120406 02:57
    My cheek on His cold bloody feet, I wept. He was human, could and did die, growing tremendous doing so. Vision, memory or imagining? Is His resurrection potent in us? I remain a gnat amidst giants. My footprint in eternity a mere two square feet. To celebrate joy we need suffer pain; near or absolute loss.
    As witness to my time I’ve fallen away from the celebrity of most rich, beautiful, hansom. Moving closer to the abyss I hear His words, “Not my will, but Thine be done.” In the dark starless night I rise to suffuse myself with quotes. There finding a common tread throughout recorded history traversing all boundaries even death. A common will to live with, love, compassion and mercy
    I remember being ill, not long ago, in need of intensive therapy, massive infusions of antibiotics. A fellow sufferer, a daughter, shared a story about her father.
    He was one of the very few surviving the destruction of the battleship U.S. Arizona. She went on to share her awe of his disregard of fear. Telling me of his insistence that she transport him, instead of an Ambulance with medical technicians when involved with a stroke or, perhaps, a heart attack.
    Of saints and sinners, the deranged and composed, I love them all, their transparent reality. Life lived tolerantly.
    When I stroke Annie’s fur I am reminded of the sound of snow falling upon a windless winter night. In turn I remember being transported to a distant Methodist Church at Easter to collect varicolored eggs and chocolate bunnies . . . the rich green lawn racing beneath my feet during the hunt . . . the dirty brown sandstone bricks . . . but best of all are memories of my mother and sister’s joy at the day.
    Experience His martyrdom and weep with me the loss. Resurrect the Love learning the joy of unconditional relationship, fearless. No exceptions allowed.

“Just as a flower, which seems beautiful has color but no perfume, so are the fruitless words of a man who speaks them but does them not.” --Dhammapada

“ 07:40
    I no longer cry or grovel when so led to see the above quote instantly leaving what I wrote. “Suffer the little children . . . “ no longer makes me furious in the Memorial Mass. If it was said then/there or was quoted by another priest to slake my anguish -- the lost children of my love.
    In these moments I become the child I was, redeemed and reconciled to the harm and pain I’ve committed upon those I’ve left behind. In body but never in heart or mind. I return to Serpent Mound, Randy upon my shoulders, seeing a six foot black snake he began to wiggle and plead that I let him down. He then squat next the snake hands upon his knees. Did he speak? Pray or commune? I’ll never know. But his quest reminds me of mine at four, same posture, discovering a nest of baby pigeons upon an alleyway, eyes dead beaks open, a rictus of hunger yet.
    Why oh why did they die. Resonant still the question unanswered. Being this broken vessel incapable of the commission i still ask why any/everything.
    The snake coiled  slept on. The nest, snake and question remain. A nodal point. Gyring higher and deeper the cyclone of love moves onward from resolution to experience.
    Our playground grows from one universe to another infinity. Onward the journey renewed.

--John Andrew Holmes
“It is well to remember that the entire population of the universe, with one trifling exception, is composed of others.”

illustration borrowed from: Parabola Newsletter: Learning to See, April 5th, 2012

“ 21:11 . . . I am slumping towards exhaustion lingering in a sense of futility and molested words personal torn from the flesh of my journal. Do I publish or allow them to disappear into the Dumpster? Hell is for me noting more than waste. He lives on.

. . .  Surrender!

120405 02:58
    The Betsy!
    Happy Special Day, marking your birth.
    I remember you in pencil skirt, flats and books wafting through the edifice of Greenwich High School.     Unattainable.
    In my minds eye remembered as iconic, somewhat akin to Ann Marrow Lindbergh whose husband purchased a flute from my father for their daughter, I never saw her, or her parents either. Yet for years he would encourage me to pursue one like you, her or the adored one from third grade elementary school with whom I had a family; no more.
    But then I never had a family: biological, adopted or of any other description until hospice.
    Forgive me please, singling you out in this semi public way. Your affirmations weave me back into the days of our youth and your pages tell me of your becoming this day.
    Most men never grow up. Instead we become inflated balloons of our adolescence. As Adult as those cartoon figures floated above Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade annually in Manhattan. Goofy flouncing about hither and yon empty save for helium; modestly tethered and led.
    The only feminine presence in my life, 24/7/365, is Annie. A cat who, contrary to classical ideation, is a continual pest seeking my touch, attention, affection, resorting to laying recumbent across my keyboard or at the very least sweeping it with her vast bushy tail.
    It seems I am fated to be a solitary, completely inappropriate for human cohabitation.
    But then you are a source of sanity in what I now realize was a time when others, including myself, presumed me insane. At best an embarrassment. I apologize less now and rationalize never; externally or interiorly.
    My mother’s birthday was yesterday and my adored’s on the tenth.
    Einstein said, “If you want your children to be intelligent, read them fairy tales. If you want them to be more intelligent, read them more fairy tales.”
    My mother did this plus suffuse me with music from conception onward. I made the colossal mistake of falling asleep listening to classical music after delving into one hundred, or so, pounds of laundry looking for summer shorts. I think I did sleep but in an alternate way lost in cathedrals of genius. A maze of glory. I sleep like a wolf anyway.
    I feared I’d made a snarky reply to your most recent ‘like.’ Where it not for your very welcomed terse affirmations--too rare in my experience, especially from a woman or anyone for that matter--I’d fold my tent and run away collapsing my participation in “Social Media.” For which I need not to detail my regard anymore than why I never listen to politicians. . . .Both seem so self congratulatory, akin to Mailer’s remarks about advertisements for one’s self; Christmas Cards in front of the Mc Mansion fire place or the latest model Break My Wallet SUV.
    Have I made my amends?
    Maybe instead of ‘like,’ a ‘yes’ would suffice.
    Knowing that you are a runner, you’ll appreciate my wholesale permission to knee cap me instead.
    . . . it seems I’ve always been attracted to terse, mostly silent women; think of bating the tiger.

