Anxiety maligns what it means to be human; to try, to fail, to try again with better intentions. It rears up at times of uncertainty and distress. It is that voice in you head, albeit sometimes wanting the best, that is critical and judgmental. It can harass and berate but it must be calmed for life is full of uncertainty and obstacles. It can be seen as a road of problems strung together with lights of happiness and wonder, but it is by no measure, for most people, smooth sailing. As they say; God laughs at those who make plans. We need to be kind to ourselves when these divert or take a corner, the other way was simply not where we were meant to go. One has to be prepared to take chances, be courageous within these and deal with the consequences. That can be heartbreaking at times and downright discouraging. Yet without these pitfalls, we wouldn’t learn the true meaning to value, respect, bravery and resilience; we would underestimate what it means to cherish life.
I had also continued the cycle of persecution. I had become so used to this being enforced by others I had slipped into doing this internally. I was angry and I was unforgiving to my soul, I was being eaten by regret. I endlessly went in loops reprimanding and criticising myself. Effectively I was continuing to let those who had hurt me continue to do so. I was letting the monster of their presence invade my psyche and overwhelm my ability to rise above the pain of the past. I was forgetting to action the greatest human gift of all upon myself; forgiveness and mercy.
…”Once upon a time there was an old woman who used to meditate early on the bank of the Ganges. One morning, finishing her meditation, she saw a scorpion floating helplessly in the strong current. As the scorpion was pulled closer, it got caught in roots that branched out far into the river. The scorpion struggled frantically to free itself but got more and more entangled.
She immediately reached out to the drowning scorpion, which, as soon as she touched it, stung her. The old woman withdrew her hand but, having regained her balance, once again tried to save the creature. Every time she tried however, the scorpion’s tail stung her so badly that her hands became bloody and her face distorted with pain.
A passerby who saw the old woman struggling with the scorpion shouted, “What’s wrong with you, fool! Do you want to kill yourself to save that ugly thing?”
Looking into the stranger’s eye, she answered, “Because it is the nature of the scorpion to sting, why should I deny my own nature to save it?” Then I understood… I saw that Reverence for Life is the essence of humanity.
And that is what we have lost. We “defend” ourselves by threatening the globe and our own level of civilised humanness with it. We have chosen technological progress and financial profits over the needs of human beings. We have bartered the quality of our own souls; we live the denial of Reverence for Life.
But we have become a society of machines and business degrees, of stocks and bonds, of world power and world devastation, of what works and what makes money. We train our young to get ahead, our middle-aged to consume, and our elderly to be silent. We are sophisticated now. We live in stadiums, not galleries. We listen to rap music, not Mozart. We talk about ideas for getting ahead rather than about our ideas for touching God. We are miles from our roots and light-years away from our upbringings. We have abandoned the concerns of civilisations before us. We have forsaken the good, the true, and the beautiful for the effective, the powerful and the opulent. We have abandoned enough-ness for the sake of consumption. We are modern. We are progressive. And we are lost.
So what do I believe in? What do I define as human? I believe in the pursuit of the spiritual, the presence of pain and the sacredness of life. Without these, life is useless and humanity a farce.
To be human it is necessary to think again about what matters in life, to ask always why what it is to be human is to listen to the rest of the world with a tender heart and learn to live life with our arms open and our souls seared with a sense of responsibility for everything that is.
Without a doubt, given those criteria, we may indeed not live the ‘better life’, but we may, at the end, at least have lived a fully human one.”
Joan Chittister, OSB - Joan is executive director of Bentivision, a resource centre for contemporary spirituality. She is an international lecturer and widely published author.
Manila has great poverty nestled in-between towering high rises, ancient churches and people hungry for the trappings of commercialism. I felt heavily the Chineses influence on interaction; an environment where one needs to be on their game and lacks the bubbliness and joviality of it’s neighbouring Buddhist asian nations. It feels by comparison on initial impression, quieter and more reserved. Manila is the most densely populated city in the world (42,857 people per square kilometre), almost twice it’s closest counterpart Mumbai, and once here it’s not hard to see why this city throbs with an ache and longing.
