Sometimes you have to ponder the imponderable.
The beautiful Memorial Day weekend was one of those beauties we get sometimes in the Northeast. The middle day, Sunday, was the highlight, the first really warm, summery day of the year. Abundant sunshine, a cool breeze, just right, and in the gardens around my house, hundreds of visitors, soaking up the sunny day, enjoying the breathless beauty of the gardens that fill the property.
I spent the afternoon reading while sitting in a golf cart at the edge of the marsh that borders the gardens. I had put down a book by the young writer Ishmael Behan whose memoir tells of his two-year trek through Sierra Leone as a 12 year old conscript to fight for the government’s army against rebel groups. He is forced to commit horrible acts of violence and butchery before being rescued by UNICEF at age 16. It’s a vivid and heart-rending account of the atrocities he sees.
Somewhat disheartened I put down the book and began reading Edward Wong’s piece in the Times’ Week in Review section about the devastation in China from the earthquake that shook the Sichuan area a week ago. Wong’s writing reflected his gut-wrenching dismay over the mutilation of many of the victims in a school that had collapsed on the students. He described the plight of a youngster whose legs had been crushed and the anguish of the young boy when they told him they would have to amputate his legs on the spot. He fought it so hard they were forced to concede and the boy was taken from the rubble and moved to a hospital.
It turned out to be only a holding action and once in the hospital, the boy was anesthetized and his legs amputated. Wong, a veteran reporter of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and no stranger to human tragedy was obviously deeply moved by the young boy’s trauma but was unwilling to draw comparisons between the relative tragedies he had been witness to.
I finished Wong’s piece and turned again to the garden. The sun still shone, the breeze was light, and visitors would stop to exchange pleasantries. My dog was dozing next to me in the sun. Great God, I thought, what in the world is going on? How is it that I sit here in such comfort while so many are experiencing pain and suffering and despair? How does anyone square all this. How can a merciful God allow this?
For several years I worked in New York City at the very end of the island and every day I came out to lunch and there was a Hare Krishna standing in front of the building. He had stopped me once to hand out literature and somehow we struck up a conversation. It became a regular thing for the two of us to talk and I became fascinated with his beliefs about the many sequential lives we are all destined to lead. So that while you may be today in a life of sorrow and pain, the great wheel would turn and on your reincarnation you might find yourself a man of wealth and comfort.
Life, he often told me, was like a movie reel made up of thousands of individual frames so the scene was continuously changing, the environment shifting and your position aligning to the changing frames. ”We are called on to play many roles,” he told me, “and often times those roles shift dramatically from one life to the next. Only through this reincarnation can we begin to understand the fullness of the mercy and wisdom of Krishna.”
And while I argued the Christian notion of rewards in the afterlife, I began to question the logic of my beliefs with him each time we talked and I was never quite sure he was wrong. China and Burma and Sierra Leone made it all jump out at me. Somehow, equity had been pilfered.
That was the imponderable on that sunny day in the garden.
No comments:
Post a Comment