screens, I saw various people I recognized - one from the New York Zen Center for Contemplative Care where I studied chaplaincy, one from a cohort of participants in a mindfulness meditation teacher training, many MBSR teachers and meditators I had met or practiced with. So it resonated with painful beauty when he said we are called to belong to wider and wider circles of community - whether our small Monday night gatherings with overlapping members of the different regional communities or different political action communities such as the progressive group Indivisible, or this gatherings for the Upaya series, or any other gathering inspired to help us remember and live for the best that is possible in ourselves and in our communities, country and world. On a million levels, we are not alone.
Today and tomorrow are turning points. And yet they are only a series of present moment experiences with each moment the mother of the moment to come, as Thich Nhat Hanh said. And as Howard Zinn said, "The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory.”
I found this a heartful way to consider and live in this point of time.
I want to offer a poem by Stephen Levine. Some of you may remember it from other times I’ve offered it. Some of you may know it already.
If prayer would do it
I'd pray.
If reading esteemed thinkers would do it
I'd be halfway through the Patriarch.
If discourse would do it
I'd be sitting with His Holiness
every moment he was free.
If contemplation would do it
I'd have translated the Periodic Table
to hermit poems, converting
matter to spirit.
If even fighting would do it
I'd already be a black belt.
If anything other than love could do it
I've done it already
and left the hardest for last.
~~Stephen Levine