The Week of 4/17: Suffering Goes Big!

In the last four days--sister in law diagnosed w/cancer. Surgery today. Co-worker's baby rushed to ICU with life-threatening low-level hemoglobin count. Thirtysomething friend, newly wed--killed in a car accident. Her husband's teen son, also in the car now in an induced coma.

So here I am praying away for people, doing tonglen. Even went to St. Bart's church on 50th and spent my lunch hour with the "Angel". Saw it/her there years ago when there for a Sakyong Mipam talk. She's in a small room, a larger than life-size Angel in alabaster.

And no I don't watch re-runs of "Touched By An Angel" and I do not, I repeat do not have a pewter angel on my key chain. But I'm telling you, you step in to a small room with a thousand pound, white Angel? Hey, sh*t happens.

Then it hits me--I'm one of six billion people on the planet. Doing my scrawny, undernourished, distracted tonglen practice--who's covering the other 5.97872 billion peeps? Okay, so not all of us are suffering. But if you just stop for a minute and think about the war fare, poverty, disease, famine--at any given moment there are a lot of people in real distress.

And that's just counting the humans. How many beings are in the animal kingdom? So what to do? It seems insurmountable, the amount of suffering being experienced at any given time. Given all that, here I am at work sleepy from waking at six a.m. PTT (pre-toddler time) to practice, but mentally whining because I want an iced mochacino.

I remember when I lived at a Dharma center. There was a Tibetan teacher visiting, waiting just outside the shrine room, ready to go in and give a talk. There was this really sweet family from Montreal there, well they come down the stairs, late for the talk--and see the lama there, ready to go in.

But the little boy (he was about thirteen) was just crying a river. This teacher looks over and the boy's sister says, with that kind of perfect, child's lack of pretense--"He just found out his grandmother dies. He misses her". And man, this teacher's whole face, like the molecular structure of it changed. It softened and re-formed and melted and tears just started streaming down his cheeks.

And he walks over to the boy and puts a hand on his shoulder and the little boy didn't think twice he just grabbed this Lama and hugged him and folded his whole little body in to him and they cried and the boys snot flowed down these monk's crimson robes and they stood there together. And that teacher wasn't going anywhere. A hurricane couldn't have moved him from that boy's side.

I haven't thought about that for a long time. Could I ever care for a stranger like that? I'm going to get an iced mochaninco. I'm going to keep getting up at PTT--something about that feels right. I'll probably forget about other people's miseries until something jars me back to that reality. I'm glad my family's safe.

That teacher? One of the strongest, kindest, wisest most straightforward humans I ever had the good fortune to be around. His ability to be truly present was the result of hard work. A lifetime of literally reshaping his intention. He died a few years later in a car accident in India.