Connection

"I have been responding to last year’s election in the ways that people often behave while grieving. I began in a tailspin, with a deep sense of betrayal and disbelief, of abandonment and lost possibilities. I was stuck in a state of incredulity for a while, in the useless parsing of untruths and hypocrisies issued by this new administration. And then slowly, in ebbs and flows, my anxiety is dissipating, and I’ve begun to have moments where I am again conscious of overwhelming beauty and goodness: the miracle of tiny birds at the feeder with small furnace-like hearts, apparently oblivious to the winter, my 4-year-old son’s detailed description of the Stingray truck named Flowery he has built from Legos, the wide-open, watchful gaze of a friend’s baby.

The latest evolution of this grief has been a kind of tenderness that reminds me of first coming to faith, when all of the plans and identities by which I defined myself were stripped away. And what was left was cleaner and simpler, a slightly better reflection of love and mercy in the Divine. A short surah from the Qur’an describes this moment perfectly:

Have We not opened up thy heart,
And lifted from thee the burden
that had weighed so heavily on thy back?
And [have We not] raised thee high in dignity?
And, behold, with every hardship comes ease: Verily, with every hardship comes ease!
Hence, when thou art freed [from distress], remain steadfast,
And unto thy Sustainer turn with love.
–Surah 94, al-Inshirah (“Solace”)

And all the while I have been trundling away, as activists do, in every way I can. Early on in the election season this involved writing, speaking, and, both before and after the election, protest. I am fortunate to have a local community of very engaged mommas looking to leave a world and an American democracy intact for their babies. It turns out that fear, anxiety, and parenthood all have their place in motivating the intentional and necessary work of resistance. I have found an unexpected niche in drafting expanded, sanctuary-style non-discrimination policies, one of which has found its way to passage in Bloomington, Connecticut, and several more of which I hope to see passed locally.

I’m striving to get to a place that allows me to be in the world but not of it, to do the hard work that is before me but also to surrender the great breadth of work that is beyond me, to accept my limitations with some humility, and to recognize the grace that is always present with hardship."

~ Sofia Ali-Khan is a public interest lawyer, community activist, writer, and mom. Her recently viral post “Dear Non Muslim Allies," the subsequent series, and other writings can be found at sofiaalikhan.com.

"Although I have never seen a president like the one we’ve just elected, all of this seems quite familiar to me because of my Zen training. Trump, you could say, is my new koan.

A koan is a story you internalize much as you would a mantra or a prayer. But instead of restoring your serenity as a prayer or mantra might, koans have the opposite effect, because they can evoke, often subliminally, some of your deepest fears and anxieties. Generally, your first reaction is to run away, but you train yourself to stay still until you can enter deep samadhi, a state in which self-referencing diminishes. Then you can start to concentrate on the here and now without your usual projections and emotional conditioning.

I’m really struck by your account, Sofia, because of the parallels to Zen. Working with a koan often involves a process much like the one you describe. At first, you can feel something approaching despair: as you put it, “a deep sense of betrayal and abandonment.” In that preliminary state, it can seem that any trust you’ve had in life has shattered.

Then the world starts to come together again, but in a different way. The surah you cite involves an opening of the heart, and this is just what happens with a koan, too. Something deeper changes everything—we would call it the buddhanature in ourselves. Now awareness seems “cleaner and simpler” because the thing that caused you to contract has become completely empty. You can see through it to a bigger view, and that restores your trust.
In 40 years of Zen training, I’ve undergone this process again and again. I wish Trump hadn’t been elected, but I feel, in a strange way, that I’ve been preparing to confront him all my life."

~ Kurt Spellmeyer is a Zen priest and directs the Cold Mountain Sangha in New Jersey. He teaches English at Rutgers University and is the author of Buddha at the Apocalypse: Awakening from a Culture of Destruction.

SAK: I find the very notion of “clash of civilizations,” that humans are driven to warfare because of a difference in culture or identity, deeply ahistorical. We have a great deal of information about what has driven warfare across history. Overwhelmingly, this information suggests that warfare, especially in complex societies, is the prerogative of the elite and serves very specific purposes, mostly to do with the maintenance and expansion of personal power, access to resources, and, in the age of the nation-state, the maintenance of a specific world order.

