Lovely Book Excerpt
"If we really want to heal our world, we'd better find an antidote beyond the topical remedies of truces and treaties. If war is an infection in the human system, its cure must lie in strengthening what it most directly attacks: our capacity for compassion.
True, it takes a discerning eye to see vulnerability behind the fright-mask of those who oppress us. Martin Luther King used to portray his racist adversaries as broken people, living in spiritual exile, in need of a forgiveness only the oppressed could grant them. He inspired among his followers a paradoxical sense of empowerment: it was only they, the victims, who could heal the damaged souls of their enemies, by moving them to mercy and leading them out of hatred's wilderness…
These days, the notion of building a more compassionate world takes a backseat to the dictates of security. It is a time of the hard-eyed realists. The Secretary of Defense sardonically quotes Al Capone: "You will get more with a kind word and a gun than with a kind word alone." The peacemakers have been banished to the kids' table with the rest of the utopians. It is said we've crossed an historic threshold, from an interregnum of innocence to a New Age of Terror.
I don't believe it. Yes, there is awful public tragedy, wrenching private sorrow, the dire clangor of arms. Plague-dogs of rage and cynicism roam the planet's nameless back alleys (and some name-brand front offices, too). And we are not safe. I read it in the Times; I can read it in Thucydides. It is a long battle, this struggle between love and hate. But to live in a climate of fear, with its color-coded thermometer-readings, means that men with box cutters, bullets, and bombs sit above us like kings. The hermetic paradox still holds: In the poison is the medicine. Hatred only summons forth its unconquerable opposite. Still, if love is ever to triumph, it's not just knocking the haters off their thrones. What we need is a regime change of the heart."
From Marc Ian Barasch's Field Notes on a Compassionate Life
True, it takes a discerning eye to see vulnerability behind the fright-mask of those who oppress us. Martin Luther King used to portray his racist adversaries as broken people, living in spiritual exile, in need of a forgiveness only the oppressed could grant them. He inspired among his followers a paradoxical sense of empowerment: it was only they, the victims, who could heal the damaged souls of their enemies, by moving them to mercy and leading them out of hatred's wilderness…
These days, the notion of building a more compassionate world takes a backseat to the dictates of security. It is a time of the hard-eyed realists. The Secretary of Defense sardonically quotes Al Capone: "You will get more with a kind word and a gun than with a kind word alone." The peacemakers have been banished to the kids' table with the rest of the utopians. It is said we've crossed an historic threshold, from an interregnum of innocence to a New Age of Terror.
I don't believe it. Yes, there is awful public tragedy, wrenching private sorrow, the dire clangor of arms. Plague-dogs of rage and cynicism roam the planet's nameless back alleys (and some name-brand front offices, too). And we are not safe. I read it in the Times; I can read it in Thucydides. It is a long battle, this struggle between love and hate. But to live in a climate of fear, with its color-coded thermometer-readings, means that men with box cutters, bullets, and bombs sit above us like kings. The hermetic paradox still holds: In the poison is the medicine. Hatred only summons forth its unconquerable opposite. Still, if love is ever to triumph, it's not just knocking the haters off their thrones. What we need is a regime change of the heart."
From Marc Ian Barasch's Field Notes on a Compassionate Life
posted by April Cheri at 1:56 PM
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