better conditions

I find myself shuddering when I open any form of media that may speak of current events.

I immediately catch at least the whiff of fear that underlays so much conversation, so much concern, so many motivations, so much rhetoric.

It took me years to own up to the role fear plays in my life. Some years ago now I spent one month in residence with the Trappist monks here in Lafayette. After a couple of weeks the abbot, seemingly satisfied that I was not going to run shrieking from the silent Catholic sensory deprivation-tank that is the abbey's silence (considered it, but decided to be stubborn instead), he asked me how things were going. "I feel like I am swimming in my own cesspool" I replied. The abbot tilted his head back and laughed in recognition. I told him that anger, fear, and pride, the there, arose in the silence especially when I tried to meditate or pray. I asked him if it ever got better. "Better?" he responded. I think I grew a half-inch that day in terms of understanding ascesis, spiritual work, and finally getting all those references to monks struggling with demons.

Of the three, it is fear that is strongest for me. As such I feel uncomfortably at home in today's culture of fear. I recognize it, and strangely enough I try to not shut the door on it each day. Fear can be a perfectly reasonable, sensible friend and member of one's inner counsel, a voice among others. When I try to ignore my fear, or play games or deceive myself as to the role that fear plays in my life, then things get weird. Reminds me of a friendship that works well as a friendship, but when one is dishonest about one's feelings and begins to cross boundaries, spend too much time or the wrong kind of time, then the friendship becomes something else, something compulsive or even toxic, something that can fill the space that belongs to healthier thoughts and goals.

I wonder if that is what is abroad these days with fear. Fear--fear of the other. Fear of change, because change means loss rather than newness and richness. Fear of the gender conversation and of all those who have lived with discrimination and shame and rejection. Fear of the upcoming election. The recent spectacle of armed people descending on Burns, Oregon treated us to fearful monologue, strange to hear, from the occupiers day after day.

As I say, fear is a sensible voice among others (see that charming animated movie Inside Out for how that may be). But allowing fear to monologue? Living in the house of fear? Perhaps that is a good working definition of hell, a hell that the fearful try to force us all to inhabit.

After having a book of Hafiz's poems on the shelf for some time, I am finally reading through his limpidly clear and playful words. His poem "Your mother and my mother" starts like this:

Fear is the cheapest room in the house.
I would like to see you living
In better conditions,
For your mother and my mother
Were friends.*

*from The Gift: Poems Of Hafiz , trans. Daniel Ladinsky. New York: Penguin Compass, 1999, p. 39.