STOPPING THE WAR

It was a couple of years ago.

I almost always keep my office door open. So, no surprise when I looked up from working on my newsletter column to see Walter leaning in, half waving a hand at me.

“James,” he said. “There’s a call for you.”

I asked, “Who is it, Walter?”

He raised his eyebrows and shook his head. His duties are primarily concerned with bookkeeping and maintaining databases, both of which he is very good at. But phone answering, while in the job description, is definitely not his strong suit. “He asked for Reverend Ford.”

Well, that told me something. If they ask for the pastor or the father, I know I’m about to be asked for money. When asked for by name, well, it still can be about money, times really are hard. And churches are down near the bottom of the last resort list. Those conversations can be so difficult, particularly as we have so little money to give to people. Still, that conversation simply comes with the territory. But, with my name involved it can also be about other things. And, so I hoped.

I thanked Walter, turned back to the phone, picked it up, and said, “James here.”

The person on the other end of the phone introduced himself. Let’s say his name was Donald. He said he read my blog. So, I immediately assumed he was a discerning sort. He also said he was hoping to swing by and talk a little. I said, sure, I have some time tomorrow. Would that work? He apologized and said he’s shipping out to Iraq and will be on a plane tomorrow morning.

I replied that if he could get here in the next forty-five minutes or so, I could give him an hour. After that I had appointments stacked pretty much into the evening, when I would be attending a committee meeting. Donald said he was staying with his girl friend at Brown, the sprawling university campus that pretty much surrounded our church and how he could easily be here in twenty minutes.

I explained where to look for the complex of offices in our Parish House, the building immediately behind the Meeting House, which is a pretty prominent building in the neighborhood. If you’re in the College Hill area of Providence’s East Side it is very hard to miss First Unitarian.

When Donald arrived I figured he was eighteen or nineteen. He was thin and didn’t look military, or rather, wouldn’t have except for the close cropped horseshoe of hair on an otherwise shaved head, telegraphing he was probably a Marine. Although I don’t think we ever actually discussed which branch of the service he was in. He was good looking, but there was something vaguely distracted in his manner.

The pleasantries included his explaining he was on leave before returning for a second tour in country. I had to revise my estimation of his age up by a year or two. He then said how he really needed some guidance.

I thought perhaps we were going to be talking about conscientious objection. If he really followed my blog he’d know that while it mostly is concerned with religion and spirituality, it also touches on cultural issues, and it includes politics. It doesn’t take reading many posts to know where my politics lay including my profound concerns with our current military engagements.

Instead, he said he has nightmares. I realized that haunted look that shadowed him had come from some place different than I’d been assuming. I asked if he was seeing a counselor. He said he is not. And he will not. It could keep him from returning to Iraq with his company.

He said, “I need peace.” He paused. And then added, “I think meditation could help.”

Peace. Two and a half millennia ago the Buddha spoke of our broken hearts, our persisting dis-ease, that sense of anguish, which seems to follow human life no matter what we do, no matter who we are. And he spoke of peace, of a way through to another shore. And, since that time, people have been investigating what that shore might look like, what peace is, and how we might achieve it.

Young Donald was just the latest pilgrim on that way.

“Meditation might help,” I responded. “I’m sure it will. But, talking with someone can help, as well, particularly if you’re having nightmares. Want to start there?” I waited. Turned out not really, too personal, too hard. I shrugged. I hope only mentally. We start where we are. And we do what we can from that place. As a spiritual director, I’ve learned much of the art, is the art of waiting.

The story is old, much older than the great physician, who diagnosed the problem and prescribed a cure, and we who follow his guidance. Whatever the circumstances of our lives, somewhere along the way we notice things are not as rosy as perhaps we’d been led to believe. A bad relationship. Health issues. Domestic violence. Hating one’s job. Bored. And the big things, too. Now, in our culture, which has a measure of insulation from the worst things that can happen, actually witnessing hunger or worse, grinding poverty or the ravages of war can be devastating. What was a low grade anxiety can become a crisis.

It certainly appears Donald saw some of the worst of the ugly and the hurt up front and without any option to ignore it. What precisely, I never knew. What I could be sure of was that the world’s sadness seeped into his dreams.

And, his response was a longing for peace. Possibly, no doubt, in part a desire to run away. To get away is one of the primary animal responses encoded into our hearts. But, he chose to come to a teacher of Zen meditation. And whatever the reasons, whatever the ideas he brought with him, the currents of his mysterious karma led him into my office, and to have a brief conversation about peace and Buddhist meditation.

Our English word peace derives through Anglo Norman back to Latin. It has to do with a pact or covenant, and means to end hostility, to put an end to war. Works for me. It is associated with the Greek eirene, which for early translators of the Bible was meant to stand for the Hebrew shalom, which in turn means safety or welfare, or even prosperity. These also work for me. In Buddhism the term santi is what we usually find translated into English as peace. Its distant roots appear to mean ceasing to labor, to rest. And, that works for me, too.

I suspect the constellation of our heart’s longing is somehow putting down our burden, stopping the war, finding that moment when and where all is right. When we say peace, we usually are seeking, to use that felicitous line from the King James Bible, that “peace that passes all understanding.” And sometimes, as with Donald at that moment in his life, we’re seeking it urgently, like that man whose hair is on fire, trying to put an end to the pain.

I explained to him as best and briefly as I could what Zen meditation looks like, at least as we begin it. He seemed grateful. I also said meditation as central as it is, still, isn’t enough. I noticed an old and worn copy of Robert Aitken’s Taking the Path of Zen on my bookshelf. I thought, a bit dated, but serviceable. I pulled it down and gave it to him. As he left I gave him my email address and I reminded him it would be a very good idea to talk with someone about those nightmares.

I never heard from him again.

I think about him.

And that war, which rages in our hearts.