This week something completely different-celebrity and meditation. :-) A FB friend recently shared a link (found below) to the current GQ cover story about Stephen Colbert by Joel Lovell. I’ve always wondered about Colbert. He seems so different than other comedians. I hope when it is convenient you will follow the link and read the article, it reveals a rather remarkable man.
GQ Cover Story by Joel Lovell
Good evening and welcome to Monday Group Meditation. We will be sitting from 7:30 to 11:00 PM Eastern Time. It is not necessary to sit for the entire extended time, which is set up to make it convenient for people in four North American Time Zones; sit for as long as you like and when it is most convenient for you. Monday Group Meditation is open to everyone, believers and non-believers, who are interested in gathering in silence. If you are new to meditation and would like to try it for yourself, Mindful Nature gave a good description of one way to meditate in an earlier diary, copied and pasted below:
"It is a matter of focusing attention mostly. In many traditions, the idea is to sit and focus on the rising and falling of the breath. Not controlling it, but sitting in a relaxed fashion and merely observing experiences of breathing, sounds, etc. Be aware of your thoughts, but don't engage in them. When your mind wanders (it will, often), then return to focus on breath and repeat."
Sangha Co-hosts for meditation are:
7:30 - 10:00 Ooooh and davehouck
9:30 - 11:00 thanatokephaloides
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Early in the interview Colbert talks about fear and being willing to move towards it, relating that Second City director Jeff Michalski once said, “You have to learn to love the bomb.” Colbert says it took him years to understand that, “You gotta learn to love when you're failing.… The embracing of that, the discomfort of failing in front of an audience, leads you to penetrate through the fear that blinds you. Fear is the mind killer.”
Colbert lost his father and two brothers to a plane crash at 10 years old, and Lovell was able to elicit some extremely deep and thoughtful responses from Colbert about just how that event affected him, about how he is not bitter and angry like so many comedians, and about how he seems so grounded and joyful.
Colbert talks about being mystified by life rather than being bitter and angry, how he has trained himself in life, on stage and even in his dreams to “steer towards fear rather than away from it.”
Lovell asked, “how much he connected that urge to his training, and how much he felt it had roots that went deeper into his life. Was it at one point purely a defense mechanism against the pain he'd experienced?”
What followed was a beautiful discussion about dealing with what life hands one, dealing with grief, not becoming bitter, specifically through the example of Colbert’s experience of losing his father and brothers. The article is written so beautifully, weaving in and out thoughtfully, digressing momentarily then coming back to the gist of the discussion, it was a joy to read, but difficult for me to try to share a sense of what impressed me so deeply without violating fair use. Colbert spoke tenderly about the example his mother set:
I was left alone a lot after Dad and the boys died.... And it was just me and Mom for a long time,” he said. “And by her example am I not bitter. By her example. She was not. Broken, yes. Bitter, no.” Maybe, he said, she had to be that for him. He has said this before—that even in those days of unremitting grief, she drew on her faith that the only way to not be swallowed by sorrow, to in fact recognize that our sorrow is inseparable from our joy, is to always understand our suffering, ourselves, in the light of eternity. What is this in the light of eternity? Imagine being a parent so filled with your own pain, and yet still being able to pass that on to your son.
Further he relates:
“It was a very healthy reciprocal acceptance of suffering,” he said. “Which does not mean being defeated by suffering. Acceptance is not defeat. Acceptance is just awareness.” He smiled in anticipation of the callback: “ ‘You gotta learn to love the bomb,’ ” he said. “Boy, did I have a bomb when I was 10. That was quite an explosion. And I learned to love it. So that's why. Maybe, I don't know. That might be why you don't see me as someone angry and working out my demons onstage. It's that I love the thing that I most wish had not happened.”
Like many Catholics, Colbert believes suffering is sacred, so I will refrain from making comparisons to Buddhism, and instead merely point out this extraordinary example of the power of acceptance. He seems to have a deep grasp of the polar tension between joy and suffering, he is willing to lean into fear rather than away from it, and he has learned to deeply and profoundly accept and love the thing he wishes most had not happened.
There, courtesy of GQ and Stephen Colbert is this week’s teaching: If we each could learn experientially to recognize that our sorrow is inseparable from our joy, if we could love that one thing we most wish would not have happened, we would find it easy to be grateful for everything, easy to see the beauty in people and the world, and easy to accept and love everything just as it is.
Namaste, Stephen Colbert, a flower offering for the teacher: