THE OPEN ROAD

peace, love & happiness

May 14, 2020

A human being is part of the whole called by us “universe,” a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separate from the rest—a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness.

This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us.

Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.

—Albert Einstein

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Father Gregory Boyle is the former pastor of Dolores Mission Church in Los Angeles. In 1992, he founded Homeboy Industries, which is is the largest and most successful gang rehabilitation and re-entry program in the world.

https://homeboyindustries.org/our-story/father-greg/

He is the author of the Tattoos on the Heart and is featured in the documentary film “G-Dog.” In a TED talk he gave in 2012, he uses a similar image to Albert Einstein’s “circle of compassion.” In the context of this talk he is not talking about “all living creatures,” but about “the easily despised.”  Here’s an excerpt from that talk:

What we all want to create and form is a community of kinship such that God, in fact, might recognize it. I suspect that Mother Teresa diagnosed the world’s ills correctly when she suggested that the problem in the world is that we’ve just forgotten that we belong to each other. So, how do we stand against forgetting that? How do we create and imagine a circle of compassion, and then imagine nobody standing outside that circle? And to that end, what we hope to do—all of us, I think—is to inch our way out to the margins, so that we can stand with the poor and the powerless and the voiceless. That we can stand with those whose dignity has been denied, with those whose burdens are more than they can bear. Occasionally, you get very fortunate and blessed to be able to stand with the easily despised and the readily left out. With the demonized, so that the demonizing will stop. And with the disposable, so that the day will come when we stop throwing people away. I suspect that if kinship was our goal we would no longer be promoting justice, we would, in fact, be celebrating it. For: no kinship, no justice. No kinship, no peace.

—from Gregory Boyle’s TED talk on Compassion and Kinship

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I don’t know how many times I’ve listened to this 20 minute talk. It makes me cry every time. Here’s a link:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ipR0kWt1Fkc&t=208s

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Below is a poem by Thich Nhat Hanh which I read regularly to remind me who I am. It’s followed by his story of how he came to write the poem. Its content is not unrelated to what Albert Einstein says in the quote that opens this newsletter.

Please Call Me By My True Names

Do not say that I’ll depart tomorrow—

even today I am still arriving.

Look deeply: every second I am arriving

to be a bud on a Spring branch,

to be a tiny bird, with still-fragile wings,

learning to sing in my new nest,

to be a caterpillar in the heart of a flower,

to be a jewel hiding itself in a stone.

I still arrive, in order to laugh and to cry,

to fear and to hope,

the rhythm of my heart is the birth and death

of all that are alive.

I am the mayfly metamorphosing

on the surface of the river,

and I am the bird which, when Spring comes,

arrives in time to eat the mayfly.

I am the frog swimming happily

in the clear water of a pond,

and I am the grass-snake

that silently feeds itself on the frog.

I am the child in Uganda, all skin and bones,

my legs as thin as bamboo sticks.

And I am the arms merchant,

selling deadly weapons to Uganda.

I am the twelve-year-old girl,

refugee on a small boat,

who throws herself into the ocean

after being raped by a sea pirate.

And I am the pirate,

my heart not yet capable

of seeing and loving.

I am a member of the politburo,

with plenty of power in my hands.

And I am the man who has to pay his

“debt of blood” to my people

dying slowly in a forced labor camp.

My joy is like Spring, so warm

it makes flowers bloom all over the Earth.

My pain is like a river of tears,

so vast it fills the four oceans.

Please call me by my true names,

so I can hear all my cries and laughter at once,

so I can see that my joy and pain are one.

Please call me by my true names,

so I can wake up

and so the door of my heart can be left open,

the door of compassion.

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After the Vietnam War, many people wrote to us in Plum Village. We received hundreds of letters each week from the refugee camps in Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand, and the Philippines, hundreds each week. It was very painful to read them, but we had to be in contact. We tried our best to help, but the suffering was enormous, and sometimes we were discouraged. It is said that half the boat people fleeing Vietnam died in the ocean; only half arrived at the shores of Southeast Asia.

There are many young girls, boat people, who were raped by sea pirates. Even though the United Nations and many countries tried to help the government of Thailand prevent that kind of piracy, sea pirates continued to inflict much suffering on the refugees. One day, we received a letter telling us about a young girl on a small boat who was raped by a Thai pirate.

She was only twelve, and she jumped into the ocean and drowned herself.

When you first learn of something like that, you get angry at the pirate. You naturally take the side of the girl. As you look more deeply you will see it differently. If you take the side of the little girl, then it is easy. You only have to take a gun and shoot the pirate. But we can’t do that. In my meditation, I saw that if I had been born in the village of the pirate and raised in the same conditions as he was, I would now be the pirate. There is a great likelihood that I would become a pirate. I can’t condemn myself so easily. In my meditation, I saw that many babies are born along the Gulf of Siam, hundreds every day, and if we educators, social workers, politicians, and others do not do something about the situation, in twenty-five years a number of them will become sea pirates. That is certain. If you or I were born today in those fishing villages, we might become sea pirates in twenty-five years. If you take a gun and shoot the pirate, you shoot all of us, because all of us are to some extent responsible for this state of affairs.

After a long meditation, I wrote this poem. In it, there are three people: the twelve-year-old girl, the pirate, and me. Can we look at each other and recognize ourselves in each other? The title of the poem is “Please Call Me by My True Names,” because I have so many names. When I hear one of the of these names, I have to say, “Yes.”

—Thich Nhat Hanh

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And one more poem:

A Little Stone in the Middle of the Road, in Florida

My son as a child saying

God

is anything, even a little stone in the middle of the road, in Florida

Yesterday

Nancy, my friend, after long illness:

You know what can lift me up, take me right out of despair?

No, what?

Anything.

—Muriel Rukeyser