Seeking Solace
The
human heart has hidden treasures,
In secret kept, in silence sealed;
The thoughts, the hopes, the dreams, the pleasures,
Whose charms were broken if revealed.
And days may pass in gay confusion,
And nights in rosy riot fly,
While, lost in Fame's or Wealth's illusion,
The memory of the Past may die.
But, there are hours of lonely musing,
Such as in evening silence come,
When, soft as birds their pinions closing,
The heart's best feelings gather home.
Then in our souls there seems to languish
A tender grief that is not woe;
And thoughts that once wrung groans of anguish,
Now cause but some mild tears to flow.
And feelings, once as strong as passions,
Float softly back a faded dream;
Our own sharp griefs and wild sensations,
The tale of others' sufferings seem.
Oh ! when the heart is freshly bleeding,
How longs it for that time to be,
When, through the mist of years receding,
Its woes but live in reverie!
And it can dwell on moonlight glimmer,
On evening shade and loneliness;
And, while the sky grows dim and dimmer,
Feel no untold and strange distress
Only a deeper impulse given
By lonely hour and darkened room,
To solemn thoughts that soar to heaven,
Seeking a life and world to come.
It is as times like these that a poem such
as this by
Charlotte Bronte
speaks to me more than prose. The tragedy
that occurred at
Virginia Tech
calls to us. Like the events of 9-11,
when unfathomable destruction occurs, we need to come to terms with how to respond. On a basic, reactive level we often
begin with the primordial “fight or flight” reaction.
We want to either do something about it or run away from it, ignore it. Two legislators in
Taiwan
staged a fake kidnapping in the wake of the shooting in order to demonstrate the
lack of security so that new security
measures would be instituted. Others
probably dusted themselves off and continued with their daily routine as if nothing
happened. Even among some who probably
should have been paying more attention the events went unacknowledged.
I spent this last week with a group of ministers.
Many may not have known about the tragedy since we had no television or newspapers
or radios at the retreat center. But
some had heard initial reports of the events.
When I spoke to
Louise
on the phone and she told me about it I mentioned it to a couple of other ministers
who also had had contact with the outside world.
Yet we did not acknowledge the tragedy publicly at any session or meal.
I arrived home Thursday night. Friday morning I prepared to finish the
Earth Day sermon that I was almost finished with for this morning.
I could not. The issues that
I was prepared to talk about were no longer as appropriate.
The tragedy that occurred at
Virginia Tech
called to me! I needed to respond. I needed to speak about it here this
morning. At first I was simply going
to change the opening words and chalice lighting, and then proceed as I had planned. But I could not.
More needed to be said, more needed to be thought, more needed to be
done. Not for the victims or the survivors,
not for the perpetrator or his family, but for me and for you.
We as human beings must somehow make sense
of those things that occur that do not fit into our neatly manicured lives. We want our lives ordered and understandable. We want our lives to be predictable. And when it is not we want to
know why. A tragedy such as this smacks
us in the face and we are confronted with the thought of “There by the grace of
God go I”.
The grace of God - we say it but do we
believe it? UUs want answers and that
does not seem to be one. By whatever
definition of “God” we find helpful, by whatever understanding of “grace” we can
acknowledge “There by the grace of God go I” does not seem sufficient.
We still want to understand.
How could such a thing happen? What
made him do it? How could it have been
prevented? What could the victims have
done to protect themselves? What could
the administration have do to prevent, or at least minimize the damage?
We become frustrated, angry or devastated by our impotence.
What can we do? What could they
have done? Our emotions kick in and
the tragedy that occurred at
Virginia Tech
calls to us.
As your minister I am supposed to have
an answer. I wish I did!
I don’t. But what I do have
is a perspective. I have, indeed, thought
about tragedy and disasters and evil before.
I have read about how we do and can deal with such things and I do have my own perspective. The first point that I want to make
is that there are, in fact, not one but many different issues involved in attempting
to get a handle on a tragedy such as this.
The first is that we need to acknowledge our vulnerability before, not just criminals
and terrorists and madmen but the universe itself.
Terrorists and madmen and criminals have agendas that do not take into account
our agendas. Hurricanes and tornadoes and earthquakes and lightning storms and floods
and mud slides and forest fires occur regularly.
And sometimes in our lives we probably will find ourselves in nature’s path. The stoic in me corresponds well with
the “There by the grace of God go I” sentiment that simply acknowledges our need
to let go of our need to control.
Human beings have always recognized that
some things and some actions are good and others bad. They have also recognized
that some things are beyond our control. The tornado cuts its path and destroys
and kills no matter what we do. How are we to understand such things? Do they have
any purpose or meaning? We need to
distinguish between what is intentional and what is unintentional.
While the unintentional can be accepted stoically as Rabbi Kusher does when
he answers the question “Why Do Bad Things Happen To Good People” by asking not
how it happened but how we should respond, the intentional doing of evil is more
problematic.
What about Cho Seung-Hui?
Why did he kill 32 people? Was he
mentally ill or was he evil or both?
