** Won't you please share the joy of WYFP by recommending?
WYFP is our community's Saturday evening gathering to talk about our problems, empathize with one another, and perhaps share advice. Everyone and all sorts of troubles are welcome. May we find peace and healing here. :-)
Trappist monk and spirituality author Thomas Merton once wrote in a magazine article "if you've never meditated on Auschwitz, you don't know anything about meditation." I don't have the quote in front of me, so that's a close paraphrase, and I don't know the exact context of the remark, but I suspect I know what he meant. In Christian monastic tradition, "meditation" means prayerful mental reflection, for instance on a scene from religious scripture, like Jesus being nailed to the cross. I think Merton was bringing the practice down to earth, down to its essential intent, by insisting that this needs to be a practice of developing real, rather than theoretical or emotional, compassion.
I've thought about this a few times recently in relation to the fighting in the Middle East. I haven't had lots of energy lately, and I've find myself really not even wanting to think about it. I don't watch TV anyway and I've been avoiding reading much about it either. It feels like deja-vous, and part of what I feel about it is a dull resignation: humans are nasty and brutish. It hurts to think about the people dying, about the people hating each other, or justifying slaughtering each other for calculated strategic ends. No matter who is involved.
I think Merton's line about meditating on Auschwitz is intentionally shaming. I felt a little indignant when I came across that quote--I'd never meditated on Auschwitz, nor in any very intentional way on current events of our own time. Thought about them, sure, obsessed about them, been angry and preoccupied and in pain. But not often really meditated, being with the suffering and tragedy and injustice, holding it within myself quietly. This is not about generating any particular emotion, but about some kind of inner honesty about the reality of the situation and our intimate relatedness to it. I think it's about our shared humanity. I think in some sense we are all the guilty ones and we are all the sufferers and that we become more human in proportion as we realize that.
It occurs to me that RubDMC's Iraq War Grief Daily Witness, now past day 500, is a pretty stellar encouragement to do what Merton was encouraging. It's not just war and killing that is worth meditating on, though, but the whole range of human suffering and human joy and hope. We should never forget the latter... children being born into loving families, streams and forests thriving after environmental rehabilitation, citizens voting and good men and women winning elections.
So what are you musing or meditating about tonight? And what should we be reflecting on more deeply? What's your effing problem?