C A T A C L Y S M

The war has begun. The United Nations inspection and disarmament program, which had more vital work to do, forced to a halt by the initiation of hostilities. The United Nations and the world community were trashed again and the war started and our nation undertook the assassination of a foreign head of state, and barraged another nation with troops, cruise missiles, and bombs — all on the undemonstrated premise that Iraq harbored significant weapons of mass destruction so as to pose a grave threat to the United States and the world.

It is hard not to feel despair. The generals were saying this will be pretty fast and easy although we will have to expect far more Iraqi casualties than in the last Gulf War. Unless, of course, Iraq's defences collapse quickly.

There can be no suspense about the outcome of a match between the United States and Iraq but it is aftermath that will be the beginning of sorrows as terrorists proliferate and the bitterness deepens and processes are set in motion that darken the horizons facing this human enterprise.

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So I have to hope for something else, something more, a shaking of the foundations, something described by Doris Lessing in her space-fiction Shikasta, describing the people of the Earth from the perspective of the far-distant future, when those who have passed through an awfulness and an ugliness and a dreadfulness look at the ruins and say, "Yes, but that will come to life, there is enough power there to tear down this dreadfulness and heal all our ugliness — a couple of seasons, and it would all be alive again," and they learn repose in their imaginations on chaosmaginations on chaos, making strength from the possibilities of creative destruction. They are weaned from everything but the knowledge that the universe is a roaring engine of creativity.

A cataclysm has come for uncounted people, we know, and knowing that, we feel it as a terrible weight of sorrow and helplessness; and it may be — certainly, it may be for you, today, that there is more than this war that darkens your horizon. You might face your own personal-sized cataclysm.

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In Roman religion, there was a goddess named Fortuna — the goddess of chance or lot. You will know, I think, the meaning of this ancient deity. She's gone now, of course, replaced by Christianity, which gives us a world which is governed by justice, and everything happens for a reason. But since you probably don't believe that everything happens for a reason, I thought we might think about our relationship with Fate and Fortune.

Deep in our Judaeo-Christian conditioning is the idea that life is fair. It's one thing to believe in Justice, capital J, as some very real principal that has something to do with the Divine and with a higher consciousness. But that Justice has no other hands than our own.

But is life fair and just? If you want to know, you might ask those simultaneously brutalized and threatened in Iraq whether life is fair, before you make up your mind. We need to look at our religious baggage — critically.

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It sometimes feels as though we cannot find the remote control to life and it has gone to some channel you don't much like. There was something we wanted. It isn't just that we wanted it. It is that we believe ourselves entitled to have it. What is happening is wrong and unfair.

These incidents come in various sizes and varying degrees of seriousness. Sometimes it is simply an inanimate object, like my computer: one is being purposely frustrated by a machine that holds one in contempt. Or it might be something like, say, a river.

There was a Persian king, Cyrus, who had built a great empire and had now declared war on yet another kingdom — this time Assyria — and set out with his army for the Assyrian capital, Babylon, to conquer them, too — on his favorite white horse. They had marched toward Babylon and were camped by the Gyndes River when King Cyrus' horse wandered into the river, swollen by winter rains, and tried to swim across. The tide was too strong and horse didn't make it. So Cyrus delayed his march for an entire summer and divided his army into digging crews who turned the mighty river into 360 pathetic little channels. Only after he had thus punished the wicked river did he march on to Babylon.

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We may experience the injustice of life in small things. But maybe it's not such a small thing that has come upon you. Maybe it's a big thing, a monumental thing, a cataclysm.

It comes unannounced and uninvited. It moves the ground beneath you and you are carried along without the slightest ability to control its movement. It settles in front of you and absolutely changes the way things are for you. It tears the fabric of life, dislocating reality into unfamiliar patterns.

The timing could not be more miserable. It wasn't your idea of how to spent this part of your life.

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You seem suddenly to be sinking, into some dark place.

It is a personal-sized cataclysm that disrupts your life with the force of a drought or earthquake or war.

Like getting old and realizing it.

One day each year I used to turn a year closer to 50 — until now each year I get farther away. What a rude disruption of life. Eugene Ionesco describes the realization of that catastrophe:

I can't explain to myself how I could allow myself to reach the age of 30, 35, 36. I don't understand how I could have failed to try to prevent this catastrophe. Did it happen in my sleep? Was I unconscious? Did somebody get me drunk? A REVERSE metamorphosis: I became a caterpillar. Whatever became of the person I was, the person I must still be, the frail child, the brand-new being, and even the adolescent who still had something from his childhood left? Where have I disappeared to? Where am I, for what I see can't be me: already pot-bellied, already a bit bald, covered with hair, a ripe, overly juicy fruit. I who had such a horror of the gelatinous flesh of mature men and women. Soon to be a quad-ra-genarian. How could the Good Lord ever have allowed me to get this way? I am in someone else's skin, in the layers of skin, and the folds of skin of someone else. I have personal knowledge of the following fact: one can become someone else.

That's a cataclysm. It particularly unnerves us because we feel ourselves carried along toward the time when we are swallowed up in the cataclysm of death.

There are others. We sink down into those dark places — you know, when you're looking for the light at the end of the tunnel, and finally you see it but it's a train.

Emotional cataclysms: wrenching change in relationships, the loss of something that had seemed to nourish the very springs of your being and now he or she will not be there for you. Or the disappointed hope of a love that never shows up.

The end of a hope. The end of a road: career, education, whatever.

When a cataclysm comes, we want to know why. If we're going to suffer, we'd prefer that it be in the course of some heroic act, in the pursuit of some great cause. But most of the time, it isn't.

Why is so much of our suffering so pointless?

The question to ask isn't Why. It is, rather,

What is there to be experienced or learned about life and being human in this time?

And the question is,

What does this cataclysm call on me to do? What new commitments does it demand of me? How does it challenge me, invite me, to change, to adapt, to grow? What is it that suddenly becomes important, urgent? What is it that life has been revolving around as if it were so urgent that I now can see isn't very important at all, and how am I still organizing my life around it as if it were?

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The philosopher Nietzsche one wrote:

To those human beings who are of any concern to me I wish suffering, desolation, sickness, ill-treatment, indignities — I wish that they should not remain unfamiliar with profound self-contempt, the torture of mistrust, the wretchedness of the vanquished.²

What a dreadful sentiment! Or is it? Nietzsche had known all these things, and had found that every dreaded unraveling of life confronts us with a new Possibility, one we hadn't considered, or one we'd considered but never pursued, but there it is, it is the meaning of the Now that we have been given, and we can receive it, or we can hang on instead to our own rigidly predetermined goals for ourselves and refuse to receive the Possibility held in this new moment. Some new realization of your identity and of the greater life within which we live. Some new comprehension of the continuity of all those pieces of our life which now unfold to reveal a new whole, a fuller meaning.

In the end, he would be destroyed by a grief he was convinced he could not bear. But not before he had turned a lot of lesser griefs into greater thought and expression. Not before experiencing a great deal of joy. Not before offering the advice that it's best to pitch your tent on Vesuvius and live dangerously.

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I think of the 40 years in the Wilderness in the biblical story of the Exodus from captivity in Egypt.

You can't get from the land of captivity to the promised land without passing through the Wilderness. Can't be done. But it just does not take 40 years to get through that Wilderness.

They had to go into that Wilderness, as we have to do. But they wouldn't let that Wilderness place be for them what it had to be, and they wouldn't let go of what had been and could be no more. They kept hanging on to the comfortable predictability they had known, even if in reality it hadn't been so terrific at the time. They insisted on measuring everything that happened against their expectations.

They could not move on until every one of that generation that still remembered had died. They responded to frustration the way we often do, objecting to it all, denying that darkness had settled upon them.

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Moving through such a time is not the same as moving into it as though it is supposed to be a permanent home, living out a permanent tragedy, never moving beyond the cataclysm. But before we can move beyond it, we must pass through it. Nietzsche had words for the kind of religion that avoids suffering:

If you refuse to let your own suffering lie upon you even for an hour and if you constantly try to prevent and forestall all possible distress; if you experience suffering and displeasure as evil, hateful, worthy of annihilation, and as a defect of existence, then it is clear that [you harbor in your heart] . . . the religion of comfortableness. How little you know of human happiness, you comfortable . . . people, for happiness and unhappiness are sisters and even twins that either grow up together or, as in your case, remain small together.³

Pain must be allowed to be pain. Listen and hear. Illusions are torn away. New vision comes, new necessities. Maybe a renewed understanding of your life's dream, and a new commitment. A recognition that there is a price to pay before corners are turned.

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Now I don't know what you call it. Maybe you call it the Tao, or maybe God, or maybe for you it's Life Itself. Emerson called it "that great nature in which we rest as the earth lies in the soft arms of the atmosphere; the Unity, that Over-Soul, within which every one's particular being is contained and made one with all other.

And I think we go on living in the hope, in the trust, in the faith, that Life Itself is good and gracious, and our individual moments are woven into a larger pattern of life. What we might miss is the indispensable function of our own artisanship: We are the weavers.

Or you could say, we are the gardeners. I marvel at those who, by working with strange, unpleasant, and grimy things such as dirt and roots can work with them so that they bring forth the beauty or nourishment or whatever it is that that sort of plant is capable of bringing forth. To work with such unpleasant things you have to have knowledge of their potential and faith in it. The roots are dark, but from them come shoots of possibility.

It all turns on how we look at the material given: do we despise and deny it, or do we ask what splendor might rise from this rubble?

I have often said that it is out of the profoundest darkness of those places called a vacuum state, that this universe gives birth to the stars, and the universe is a roaring engine of creativity. And Life Itself is a roaring engine of creativity.

Mystics have always understood that. They have always called us to silent wonder in the face of the strength that holds the very fiber of life together, no less in times of dark and dislocation than in times of light and comfort.

I don't believe in that old doctrine of Divine Providence as though life were run by some cosmic super-king in some cosmic controlroom with knobs and levers and computer displays. I don't believe in some God who makes us do what we do, who controls everything and has a reason for everything.

I don't believe in some God who sets us up for unpleasant diaagnoses, wilderness wanderings, depressions, getting fired or dumped by significant others. But I do believe in that Larger Reality that is always there because life is one whole and life is a roaring engine of creativity, inhabiting the darkness, chaos, and cataclysm just as much as the success, the record income figures, the sunlight and pleasure. There is a Psalm which, loosely and poetically translated, says,

Where shall I hide from your wind, or where find a place
without your face?

No long road will lead away / Nor deep sea drown
your sounding voice.
The darkness leaves no time alone
For dark and light are both your home.

The poet Rilke praised darkness:

You darkness, that I come from,
I love you more than all the fires
that fence in the world . . .
. . . the darkness pulls in everything:
shapes and fire, animals and myself,
how easily it gathers them! —
powers and people —

and it is possible a great energy
is moving near me.

I have faith in nights.

There is an engine of creativity at the heart of Life Itself. There is a life that springs from the soil, a strength powerful enough to supplant the rubble.

If our cataclysm is waking up to our own fragile vulnerability, waking up to the emptiness of the things we relied on, whether some nice airtight religious creed, or whether the signs of outward success, or the reliability of the familiar . . . or waking up to the wasting of our lives in triviality . . . or if it's waking up to the loss of our youth, through whatever it takes to shatter the illusion that we do not die —

then we may be grateful for the cataclysm: and begin to live in a way that matters humanly in the years that remain.

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In the 14th century Meister Eckhart offered an image of being in and with our experience. He once titled a sermon, "Sinking Eternally into God." Sinking. He said "We should sink eternally from something into nothing . . . let your 'being you' sink and flow into God's `being God.'" Sink into the vortex of being as the depth of a great ocean. It is letting go of control, security of place or identity; letting go all our images, definitions and projections of the mystery of Life Itself.

The same point is taken in a poem composed by the cockroach Archy in Don Marquis' great classic work Archy and Mehitabel about a worm who's just been had for breakfast by a robin, in which the worm says,

i am losing my personal identity as a worm
my individuality is melting away from me
odds craw i am becoming
part and parcel of
this bloody robin
so help me i am thinking
like a robin and not like a worm any
longer yes yes i even
find myself agreeing that a robin must live

and then he meets a previously ingested beetle who agrees that it is better to be merged harmoniously into the cosmic all. But when we are sinking into the unknown dark territory of Life Itself, when our identity seems to dissolve, I swear it isn't funny.

In its physical structure and its awesome and mysterious processes, the Universe itself is at its most creative state at those times when the existing order seems to dissolve, when existing structures seem to give way — situations known to the physicists as far-from-equilibrium conditions.

And our lives are parts of those great and mysterious processes, parts and manifestations of that larger life of the Universe,

and it is no less true

in the dark times when the known order of our lives unravels and when the structure of our lives, with the dreams we cherish and the things we have come to rely on —

seem to dissolve.

Who isn't afraid of sinking, drowning, being overwhelmed? But our fear of sinking might be a fear of the very creative power of Life Itself. We might fear our own rebirth, because still in the recesses of ourselves we remember the terror of our first birth. Yet if we are sensitive to the unfolding of that Self or Center from which the experiences of life come, that profound depth of who we are, it will unfold and reveal new splendors. But in our living we must be true and faithful to the unfolding Self. We think we know who and what we are but there is more to us. If we are insensitive to that fact and insensitive to our own unfolding identity, our cataclysms and our successes only make us more false.

There is more to us than we know, more than has yet been made visible. At the core of our great Unitarian Universalist spiritual tradition there has been from the start a faith in the magnitude of the human, the divinity at the core of our Selves. And the cataclysms and pain are a breaking open. And when we are broken open, hidden magnificence flows from deep wells. We know that some of the most splendid works of human creativity have flowed from pain, with a certain joy. It is like a coarse, dark rock that breaks open and reveals a stupendous crystal at its center.

