Musing #9: Reality

“Our hardest and holiest work is to not look away”

Yesterday evening I went to the shops and when I got home my 15-year-old daughter was watching a Dispatches program on Channel 4 entitled, Kill Zone: Inside Gaza.  The graphic footage of what has happened and is happening to people in Gaza was harrowing.  There were no advert breaks during the program but, where the adverts would have been, a notice warning viewers that they may find some of the images distressing and that they included footage of injured children. I asked my daughter: Do you want to watch this? She nodded.  So, I sat with her, and we watched the horror that is reality for so many unfold before our eyes.  Knowing that this reality is only one of many around the world which seem impossibly inhumane and unliveable.

What should I do as a parent?  As a mother my primary concern was for my daughter: how would she respond to these images?  And yet I watched children with multiple injuries and listened to them talk of the multiple family members they had lost.  Their reality is so bleak.  As I went to bed I looked out my window and thought that in another part of the world, somewhere I can not see, that reality continues.

A couple of days ago I was listening to a radio discussion about a novel set in the near future, or may be the present, which deals with climate change.  In the novel one of the characters observes people laying out their towels on a British beach in the sunshine and says to another character: How can they do this?  How can they carry on as if nothing is happening? Don’t they realise that this is our planet falling apart? (or words to that effect).  In the discussion the author and the other participants talked of how we live in two different realities: most of us are fully aware of the effects of climate change and the suffering and radical changes they will bring, but at the same time we have to carry on with life, so we do. 

The realities of our own life in the here and now tend to supersede any other realities that we know of.  We tune out some of the news we hear: we numb ourselves to the pain that we know exists.  And, often, we have pain and anxiety in our own reality which can not be easily brushed aside: it is as real as the suffering on the other side of the planet and as real as the suffering that is coming.

The quote above is from Rabbi Sharon Brous.  These words - our hardest and holiest work is not to look away – struck me as true on so many levels.  It is easy to look away; to carry on as if nothing is happening; to let things happen to other people; to ignore the person I had an argument with.  But is it right? What is hard is also holy work: when we face the ugliness of humanity something shifts in us.  If we can stay with that pain we open up cracks that let Love in, even in the midst of the suffering.

We can not function and take on all the realities that exist on our planet at the same time: the pain would break us.  But neither do I want to ignore them.  I know that when I sat down to watch that program last night – doing so not because I wanted to but because I wanted to see what my daughter saw – I opened myself up to the suffering of other human beings.  I witnessed other lives and, in some intangible way, I let their souls speak to mine.  Did anything change?  In the horrendous situation I was watching, the news this morning would seem to say a resounding no.  But, did anything change?  Somewhere inside me I think something did, because I recognised and acknowledged another human being in pain.

At the beginning of Rabbi Sharon Brous’ reflection that I read this morning she says: A Rabbinic text from the ninth century declares that every person is accompanied, at all times, by a procession of angels crying out, “Make way, for an image of the Holy One is approaching.”

Every person… My prayer is that we will know that for ourselves, and that we will honour it in each person we meet and in those that we see in their suffering on our screens.  Let us not turn away from them but do the hard and holy work, reaching out – in what ever way we can – into the pain of our kin.