Welcome back. So in this session, as we continue to complicate in a redemptive way the meaning of compassion — in this session and the next one, I want to focus on points of tension. We really are wandering here into the realm of paradox, of reality and mystery completely intertwined.

Something I’ve been thinking about before and during and since the Dharamsala gathering is the importance of conflict in human life. We have a lot of problematic, even catastrophic conflict in our world right now, but wise people keep reminding me that conflict is not all bad. That it can be a good. That it is, of course, inevitable and necessary, and always has a potentiality to be generative and productive. Conflict is always telling us something important. A cousin to conflict is tension — and just remember that the flip side of tension is that it is electricity. This is all true even and especially with something as important as compassion.

So one fascinating tension that emerged and really built to a very complicated place was around how we talk about the meaning and the metaphors of compassion itself — that we can superficially speak of it as such a beautiful thing — and it can be — but it is also fierce. It is struggle, and it is strength. That’s what I’m going to go into next time.

This time I want to focus on the problem that arose, the discomfort that arose with the notion of unity, of oneness. It is something that His Holiness the Dalai Lama repeats often. It is a deep truth, a deep belief that resides in deep time and in all of our traditions. I have reflected on this so much in recent years in my country, especially looking at those maps on election night. It’s a picture of very intricate fracture cutting in every direction. That fracture is real, and it belies this deep truth of our belonging to each other.

I think about John Powell saying to me years ago, you know, “we’re in relationship. It can be a good relationship, it can be a bad relationship, but we are in relationship with each other.”
I think it may be true in this century — all indications to the contrary, notwithstanding — that we are also becoming capable of being more conscious of that belonging, that oneness.

But at the very same time — and this was so alive in this room — that we are also remembering, rediscovering the importance of identity. That the particularity, the granularity, of our identities also matters profoundly. That it is essential to human dignity and — in fact, mysteriously — it is essential to what we have to bring to offer to each other.

Our particularity is essential to the vividness and beauty and reality of oneness. The Dalai Lama himself embodies this paradox. He is really quite universally respected as a teacher and he is rooted deeper than deep in a very particular tradition.

What comes to me from my spiritual homeland is a notion from Christianity, from Christian theology, and it’s the language of charism: that we each have our charisms, that we each have our gifts, and that our wholeness is about the bringing of that and the sharing of that.

So, that’s the beauty of oneness, and yet. In my notes, those two words are in capital letters and in bold “AND YET”. A picture of our world in this young 21st century — of its dramas and its crises and its challenges, and even of its beauties and its comforts – is not a picture that bespeaks oneness. This group in Dharamsala — and any group we would gather of us if we got honest enough — was absolutely full of vivid and heartbreaking stories that, together, tell what is also a story of our whole world — this fierce story of fracture, of fighting that is also ours and defining even if we are at some cosmic and ecological level “one.”

One of the most incredible, wisest young people among us is from Afghanistan. In these two years, in addition to suffering from global pandemic, her country has utterly changed. She has become a refugee. She founded a school for girls. She is not “one”, as she said to us with great elegance and clarity, she is not “one with the Taliban.” That is a nonsense statement. Therefore, if we are talking about unity and oneness, we have to develop — we have to also integrate a sense of reality, which includes complexity and volatility, and the tenderness of the human drama. The human drama underlies everything and that, too, was alive and well in Dharamsala.

No one in this group — and this group as a whole, as in any group of human beings — modeled certainty or perfection. But what they did dare and what they did accomplish is to sink into a level of trust and truth telling that helped them — and helped all of us present — so that we could share the common ground of our universes of hurt and loss and also muster universes of consolation and care and hope that we could extend to each other.

This has me wondering if that rootedness in a place of realism and vulnerability is in fact the opening to oneness that is available to us. That, in fact, if we reach for that, that opens a path to the oneness we aspire to when we’ve used that word in such a lofty way.

One of the phrases that was used so often — it was in the questions that people are living and it is so much a question for all of us after post-2020 years — is: how to get into a right relationship with grief. That is also getting into a right relationship with grief, with everything that goes wrong with all the losses, large and small, that always mark life and mark life writ large right now. Getting into a right relationship with that, you do that in order to get into a right relationship with life. What a radical notion that is.

So, I have taken this as an invitation to myself moving forward, and I extend it to you as we ponder our particular callings in this particular time — to take our vulnerabilities and join them where that is safe, where that is possible, as a pathway to oneness.

In closing, I have two offerings that have come to me as I have continued to grapple with this notion — how I’m making sense of the reality base here and the positive wisdom it is pointing out for the rest of us. It is actually joining insights that have always been there in our spiritual traditions and also very pragmatic and hard learnings of the big social movements of the 20th century.

I remember Isabel Wilkerson saying to me, “We changed the laws, but we didn’t change ourselves. And we find in this century that laws are fragile.” But I really do experience this generation — I experienced this again in Dharamsala — to have this intuition that they can’t heal the world or save the world in a way that crosses sustainably and robustly into future generations if they don’t attend to healing themselves.

Here’s another way I have said this: we create transformed, resilient social realities by creating transformed, resilient human beings. The wise and graceful lives I have been in conversation with over these decades teach me again and again that our work as human beings is not to get past our wounds or to resolve them but integrate them into our wholeness, into the fullness of our identities on the other side.

I think what we’re talking about here also is that, that is a way into oneness with the complexity it must have.

I will see you next time.