NOTE:. At Easter we celebrate rebirth and renewal, but sometimes we forget that that rebirth was purchased by suffering, according to Christian belief, and that there is meaning to be found in suffering and in loss. In honor of that, I ma posting this diary, which I wrote for Street Prophets last year.
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In many ways, the last year or so of my life have been about loss.
In September my beloved familiar, my mini-Maine Coon Lamis, whom I have diaried about, was diagnosed with spinal problems which would lead to paralysis and eventually to her death. In February, we had to put her to sleep
In November of 2004 , a test showed me positive for Hepatitis C--I had already tested borderline,. Saw the specialist but had to wait until after New Year's to get the results. That made for a miserable Christmas. I contemplated losing hair and perhaps losing my life--the best I could hope for if I had it was a chance of rather nasty 6 to 12 month course of anti-viral and interferon therapy--and the odds depend entirely on which strain you had. As it turns out, I either had two false positives, was one of the 2-% who spontaneously clear the virus--or had a miracle. In any case, I lost my innocence. Nice Girls CAN get diseases that may be sexually transmitted (though it's damned hard to get Hep C that way--more likely source was, of all things, a manicure I had in Japan where my my manicurist sterilized instruments rather than using disposal ones--it caused a mini-epidemic in a Russian town).
In April, Ben lost his job. A few days later the car died and it would cost more to repair it than its Blue Book value, so we lost transportation and had to borrow a van from the his Mom's Pre-K to get around when we needed to.
On August 13, my mother died after a brief illness--peacefully and with Dad and her Irish priest at her side, about as good a death as anyone gets. It was sudden and I couldn't be with her.
In September Ben's unemployment ran out (Bush has decided there isn't recession, so you're limited to half a year). Unable to afford our apartment we had to ask his Mom if we could move in with her until we finish paying off the landlord who is charging us an extra two months' rent to let us out of the lease early (won't be paid off until May so we can't start saving for a car and a place to live).
And them my mother-in-law told us we could live with her so long as we agreed not to practice Wicca under her roof.
About that time, I just put down my head and cried. One loss too many.
We almost loss our Japanese bobtail Mike last night--she took off, but Ben found her today. I DID cry.
That was, for me, the final straw.
Too many losses to bear.
I felt like Job--and like Job, I would have shaken my fist and dared to ask "Why ME?" if I believed in the God of the Old Testament. And probably gotten the same answer of "How dare you question MWE?" poor Jpob got. Never cared for that bit of the OT--never much liked YHWH, who seems to me (sorry Christians, but this my extremely PERSONAL reaction to the OT) to be vengeful ("unto the seventh generation"? punishing people for what someone 6 generations back did? Is that merciful or loving?) and occasionally sadistic. It's one of the reasons why I couldn't join another Christian faith after I left Catholicism -I couldn't get past the OT and particularly the Book of Job--allowing .the Adversary to do terrible things to a good man just to win a cosmic bet was something I simply couldn't buy into (and lots of Christian theologians have trouble explaining this away; I've never seen a really GOOD explanation for it). Many Christians can and do get past, which is why that is THEIR path, but isn t mine.
But I do have to wonder: what is the point of loss? What lessons do we learn from it? Are we chosen for this? Is it karma coming home to roost?
And my answer as always is "Fuck all, I don't know.
Better minds than mine have wrestled with what C.S. Lewis called the problem of pain, and been unable to come up with satisfying conclusion.
But I don't believe Deity visits it on us.
Rabbi Kushner, in his book published in the 80s called When Bad Things Happen to Good People, says we can either have an all-loving God or an all-knowing and all-powerful one. I tent to believe Deity is all-loving. We have free will--and that means Deity has made an agreement with Itself to NOT know the outcome and not to interfere--otherwise, free will is a joke. Deity COULD still be all-knowing and all-powerful, but has chosen not to be. So Deity isn't punishing Sharon for giving back the West Bank and isn't likely to smite Dover PA for voting out the ID loonies. Those people who suffered in Katrina weren't being punished for the licentiousness of N'Awlins or its tolerance for gays (as one gay man posted, if God wanted to smite gays, He should have waited a week until Southern Decadence was in full swing). The thousands who died or lost everything in the tsunami weren't being punished. Deity set up the planet to run according to the laws of the universe--and sometimes bad weather (probably aided by global warning) just happens.
A lot of the other bad stuff is just due to human cussedness. People make bad choices. They smoke in bed or overload the electrical system, and a fire starts. They smoke, and they get cancer. I chose to have a manicure and may have contracted Hepatitis C. They drink and drive, and someone is killed. Human stupidity explains a lot of it.