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Sink into the depth of Life Itself — like falling into sleep and trusting yourself into that darkness —

spiral down into your own inner depths, which are the depths of the universe

allow yourself to be washed through with a strange music, carried by it into a state of wonder

yielding maybe to tears that pour out of your own struggle and the pain of humanity and the struggle of Life Itself — allowing those cleansing waters to roll through you until the clutter and junk is cleared away.

Through eyes cleared with these tears, discern in the dark roots the life that would rise new from uninvited darkness. Struggle with the material given like an artist —

In the faith that the
roaring engine of creativity which is Life Itself
and is your life
waits there in the darkness to greet you and

make all things new.

¹ New York: Pantheon, 2000, 177.

² Will to Power. Trans. Kaufmann and Hollingdale, Vintage, 1968, p. 910.

³ Gay Science, 338.

Meditate

Many things stir within us

Currents surge in us as in waters buffeted by storm

And muddied by swirling tumult

But we have enetered a sacred temple and time

Beyond the reach of tumult

and it stills

it is quiet

the swirling tumult ceases within us

we are quiet

And in this quietness our vision becomes clear

As in quiet water

revealing great depths

reflecting the heavens

reflecting ourselves, revealing images of the real and true

Be still and know

Be still and see images of the real and true,

see vision, with holy imagination

see deeply

in great clarity

enter the silence.

Readings.

Words of Ralph Waldo Emerson,
in his essay "Fate":

Though Fate is immense, so is power . . . Man is . . . a stupendous antagonism, a dragging together of the poles of the Universe. He betrays his relation to what is below him, — thick-skulled, small-brained, fishy . . . — quadruped ill-disguised, hardly escaped into biped . . . But the lightning which explodes and fashions planets, maker of planets and suns, is in him. On one side, elemental order, sandstone and granite, rock-ledges, peat-bog, forest, sea and shore; and, on the other part, thought, the spirit which composes and decomposes nature, — here they are, side by side, . . . mind and matter . . .

'Tis weak and vicious people who cast the blame on Fate. The right use of Fate is to bring up our conduct to the loftiness of nature. . . .   So let man be. . . . A man ought to compare advantageously with a river, an oak, or a mountain. He shall have not less the flow, the expansion, and the resistance of these.

'Tis the best use of Fate to teach a fatal courage. Thought dissolves the material universe, by carrying the mind up into a sphere where all is plastic. . . .

Fate, then, is a name for facts not yet passed under the fire of thought; — for causes which are unpenetrated.

But every jet of chaos which threatens to exterminate us, is convertible by intellect into wholesome force. . . . The water drowns ship and sailor . . . But learn to swim, trim your bark, and the wave which drowned it, will be cloven by it, and carry it . . . The cold is inconsiderate of persons, tingles your blood, freezes a man like a dew-drop. But learn to skate, and the ice will give you a graceful, sweet, and poetic motion.

And from an editorial, yesterday, in the British Newspaper The Guardian:

In the short, violent term it may seem secondary that these are the first days of a new spring, but in the longer term it is fundamental. Whatever the miseries and miscalculations on the passing political stage, the daffodils are opening and the cherries will soon carpet streets and gardens with their delicate petals.

The beauty of the annual rebirth cannot fail to raise battered spirits, just as the striking good humour of this week's youthful protests has been helped by the sunshine and warmth. The coming of spring is the single most powerful metaphor that mankind has for hope and perseverance, shared by those who have religious faith and those without.

It is not a weakly sentimental parallel, for spring involves the agonies as well as the wonder of birth. The last few days have encouraged an optimistic burst of growth and the setting of darling buds which the clear nights' lethal frost has promptly destroyed. But the underlying process is unstoppable. Its indomitability is a timely exaltation of the apparently vulnerable and superficially weak. . . .

—"Spring will not be denied," Leader, Saturday March 22, 2003, The Guardian

Doris Lessing, in her space-fiction Shikasta, describing the people of the Earth from the perspective of the far-distant future:

Forced back and back upon herself, himself; bereft of comfort, security, denuded of belief in "country," "religion," "progress" — stripped of certainties, there is no Shikastan who will not let her eyes rest on a patch of earth, perhaps no more than a patch of littered and soured soil between buildings in a slum, and think: Yes, but that will come to life, there is enough power there to tear down this dreadfulness and heal all our ugliness — a couple of seasons, and it would all be alive again.

This, then, is [their condition] now . . . Nothing they handle or see has substance, and so they repose in their imaginations on chaos, making strength from the possibilities of a creative destruction. They are weaned from everything but the knowledge that the universe is a roaring engine of creativity.