Like the killing of students at
Columbine
High School
and at the
Amish West Nickel Mines School last October this tragedy was caused by someone who was mentally ill. The law has attempted to deal with some of the nuance of the problem by avoiding the “Guilty” label for some criminal (“evil”) actions by identifying some perpetrators as “Not Guilty by reason of Insanity”. Interestingly that classification does not coincide with clinical definitions of mental illness. Someone who does “know right from wrong” even though mentally ill from a psychiatric perspective may not be accorded that defense.
If some types of evil are natural such
as volcanoes, earthquakes, forest fires, old age, and death, and some types are
intentional such a lying, cheating, stealing, killing, etc., then they should be
dealt with separately. Natural disasters, natural evils, are explained on the basis
of how one understands the universe. If one sees the universe as beneficent, then
natural evil is seen as an unfortunate result of beneficent forces. On the other
hand, if one sees the universe as basically hostile, then natural evil would be
expected. If one sees the universe as without motive and neutral then natural evil
could be seen as simply our own interpretation of what is, in fact, value-free.
St. Augustine
's idea of limited perspective may be appropriate here.
Intentional evil is more problematic.
Socrates
called it ignorance;
Buddha
, desire; William of Oakum, failed obligation. None of these definitions ever seemed
very real to me. They always seemed like obtuse philosophizing.
M.
Scott Peck
, in “People of the Lie”, discovered over his many years as a psychiatrist that
certain people have consistent behavior patterns that belie traditional psychiatric
classification. It is not really a matter of these people not being classifiable
in traditional psychiatric jargon, but that they exhibit behaviors which transcend
the traditional classifications.
Peck
tells the story of a father who gave his son a rifle for Christmas. It was the same
rifle that his older son had used to commit suicide the Easter before. A made for
TV movie “Stay The Night” was the story of a middle aged beauty parlor operator
who seduced a teenage boy then manipulated him into killing the beauticians abusive husband.
Peck
speaks of such evil as being anti-life
and anti-liveliness; that which seeks to kill the body and/or the spirit of a person.
Moreover, he suggests that evil people are those who mask their evil desires and
deeds with lies. These "people of the lie" are consistent, straight-faced liars
who deny their motives as well as the facts. They confuse situations and even make
you think that you are the one who messed things up. They build layer upon layer
of deception that not only confuse others, but also themselves. They are self-deceptive
because they are absolutely unwilling to tolerate their own sinfulness. These people
are usually not in jail or in mental hospitals. They are usually quite capable of
maintaining a stable life-style and are often so subtle that they never really get
caught.
Why would anybody want to be this way?
Why would someone choose to be evil?
Peck
believes that, like other forms of personality disorders, it is an unconscious choice
that one makes in order to cope with ones situation. The natural fear of abandonment
and loneliness and the avoidance of pain often makes us do things both consciously
and unconsciously that are immediately self-serving and self beneficial even
while they compound the problem. They wish to take all of the blame and heap it
onto others in order to protect themselves. If avoidance of blame and fear of abandonment
and loneliness are the causes of someone becoming evil, a possible therapy is an
environment of love and acceptance where a person can relax enough to risk taking
some blame upon him or herself.
Peck, being a born-again Christian, has
felt the need to use traditional Christian language at times. This makes for difficulty
in translation when he speaks about Satin and exorcisms.
Peck
uses Christian terms to describe the treatment as well as some aspects of the illness
that he calls “Evil”.
Saul Friedlander
, in an article in this week’s Newsweek,
in speaking about his book about the Holocaust, suggests that:
Evil is a theological term, which isn’t
to say that it doesn’t fit. Lunacy,
perhaps, even more than thuggery, sadism and deliberate cruelty were the sheer essence
of Nazism. Yet we seldom see sheer
Lunacy emphasized and it might be a useful perspective to recover today.
In a therapeutic session that I participated
in neither “Evil” nor “Lunacy” were in evidence, yet, I believe, it was quite similar
to what Peck described as an exorcism.
There was no religious language or presuppositions
attached to it, even though the location
was in a “House Church”.
The circumstance was a weekend retreat
which was an elective part of one of my first classes in seminary. The course was
taught and the retreat led by a very prominent and well respected Gestalt therapist.
We had been going to classes for about a month when the retreat took place. The
class was fairly large by seminary standards, 22 students, but we had by this time
become somewhat acquainted with each other. About 20 of us gathered for a Pot Luck
supper on Friday night and then proceeded to a large recreation room of our teacher's
house where we did some introductory exercises. We went on a blind trust walk outside,
we drew pictures of our family constellations and of our hopes and dreams. We formed
into dyads and triads talking about pets and mothers and joys. After a snack and
more of the same, we unrolled our sleeping bags and went to sleep.