So does human moral myopia. We only see what's directly in front of us. We think locally and don't worry about Them--them being people who don't go to out church, or live in our neighborhood or town or region or belong to our race or ethnic group. In wartime-we make the enemy the Other--THEY, the Evildoers as our prez calls them--forgetting that to them we may look like the Evildoers (try Iraq on for size). Certainly this moral myopia played a role in the horrors after Katrina stuck. No one seemed to realize that there were 100, 000 people who relied on public transportation, who couldn't load up the SUV with Perrier and Diet Pepsi and some Brie and cold cuts and granola bars and head to a motel. So they were left behind, and they suffered and they died. I honestly think people didn't even think about them because they weren't REAL. They somehow didn't matter. And it will happen again and again until we open our eyes and realize we are all equally important--some animals aren't more equal than others.
And human evil explains much of the rest. Because some of us knowingly, willingly, even joyously, choose to do evil--to kill, maim, abuse, torture, bomb, deal drugs, preach hate, steal, corrupt, rape. In some cases it makes a vague kind of sense. They GET something out of it--power, money, fame, pleasure, martyrdom, the belief that they are right and special so it isn't evil when they do it. Some probably don't see it as evil--suicide bombers see themselves as serving God, terrorists believe they are aiding the Cause, preachers of hate justify it as spreading the Word of God to Sinners(bet Pat R. tells himself that often).
But it's the ones who chose to do so knowingly who leave me bewildered
Where do sociopaths come from? Where do Sadists like the Marquis de Sade (as opposed to the good kind, who take pleasure from giving someone pleasure through pain--a consensual sexual game) who enjoy torturing others come from? I've read a lot about sex killers and serial killers, the closest we can come to pure evil in the flesh, and it seems to take a lot of abuse to make one. But not all killers fit the profile. How do you explain a Scott Peterson, with no violence or abuse in his background, to all appearances a normal, charming, well-educated man,, who simply decides he doesn't want to stay married or be burdened with a child--so he kills his wife? I suppose you could say he wanted freedom and this would free him of child support. But to kill someone to avoid support payments doesn't make sense to me at all. How could he NOT have known that was evil? For that matter how could the commandants of the Nazi death camps oversee mass slaughter by day, then go and be loving fathers at night?
I feel the same way when I read fantasy novels. The villain sells his soul to the devil for something---which means eventually he will end up in hell. Um, a short time of power or pleasure against an eternity of agony? Does that make sense? A friend, who also writes fantasy, says they are like really dark versions Peanuts' Lucy--they convince themselves they will find a loophole, so the devil won't collect, because they are smarter/better/ wiser than the devil. In other words, Scott Peck was right--the evil lie to themselves most of all, and their rightful name is People of the Lie.
But even if I reject evil as something DONE to us by an uncaring Deity, I have to wonder about karma. Do we suffer to do penance for sins past? Well, it has a certain crude justice to it. That's just not how I view karma or reincarnation. We are to learn, to grow, to BECOME completely our True Self. This is a school. In between lives, we review where we succeeded ad where we failed, and then we go out to try to undo whatever we did wrong--but not by coming back as a leper or allowing the person we killed in the 15th century to kill us. We come back and we try to help solve that problem by making things RIGHT.
I've been helped by a lot of people over my 56 years. One thing I learned is that we can never repay directly those who have helped us--they may never need that kind of help from us. But we can "Pay it forward" or give help to those we run across who need it.. When we lose, we learn about the need to accept help, something that is very difficult for most of us. Needing help means learning humility, letting go of pride, acknowledging you lack power and need help--sort of like a Twelve Step Program. Sometimes we even have to ASK for help, as we had to with Ben's mother because without her we'd be homeless. I think the ability to accept help simply and gratefully is a lesson we all must learn, throughout many lives.
And in learning it, we learn how to make it easy for others to accept the help we offer. My grandmother told me that you should always make offering help look as if the recipient is actually doing you a favor by accepting it. And we learn how to give help graciously from the examples of those who have helped us.
We learn to love, simply and purely, by giving and receiving. We don't ask about someone's politics or their religion or their race when we give the right way--and we should accept help with that same simplicity.
Maybe THAT is the only real lesson we can learn from loss. And it may well be the hardest one to get right, which is why we keep having to do it again and again. Because, at bottom, all we really carry with us from life to life is what we have learned of love.
And perhaps, as some mystics believe, those who suffer most actually CHOOSE to suffer to help the rest of us--as examples, as expiation for the world's pain, the way St Francis washed the feet and faces of lepers.
I wish I could come up with some great wisdom to explain loss and pain. Like far wiser and purer souls, I am stumped by it. And this is the best I can do. Anything else forces me to believe in a Creator with a sadistic streak, or a karma that is far too literal to be meaningful, just a cosmic account book. And I can't accept that--because I believe in love and in Love. And I believe there is meaning to life and to our pain--when we hurt, we share a common humanity with all who suffer, and it helps us to wake up to what we need to do to make this a place of joy, not a vale of tears.
In Philip Pullman's trilogy (The Golden Compass, The Amber Spyglass and The Subtle Knife), the heroine is told that she must build the Republic (not Kingdom) of Heaven here on earth, during our lives--because there is nowhere else. Maybe there is, maybe there isn't--but the only one we can be sure of is this place, this time--and we must build it here and now. And that, perhaps is the lesson we learn from loss--to build heaven here on earth.