However, elites need the assent of their people to sustain warfare. They require funding and—especially—committed soldiers. So some other narrative needs to be cultivated, something that makes warfare seem useful to a majority of people in a society, and that narrative, today, is the “clash of civilizations.”

Still, the vast majority of people, even in those regions, would rather not be dragged into the politics of global elites. They, like us, simply want to feed their children, and they dream of the luxury we have to contemplate matters of faith...

KS: I’m very glad our exchange has taken this turn. When Donald Trump said recently of Iraq, “We should have taken the oil,” he was just expressing openly what many of our leaders have been saying to themselves for the last 50 years.
But let’s not overlook a crucial point. As early as March 1975, Harper’s Magazine ran an article, “Seizing Arab Oil,” arguing the United States should do exactly that without the slightest hesitation. The article was meant as a trial balloon, but the outcry against it became so strong the instigators had to take a step back. Most Americans condemned the idea...
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Well, if dependent co-arising holds true of flesh-and-blood individuals and also their systems of belief, why wouldn’t it apply also to the big selves we call “civilizations”? Whether or not one can accept the notion that people are like holograms, the survival of all our societies depends on our ability to overcome our in-group narcissism. We don’t owe our ultimate loyalty to the United States, Judeo-Christianity, the West, or any other abstraction. We owe it to the person who needs our help, whoever he or she might be.

SAK: This question reminds me immediately of the passage in The Autobiography of Malcolm X where he describes making hajj, or pilgrimage, to Mecca, and seeing the incredible diversity of humanity together, united in faith and reflection. He describes it as the moment when Islam became something with a purpose and meaning apart from (although continuing to inform his commitment to) black liberation. And also a moment in which he realized that the racial politics of America were not inevitable, not a human problem, but a particularly American problem. Interestingly, hajj is incumbent upon all Muslims, men and women, with the means to travel—and many spend their lives preparing and saving for the journey. We are meant to converge from all corners of the Earth; we are meant to confront both our limitations and our potential by experiencing the other...

If we accept our astounding diversity, the common language that remains is love of God, love of the message and the messenger, and our striving to do good. May this becomes the template for how we encounter the great kaleidoscope of beings, great and small, all around us.

KS: Today, millions of people want to go back to a time before our cultures started to converge—a challenge like no other we’ve had to face. After all, once there are Muslims on your street, where you can watch them working hard, loving their children, and mowing their lawns, it becomes much harder for you to believe that the Creator’s one true name is God, and not HaShem, Ram, Allah, or something else. And it becomes harder, as well, to assume that you, and those like you, enjoy a special place in the Creator’s grand design.

When that recognition sinks in, many of us grow angry and afraid. Others undergo a kind of death, even if they try to keep up appearances. Some of the most powerful people, I suspect, are closet nihilists of this kind. I’m certain it’s the case with our current president, along with many Wall Street titans. And we should probably add to the list a fair number of religious leaders. On some level, they’ve realized it’s all a game—the biblical prophets, Buddha’s enlightenment, the Sermon on the Mount, Muhammad’s ascending into heaven.

I understand their situation very well because it’s exactly where I found myself when I finished college. I had no idea what I should do next because I no longer believed in anything. I still don’t, in a certain way, but everything has changed for me.

The change didn’t come from reading sutras or from the many gifted teachers I’ve met. Instead, I was changed—I was set free—by emptiness itself: specifically, Zen meditation on “Mu,” which can be translated as “nothing.” You might spend many years sitting with Mu, and until the change happens, you’re trapped. You can’t go forward and you can’t go back. You have to become the emptiness, but when you do, there’s a big surprise: a boundless compassion emanating from you...

Whether we meditate or not—and most of humanity never will—what really matters is gratitude. That’s the heart of spirituality. And gratitude connects us: it lets us see that we are all connected. Any goodness we encounter in the world is a gift from people now and in the past—a handful of people we know by name, and millions of others whose names we’ll never know. For their countless acts of generosity, we owe them our deepest gratitude. Our job is to take the lantern from their hands and carry it a little farther down the road."