The next morning we found our way to the
sink to brush our teeth and to the table for cereal before returning to the recreation
room. Saturday we started by drawing pictures about our goals and what was blocking
us from obtaining our goals. Then the teacher/therapist asked for volunteers who
would like to work on what was blocking them. One at a time about 6 or 7 people
worked with their blocks and the group under the guidance of the teacher/therapist
who helped us to help each other. Then a strange thing happened. A young woman began
discussing her problem with anorexia: an inability to eat. She was indeed skeletal
-- a fact which I had not really noticed until she started talking about it. It
seems that she was already working with a doctor and had gradually built up to one
egg and a couple of tablespoons of milk a day. None of us had known about her struggle
and as she related more and more of her problem we became more and more amazed.
By this time we had become a fairly solid and cohesive group and one could feel
a tangible air of acceptance and support for this girl who felt so unloved. She
cried and we cried; she giggled and we giggled; she wanted support and we all lifted
her. There were long periods of silence and abrupt changes of mood. After a couple
of hours she was through and so were we. The spirit of that group was with her and
a sense of caring followed her wherever she went over the next two years. Something
powerful had occurred. We did not exorcise demons and, in fact, did not cure her
-- she had a doctor who was working on that. But we did lay to rest, at least partially,
her fear of abandonment and loneliness. And she was able to express her need for
approval and accept it when it was given.
Those who avoid the warmth and flow of
love are the ones who most need it, however.
Erich Fromm
wrote: (in The Heart of Man: It's Genius for Good and Evil, pages 173-78). "Most
people fail in the art of living not because they are inherently bad or so without
will that they cannot lead a better life; they fail because they do not wake up
and see where they stand at a fork in the road and have to decide. They are not
aware when life asks them a questions and when they still have alternative answers.
Then with each step along the wrong road it becomes increasingly difficult for them
to admit that they are on the wrong road, often only because they have to admit
that they must go back to the first wrong turn, and must accept the fact that they
have wasted energy and time."
The exorcisms that
Peck
spoke about were not exactly like what happened that Saturday, but close enough
for me to accept the fact that healing took place. My experience confirmed
Peck
’s understanding that healing occurs when we can break down the defense mechanism
that we have built up in an atmosphere of trust and acceptance.
This young woman suffering from self destructive
anorexia was a gentle soul. The only
evil that she was responsible for was self inflicted, yet it was not unlike the
kinds of evil that resulted in the shooting of innocent victims.
Understanding that the perpetrators of evil actions are in some way mentally
ill does not bring solace to the victims or their families, however.
The question of why someone would do such a thing is, thus, less helpful
than we a first imagine. To find solace
is not to find answers.
Some may find solace in activities that
attempt to prevent such an occurrence for reoccurring.
Their “busy work” may indeed bring them solace, but it is ultimately ineffective. Trying to prevent a reoccurrence of
an evil act is ultimately futile. Forcing
everyone to take off their shoes before boarding airplanes will, indeed, prevent
someone from bringing aboard a shoe bomb.
But a shoe bomb, with a timer in someone’s checked luggage can still blow up a plane. Trying to prevent evil, trying to prevent
terrorists from detonating bombs is futile.
The day after the
Virginia Tech
shootings four bomb attacks killed 183 people in
Iraq
— the bloodiest day since the
U.S.
troop increase began nine weeks ago.
On April 12 a suicide bomber blew himself up in the Iraqi parliament cafeteria killing
at least eight people — including three lawmakers — and wounding dozens.
This occurred in the heart of the heavily fortified, U.S.-protected Green
Zone.
Solace does not, ultimately, come from
casting blame, it does not, ultimately, come from answering the question why the
person did it or why the natural disaster occurred , it does not, ultimately come
from frenetic activity that seeks to prevent a reoccurrence, it does not, ultimately
come from punishing the perpetrator, if he or she is still alive.
All of there activities do take our mind off of the loss and horror, of course.
John Winter
is the author of an Hiaku poem entitled
Sorrow:
Sorrow is now his
Its spiny fingers wrap his heart
It is his to hold
Sorrow is now his
The waves encompass his soul
He has no choice now
Sorrow is now his
The tears flow without ceasing
It becomes his solace
Sorrow is now his
The beauty he desires is gone
It must be set free
Sorrow is now his
The battle is fought inside
His mind deceives him
Sorrow is now his
Without realeasing himself
He will never grow
Sorrow is now his
He will relinquish and grow
It is his alone
Sorrow used to be his
from a frown now he can smile
Today is now his
We must return to our daily routine. We cannot
allow ourselves to be consumed by the tragedies of life.
We cannot fight and we must not flee.
We must accept that they are an inevitable but painful part of life.
I echo
Rabbi Kushner
who said of the 9-11 tragedy that "It seems to me the most insightful response is
to find the presence of God not in the terrorist act, but in the response of some
very brave people. That so many people
responded with courage — to me, that's the presence of God."
The demonstration of solidarity with the
victims, our being with them, our sharing their grief, and our placing our selves
in service to the victims in whatever way we can is all we can do and is what we
must do. The Amish parents in the wake
of the shooting at the
Amish West Nickel Mines School brought food to the parents of the one who did the shooting. They understood that the depths of the sorrow of the relatives of the shooter was perhaps greater than their own. We must acceptance that this must be sufficient, for now it is life that calls to us and to life we must respond.