Thursday, April 18, 2013

A Race Unfinished

Monday was the annual running of the Boston Marathon, a central event in Boston life.  It falls on Patriots Day, a Boston-area holiday commemorating “the shot heard ‘round the world” in Lexington in 1775, the subsequent victory over the British at Concord, and the de facto start of the American Revolution.  It is a holiday that begins with a Red Sox baseball game in the morning, the running of the 26 mile race along a course lined the with thousands of well-wishing spectators, and great festive celebrations at the finish line in the Back Bay heart of Boston.  The race includes many top-professional runners, followed by a hoard of amateurs fulfilling personal challenges or raising money for their charities.  It is always an inspiring day in Boston where unity, joy, and sharing is paramount.

But this year’s race was different.  For some unknown reason, a person(s) filled with hate and irrationality decided to break apart this universal coming together by setting off two bombs among innocent well-wishing spectators at the finish line.  3 dead; 50 critically/seriously wounded; over a hundred more with other injuries.  Overwhelming acts of ensuing heroism and inspiring help from runners, spectators, and emergency responders could not take away the horror and inexplicability of this act.  Most responsible journalists, commentators and law enforcement officials pleaded against speculating about the perpetrator(s), to let the investigation run its course until the facts could be determined.  It is a very wise cautionary pleading to us all.

In my own way, I immediately felt a personal kinship to this tragedy, even from this distance.  I spent the first couple of decades of my personal/professional life in Boston’s Back Bay, on Boylston Street, where this violent tragedy occurred.  And a couple of more decades thereafter in/out of Boston.  It is a marvelous city that still holds many memories and friendships, connections loosened over time but still existent.  And so some of the concern and suffering is personal.  My heart may go out to the disturbed individual(s) who came to do this act.  But I confess that my heart goes out even more to the victims.

But isn’t, or shouldn’t, all such instances be personal to us?  An insult to our supposed humanity, a backward step in our path to being civilized, a wake-up call to live better in harmony with God, nature and our contemporary human beings?

This incident in Boston, and my past/present connection to it, made me recall many other such “connected” events in my life.  I am a deep student of history, as is known to my friends and likely obvious to readers of this blog.  For whatever larger reason, I seem to have had personal contact with various altering events through my life’s passage.

I was born two weeks after the end of World War II and the dawn of this age of American and world transformation.  I grew up in Arkansas, where the violent upheaval of the modern civil rights movement began with the integration of the Little Rock schools in the mid-1950s.  That connection came full circle when I lived in Boston during its school busing violence in the 1970s.

In the mid-1980s I made my first trip out of the country, to Haiti, arriving just weeks after the overthrow of its long-term father/son dictatorship.  The joy and future promise of the people surrounded me.  When the massive earthquake hit there a few years ago, I could easily picture and relate to the people living in renewed squalor and pain.

In 1997 I went to Scotland and Ireland on a family history pursuit of my ancestors.  The night I arrived in London, I turned on the TV to hear the first reports of Princess Diana’s death.  A week of public grieving and ceremony surrounded my wandering trip.  But that trip also included a stop in Northern Ireland on the opening day of reconciliation talks between the IRA and the British that ultimately resulted in the Easter Accords, a fragile peace still in place today.

In 1999, I fulfilled a life-long dream by journeying to Tibet, bookended by sightseeing in China.  The unexpected 50th anniversary celebration of the People’s Republic of China resulted in my having a private guided tour of Tibet.  It gave me a personal understanding of the problem of self-determination for these most gentle people.  My heart continues to suffer over each violent event or self-immolation that occurs there today.

In the summer of 2001, I attended a Buddhist conference in New York City.  The meeting site was at the Sheraton Hotel, located in the plaza adjacent to the Twin Towers.  Two months later, the hotel I had stayed in, and the plaza I had walked in, were all completely gone due to the violent work of 18 Arab traitors to Islam.

But in 2005, I made several trips to the Middle East, to Lebanon specifically, and fell in love with the people there.  I arrived just a few days after the assassination of their Prime Minister.  After years of civil war, thus began Lebanon’s march to independence from Syrian domination – a freedom march which surrounded all my subsequent visits.  The experience allowed me to better understand the Middle East issue that remains still so intractable today.

And so Boston renews my sense of connectedness not just to world events, but to the world’s people.  Humanity moves, lurches from event to event.  Yet movement is continuous, and in the end the people are still all connected to one another.  The events of this world are not just newspaper headlines, or pundit pontifications.  They are the people and their individual stories that create their outcomes – outcomes affecting both them and me if I open up to them.  They are the stories that bring us together, and remind us once again that all things connect all people into one universal community.  It can be easy to hate who you do not know.  That is why we must work to know – to make hating a little bit harder.

As I sit here on the porch of my spiritual home in the mountains, the clouds are moving in over the peaks of the multiple mountain ranges in view.  They provide an increasing cover of darkness over the valley below, and soon the fog will completely envelop me, and my view will become very limited.  And then the rain will come.  But I will be reminded that the rain will give gentle nourishment to all life that lies below the dark clouds.  Then the clouds will eventually lift and the longer view will be seen and understood once again.  And the light of the sun will come out once more.

We will once again go about our daily lives, hopefully with a somewhat altered and better view.  The Boston Marathon was not competed this year.  Our work towards humanity and love is another race not yet complete.  As I finish this writing, the rain is ending and the sun is now peeking through.  May that sunlight illuminate, and make ever more clear to us, the long marathon course we must still travel.

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