I’m sitting in my living room as the sun slowly disappears into the ![1308691845leHv1W[1]](http://sampatron.files.wordpress.com/2012/12/1308691845lehv1w1.jpg "1308691845leHv1W[1]")
longest night of the year. It’s the winter solstice. This time of year has been celebrated since time immemorial as a way to bid farewell to one year as it sinks into the darkness of the past and welcome in the new year with the return of the light and hope for the future.
This year, though, there’s much more than just an actual disappearing of the sunlight to ponder. I told myself I wasn’t going to jump on the “bandwagon” and write about this. Yet, it’s not something I can ignore.
A week ago today a gunman forced his way into an elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut, and killed 20 children and six adults, and then himself. That action plunged the entire country, and much of the rest of the world, into an emotional darkness from which it’s hard to recover.
Part of my pondering today has focused on that, and the![1277305410rnqync[1]](http://sampatron.files.wordpress.com/2012/12/1277305410rnqync1.jpg "1277305410rnqync[1]")
saying, “We are all One.”
How can that be? I can imagine being one with the terrified children, I can imagine being one with the teachers desperate to save them, I can imagine being one with the parents and the first responders, and so on. I can even imagine being one with the family of the perpetrator and the pain that’s been caused them. We all have a part of us that can accept that we can identify with their agony in some way.
It’s much more difficult to imagine myself as one with the perpetrator. “I would never do something like that!” Really? If we truly are all One, why can’t we identify with the perpetrator? If One is all there is, isn’t the perpetrator a part of that? And a part of us? Don’t we share in that to some extent, no matter how small? And what happens if we reject that? Reject a part of ourselves?
I can’t explain how there’s such apparent evil in the One I perceive as Everything. The qualifier in that statement is “apparent.” It’s hard to believe but maybe, just maybe, what we call evil is only evil from our restricted point of view. I won’t try to make lighter of an event that inflicts such pain by supposing it’s somehow “good.” Anything I might say would just be facile. But I will say that there’s so much I don’t know and can’t know from a human standpoint that I hesitate to make a judgment call about what I don’t understand. But I still cry.
There’s ![1223994750e3i2b9[1]](http://sampatron.files.wordpress.com/2012/12/1223994750e3i2b91.jpg "1223994750e3i2b9[1]")
one thing about this solstice and this dark emotional time that I do know, though; it’s that the light always returns. Always. Nothing lasts forever, neither dark nor light. The sun always rises and joy will return. But, as with yin and yang, they always have at least a tiny bit of the other within them.
My feelings about such events are that they will continue in one way or the other until we understand that, as Pogo said, “We have met the enemy and he is us.” The words “whole” and “holy” arise from the same root word. Until we can have compassion for every part of us, for every part of our human existence, for the “enemy,” and accept it as part of us even if our first instinct is to reject it, we will never be whole or wholly human.
I agree.
It was when I sat in the night alone, with the crickets breaking the silence, that I knew everything would be ok. Nothing is new under the sun. The birds still rustle in their nests, the stars still twinkle, the moon still rises and the world still patiently cradles our sorrows and joys.
I’m remembering from the movie, Gandhi, him saying something along the lines of, “When I despair for the future, I remember that good has always outlasted evil.” Just as there are blessings that leave us dumbfounded and shaking our head, the same goes with the other extreme.
“We’ll understand better/farther along”? Well that doesn’t help for sh*t, here and now, here in the trenches.
When the blessings inundate us, we don’t ask why (at least not so much, not so fervently) and we don’t ask that they stop. But we write books about why bad things happen to good people.
This evening, I joined with way-too-many people in lighting luminarias, votive candles inside paper sacks with sand in the bottoms. It’s a south of the border ritual of illumining the dark on the longest night of the year. I think it’s a something we’re supposed to do throughout the year, whenever, every time, it seems so too-longly dark.
“There is so much we don’t know and can’t know and .still.we hope’..that the light will shine again. Thank you, Sam for these words from your heart.
It does feel like a copout to say, “We’ll understand better, farther along,” doesn’t it, Ed? I got that sort of saying way too many times when I was a kid: “Nobody knows the mind of God,” etc, and I didn’t like it then, either. As unsatisfactory as it is, at this point, though, it feels true to me. I can’t explain why bad things happen to good people or, for that matter, why good things happen to “bad” people. People clearly don’t always get what they deserve while they do tend to take blessings for granted and act as if they’re agrieved when the blessings fail. But I do know that the light always returns, at least if we don’t destroy this lovely planet before it does. Can you take another platitude? “It’s always darkest just before dawn.” I just don’t know how long it is until dawn.
Thank you, Kathy. Events like the ones of last Friday are really beyond my understanding so I have to fall back on platitudes and such. I suppose there’s a reason certain platitudes hang on. But I’m still basically an optimist and as Anne Frank said, “In spite of everything, I still believe people are good.” Indeed, there are terrible actions taken by some people but there are so many, many more that respond to those actions in good ways.