With Enough Love
With enough love, anything can be healed. It’s easy enough to say, but how does it work in the real world? People such as Victor Frankel, who wrote Man’s Search for Meaning, the now classic treatise on the subject, chronicled how, with a enough love, even years spent in a concentration camp could be healed. Though Victor wrote that book decades ago, the idea that with enough love anything can be healed can still seem startling, even suspect.
This seems especially true when our culture experiences the trauma of an event like the Virginia Tech shootings. People ask, “how could anyone do something so heinous?” It is hard to imagine how someone could be so emotionally wounded that the only way they could deal with their trauma would be to hurt other people. And yet, if we look around, we see people hurting each other in smaller ways every day. Perhaps it’s not whether we hurt people, it’s how often and how badly we hurt them.
At some point, we must come to understand our collective shadow. When famous people such as Dr. Phil tell us that there is no way to know why a person would do what they did at Virginia Tech, he is not really doing us any favors. The truth is, we do know. We just don’t want own it. There is such intense agony among the friends and family members who were killed or wounded. It can be very challenging to remember that the young man who did the shooting had a family as well. His parents and relatives are grieving as they search for answers in their own souls. It’s easy to see that there is more than enough grief to go around.
And yet, most spiritual teachers tell us that love is the answer. Even in such a tragic situation, time and love can heal. Some people are already saying that they will never heal, that they will never get over it, that they intend to wear their grief for the rest of their lives in some (I believe misguided) belief that their mantle of grief will somehow serve their deceased loved ones. Instead, it’s a recipe for making sure that the wounds stay fresh, and that the suffering continues. I have no doubt that the people who passed away on that fateful day would want their relatives, loved ones, friends and classmates to be able to heal and move on with their lives. Perhaps even more, there might be some gift in this entire experience. It may be hard to see now, in fact it may be hard to see for quite awhile, but there are gifts in every experience we ever have. There are always gifts.
When I lost Carl, one of my best friends, in a motorcycle accident many years ago, at first I thought I would lose my mind. I happened to be at my friend’s house when his mother got the call. Her piercing and desolate scream tore through my heart like a bomb. I knew instantly that something horrible had happened. I remember walking around the hills near his home, places we had frequented so many times in the years of our friendship. I questioned the existence of God, I railed against the unfairness of it all.
Over time, with a lot of help, I begin to heal. One of the many gifts that came out of the experience of my friend’s death was a growing sense of spirituality. You see, Carl came and visited me several times that summer. In my dreams, he always appeared happy. He told me that he had moved on and was busy with other spiritual work and not to worry about him at all. He also told me to get on with my own life, to use his passing as an opening into my own heart and soul.
I took him seriously precisely because the experience of losing him was so powerful. I began to question everything, all of my assumptions, all of my stories about the meaning of life. Or precisely, I begin to question my stance of atheism, which I had adopted in my rage against what I thought was an unjust and vengeful God. As I detail in my book, Drunk with Wonder: Awakening to the God Within, Carl had saved my life only three weeks before his death. I didn’t even feel as though I’d had a chance to thank him properly, and now he was gone.
After a rough summer, I went on with my life, fell in love, got married, graduated from college, and in the process picked up a drinking problem. I had no idea how to feel my feelings, how to deal with my emotions, so I took my grief at Carl’s passing (along with many, many other issues) and shoved them into a bottle. I realize now that most of us find ways to cope with feelings we don’t know what to do with. Sadly, our coping mechanisms often include addictions. Our culture is really good at teaching us how to numb our feelings. We’re all experts at distracting ourselves with food, drink, drugs, sex, work and so on.
Whenever we’re faced with loss, we have a choice. We can numb it out, or we can feel our feelings and look for the gifts in what can seem to be the most heinous, senseless tragedy we could ever imagine. I suggest that we choose love, that we choose to hold each other close. Hug one another, tell everyone you love that you love them. Hold nothing back. The next time you see someone who seems to be isolated and alone, say hello. Choose to reach out. Choose to make a difference. With enough love, anything can be healed.
Steve Ryals, author of Drunk with Wonder: Awakening to the God Within went from homeless and shooting drugs in San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury district at 17 to graduating from UC Berkeley on the Dean’s List six years later.
Drunk with Wonder was written, edited and designed with almost no help from fossil fuels. Steve is proud to say that Drunk with Wonder is printed on 60# Thor Offset acid-free, recycled paper with soy-based ink. Drunk with Wonder is the culmination of years of research and decades of personal experience.It’s been hailed as where “Conversations with God meets What the Bleep Do we Know?” To learn more about this timely book go to: http://drunkwithwonder.com, http://drunkwithwonder.blogspot.com
