Some years ago, I spent 18 months working as a chaplain at hospital that is a Level 1 Trauma Center, meaning they treat the victims of the worst accidents of all sorts in a five county area. Every chaplain who works at a Level 1 hospital must take a turn at being on-call overnight and having the pager which calls him or her to the Trauma Emergency Room to pray for patients, be a calm presence to doctors, nurses, and staff, and to minister to the families of trauma patients.
As the on-call Chaplain, I witnessed people brought in who were injured in accidents involving cars, motorcycles, pools, kitchens, lawn mowers, farm equipment, ladders, electrical works, guns, knives, drugs, and head injuries. Anyone who loses consciousness or loses a lot of blood goes to the Trauma Bay. There the utmost priority is stabilization – getting the patient’s heart rate, blood pressure, and pulmonary function stabilized. Sometimes a patient arrives with the EMT’s performing CPR and the Trauma Team takes over with intubation and chest compressions. They will do numerous compressions while administering chemical blood pressure boosters. They’ll pause to find a heartbeat. Sometimes, nothing, and they start the process over again. The compressions are hard; nurses and doctors take turns. They pause…a few heartbeats show up on the monitor then stop; more compressions.
In the Trauma Bay once, I prayed with a mother and father as they stood at the end of their 19 year-old daughter’s gurney as the Trauma Team worked furiously for thirty minutes trying to get her heart to beat on its own. The doctors and nurses did not want to give up. The parents of course did not want to give up. But for whatever reason the young woman’s body would not respond to medical intervention. I was overwhelmed by witnessing the utter tragedy as her parents stood in shock hearing the pronouncement of their daughter’s death.
Yet I could go on. In the Trauma Bay I witnessed a man dying from a gunshot wound to the stomach – apparently a bystander on the wrong street corner that night. And there was the four-year old Amish girl who fell into a grain elevator and suffocated before her frantic father could find her. She was brought to the hospital by helicopter for naught. She lay lifeless in the Trauma Bay her little bare feet still dirty from play – a heart-breaking sight. There was the truck driver injured and sobbing after running a stop sign on a country road killing three teenagers in an open Jeep. In addition were the parents of the fourth teen in the jeep. They could not be consoled as their daughter lay barely alive in the Intensive Care Unit.
All of what I just described is something Jon Kabatt-Zinn calls Full Catastrophe Living. In the face of such catastrophes, how do medical workers keep their sanity? How do parents cope with losing their young children? How do chaplains keep from losing their religion?
In his book Full Catastrophe Living, Kabatt-Zinn describes meditation and mindfulness as the key to coping with these catastrophic events. The meditation Kabatt-Zinn prescribes he does not call a Buddhist practice but that’s what it is; Kabatt-Zinn teaches mindfulness and meditation, he talks about the impermanence of things, about non-striving (the same as non-attachment) and he even instructs Yoga as a way of meditating. If there is any doubt what Kabat-Zinn is teaching is Buddhism, you need only look at the Preface of his book which is written with an economy of words by Thich Nhat Hanh. He says, “When the dharma is really taking care of the problems of life, it is true dharma.” (Kabat-Zinn, p xiii)
The first step of the dharma or The Way or the practice is to accept that to be human is to suffer. Consider the oldest narrative the Western world has about suffering – the biblical story of Job. When God brags to the prosecutor of his heavenly court known as the Sah-tahn, God makes the claim that Job is such a righteous man. The Sah –tahn then replies, “Well that’s because you put a fence around him, you protect him from the vagaries of life.” And that’s when the heavenly wager is made: God would make Job suffer and if Job cursed God for his suffering then God would give Job over to the Sahtahn. So God set out to put every calamity on Job – his livestock was stolen, his servants killed, his children died when their house collapsed, and a pox was cast upon him. Every cause of human suffering: human evil, natural phenomenon, and disease. Job never cursed God but he did finally give himself over to his pain and suffering. Job stopped trying to figure out why God would punish a good man: Job faced the reality of his powerlessness and his suffering and sat down in ashes, grieving. From then on, it’s not IF something bad happens to good people but WHEN bad things happen to good people.
Pema Chodron, Buddhist nun, knows this well. In her book, When Things Fall Apart, she examines with frankness and tenderness the reality that life is messy and that if something can go wrong it will. Along with that reality comes fear, a natural fear of living in chaos. And because we have been taught to run from our fears, we never really face our living with calamity or even our discomfort at lesser problems of life. We tend to do anything to avoid being afraid: we run, we hide, we anesthetize, we distract ourselves, we tell ourselves stories to avoid the pain of fear. It’s natural that we do this; all creatures feel fear and most times they will retract or retreat from what they perceive as danger. But Chodron says that being aware of and staying with our fears in the face of the unknown is the only way to see through to the real world of impermanence. Yet we also discover the real world of compassion, wonder, and courage.
