Recovery
In Search of a Pure Heart
When I catch myself whining, whether about ailing knees, or malign government, I hardly ever stop to ask myself,
“Well, what would it look like, be like, to recover from this?”
I’m chagrined to realize, not only that I have adjusted my life to conform, as best I can, to what reality presents, but I may have so totally adjusted, that even my complaining is built into the fabric of my days.
I play tennis on sore knees and an old back. People express admiration for my doing that at my age.
Precious few expressed admiration for my tennis when I was younger. Is the payoff in late-life admiration, greater than whatever satisfaction I got from playing as well as I could when my body was more whole?
What was I like when Obama was president? When Joe Biden lent his office to doing what I thought was so right?
How much satisfaction do I find in my outrage at this administration?
Or maybe a bigger question, is, do I engage only when I don’t like what’s happening?
I’ve been affected by the Buddhist monks who walked from Texas to Washington, D.C.
What’s affecting is that I sense their manner, how they act and think, doesn’t change, whatever they may be facing.
What motivated them to do that walk, I think, is to model healing behavior that resists simply opposing whatever may be haunting.
I could write another lengthy piece about the reforms I want to see, to pull us from the deep ditch into which we have fallen.
It has gradually become clear to me that the malady plaguing us right now, is an infection we have contracted through neglect.
Like an open sore we left untended and jumped into water filled with opportunistic organisms.
No doubt there are antibiotics that can help the sore begin to heal, but suppose the sore has found its way into the blood stream? Has become resistant to simple antibiotic remedy?
What is so a-ffecting – opposite to in-fecting – about the monks simple walking, ancient peaceful teaching, is that it’s not subject to the vagaries of human behavior and belief.
It seems a bit grandiose, or naïve, yet the way those monks have been received in their 2000-mile trek through the south – the region my prejudice regards as ripe with our national malaise – persuades me that the change that seems so elusive, begins with an encounter with a pure heart.
Yes, even the heart of a nation.
Just before the ICE person shot Renee’ Good, she said to him, “I don’t hate you.”
Dr. King said that until he could love Bull Conner, there could be no peace.
Dr. King and Renee’ Good were shot dead.
Do I believe that a pure heart matters more than being alive?
I think, hope, I believe, that being fully alive depends on having a pure heart.
And what we are here to do, is to learn, from Dr. King and Renee’ Good, and from Bull Conner, and yes, Donald Trump, what a pure heart is made from.
And what stands between me and a pure heart.
We speak of our national experiment, to learn how unlike people can live together.
How about the human experiment?
How to live since being expelled from the Garden of Eden?