Chodron says, “When things fall apart and we’re on the verge of we know not what, the test for each of us is to stay on that brink….” (Chodron p 9) The Trauma Bay at Strong Hospital is a place that can test a person in that way every day. In the drama that unfolds as the Trauma Team fights to keep patients alive, no one in that bay knows what will happen next. As witness to this and as minister to loved ones of the patient, together we had to sit on that brink of the unknown. And I found if I tried to fill that groundlessness with small talk, platitudes, even prayer, my ministry felt wrong somehow. But now I realize my own discomfort in that place of the unknown caused me to try and allay the family’s fear for their loved one. Now I read Chodron and realize my chatter was not helping anyone. Indeed, my best ministry came when I stayed with the family on that brink as a silent witness to their pain, a calm presence in the midst of chaos. Still, it was no easy task.
Chodron goes on to say, “The spiritual journey is not about heaven and finally getting to a place that’s really swell. In fact, that way of looking at things is what keeps us miserable. Thinking we can find some lasting pleasure and avoid pain is what in Buddhism is called samsara, a hopeless cycle that goes round and round endlessly and causes us to suffer greatly.” (Chodron p 9) The Job narrative confirms the idea that one can’t live life without pain and suffering. Once we accept that reality, once we accept our powerlessness in some situations, we can begin to work on how to be present to it and learn something about living our lives with clarity. We see that Stuff Happens. Even if human constructs of evil were eradicated we would still live in a hazardous universe where disease and accident beset us. We see that we must live with this knowledge and abide the physical and emotional pain which come in the aftermath of Stuff Happening.
How do we do this?
We take some cues from Pema Chodron. The thing I like about her is she teaches one of the oldest forms of Buddhism and she’s gained expertise in a way few Westerners do. And I find her accessible as American born and having lived a similar lifestyle before entering a Buddhist nunnery. In fact, she tells the story of her failed marriage. Her husband had come home one day and out of the blue told her he was having an affair and wanted a divorce. She says when she heard this everything stopped and for a moment she stood in silent stillness. Then she said, “I regrouped and picked up a stone and threw it at him.” (Chodron p10)
She goes on to say that she began her practice of Buddhism because she was not able to return to her secure world of dependence on her husband. With mindfulness and meditation, she was able to stay with her “shakiness – to stay with her broken heart with a rumbling stomach, with the feeling of hopelessness and wanting to get revenge – that is the path of true awakening,” she says. “Sticking with that uncertainty, getting the knack of relaxing in the midst of chaos, learning not to panic – this is the spiritual path,” says Chodron (p 10)
In her book, When Things Fall Apart, Chodron teaches the Eight Worldly Dharmas. Dharma is a difficult word to translate into English and it has multiple meanings between Hinduism and Buddhism. But with the Eight Worldly Dharmas, dharma means phenomena or the playing out of things which keep us on the wheel of samsara or suffering. They are akin to the 7 deadly sins. The Eight Worldly Dharmas are described:
Pleasure and our pursuit of it while avoiding Pain
We are attached to Praise and try to avoid criticism and blame
We are attached to Fame and try to avoid Disgrace
We are attached to Gain, to getting what we want and don’t like to lose (Loss) what we have
Now think for a moment about these pairs: Pleasure and Pain, Praise and Blame, Fame and Disgrace, Gain and Loss. I’m sure we all have been in these loops at some time in our lives. I struggle with Praise and Blame. I’ve been conditioned by my family of origin to be a pleaser. I knew when I started this path of ministry this would be something I would have to work on. It took a long time to recognize what situations triggered that pleasing behavior but I have since become more mindful of those triggers. This doesn’t mean my over-functioning never occurs but being aware of it and knowing there is nothing that requires my pleasing behaviors, I can gently extract myself from that pattern. What about you? Do you recognize yourself in any of these patterns?
Chodron says the irony is the Eight Worldly Dharmas have no basis in reality – they are all constructs of our experience in life, the stories we’ve been told about ourselves, the stories we tell about ourselves. Yet we don’t have to necessarily rid ourselves of these perceptions but befriend them, let them teach us about how and why they hook us. We need to see how the Eight Worldly Dharmas color our perception of reality, how they aren’t all that solid, Chodron says (p 46).
The practice of mindfulness and meditation will enhance our ability to deconstruct the self-perceptions which hurt us. The practice of meditation is not a vacation from reality but a venture into it – where there’s no escape from the truth of yourself. Remember the Spider in the Meditation Room story? The young acolyte tells his teacher he is finally getting the hang of meditation. The only problem is every time he enters a heightened state of awareness, a big ugly spider suddenly appears in front of him, dangling from his thread. The student wants to take a knife into the next session and get rid of it. But the wise teacher suggests that he instead take a piece of chalk and simply put an X on the spider’s belly. The next day, the student runs to his teacher and says, I did it! I marked the spider’s belly! Good work says the teacher as he reaches over and lifts the student’s shirt to show a large X on his own belly. Good work, the teacher says.
This is the challenging part of meditation practice – coming to terms with yourself and all your fears. If you are thinking of taking up a practice, it might be good to have a teacher or a mentor to whom you can discuss your experiences.
If we all could find a way to be more aware, more compassionate, more loving to ourselves and others, we can remove those roadblocks at which we tend to get stuck and put out into the world our hope for peace and our practice of non-aggression. May it be so.
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