120330 04:17

    Mere children, trained killers, boys mustering out in Mid-Advent; hardened and invincible. His voice, amid the murmuring rhubarb of 400-to-a-barrack at Ft. Sill, Oklahoma, a clarion call. I swam through the babble introducing myself as a citizen from his home town; clear to me given his lack of an accent. We became friends in that moment until he took his life leaving no note. I’ve suffered his loss ever since. Now reconciled the pain remains.
    I did not remember him until recalling my similar intentions. The topic arose from my “Spinning Wheel of Fortune;“ collecting/collected quotes; a prayer wheel in reverse: morning ‘meditation.’
    Love, as verb, meant we entered a sacred space of friendship. His choice to end life is, on this plain, the last right he, or any of us, can exercise. I simply wish I’d had to opportunity to let Jim know I’d allow him to die in my arms accepting his choice.
    I stood on a bridge railing, over the Inter Coastal Waterway, one Christmas Eve night. I was stayed by three distinct personalities: Jesus, J. S. Bach and Fritz Eichenberg. There were absent others  recalled as witnesses, voiceless then, but having touched me equally nonetheless. Stanley Elkin is one. I was able to express my gratitude face-to-face later on.
    I confess my dying son’s concerns were outside the equation. It was only later, when at the point of farther despair, separated from my family, I called ‘home.‘ He answered and asked, “Will I ever see you again?” My selfishness  was crushed, crumpled and spindled as if I’d been a fly swatted. There began my return to the life I had attempted to abandon and the journey to Now.
    At the last day he embraced me, voiced his love, then laid down to drown in his own blood, dying from Leukemia. I had intuited the moment at his diagnosis six years earlier and had fled in terror of it. My cowardliness: leaving work late on the day of his death intuited. He waited.

120403 07:13
    Time has reconfigured the night I returned to the Paradox and lay listening to fish nibbling her hull. Jim & Patti slept oblivious my sojourn with infinity. Ours was a trio of fetid revenge, one against the other; each male longing for the other never to return. Looking back I sense we individually and collectively sought rebirth in the southward warmer climate, fleeing from encroaching winter and consequence the previous dalliance: two women one man . . . no, more nearly a boy with two mothers. Now focused through the lens of forty years distance.
    Only now remembered, the previous ‘death’ by heroin laced marijuana. Were they there, we three? My host aboard Ishmael a purported friend via familiarity with my abandoned. Did I, or she, do the leave taking, fleeing one another? For their amusement I crawled in circle beneath a gigantic paw foot oak table crying against the prospect of being crucified again and again. . . . I’ve wrestled with the imagery of that ideation until I became more fully aware the execution of criminals. A  vastly more torturous, long suffering, death than that depicted in the Bible for Jesus.
    And what if it is an illusion that death ends suffering? Resurrection and reincarnation being roughly equivalent; my sense being that as a Christian we are each ‘called’ to be the, or at the very least, part of the resurrection. To fully know and inhabit one’s life is to enter into the suffering and know the numinous as present in all life. In some sense to become co-creators with the nascent kindness and compassion indwelling in all existence without exception or boundary finding and giving peace/love to others.
    Happily I survived, an implement forged between the indifferent anvil, my father, and the hammer blows struck by the smith, my mother. To be the wealth I am now, to myself, would to be willing to do it again thrice fold. I exaggerate since even then in infancy/childhood I survived through instinct, as I did in the five times drowning, I let go seeing the nodal point when rage become insanity. My parents long ago forgiven as myself for remaining as ever loving them.
    Would that I were nearly a gnats worth one might infer from the course I’m lead. We’re no different you & i, same, same, all the same, one-and-all of us alive. Happily I am a fool regarding the ‘how’ but wisdom courts me in the “why.” Truth is sacred to me. And while I’ve read the wisdom books in toto or partially, I remain enamored of the words spoken by those who like the river stones I adore are worn by time and not the press of weight like carbon made diamonds.
    Our lives are music, rending or sweet, sounding now in the silence following our song. I sense the relationship we have with Creation is: we are Aeolian Harps knowing not who strums our hearts . . . until then reflected the dark mirror surprised.
    Before closing I was led to the following . . . I am nowhere near all that clever to find these alone . . . http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/f/friedrichn101616.html

“He who has a why to live can bear almost any how.”
“To live is to suffer, to survive is to find some meaning in the suffering.”
“That which does not kill us makes us stronger.”
“When you look into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you.”
--Friedrich Nietzsche

“There is no refuge from confession but suicide; and suicide is confession.”
--Daniel Webster

“ . .  It is possible that a man may refuse to love anything on earth; he will prove this refusal and he will carry it out by suicide. If he lives, the reason is that, whatever he may say, there still remains in him some attachment to existence; his life will be commensurate with this attachment; it will justify itself to the extent that it genuinely justifies the world. .”
--Simone de Beauvoir

“Man does not simply exist, but always decides what his existence will be, what he will become in the next moment.”
--Viktor Frankl

. . . 120404 01:27 I awoke aware that I was remiss in this: I’d not mentioned the person who saved me from suicide. And I think her ‘last’ word on the subject bears remembering. “It is amazing what unconditional love can do/heal.”

120331 10:14 Newly discovered this date . . . love as a verb--intimacy redefined . . . .

“Love doesn't just sit there, like a stone, it has to be made, like bread; remade all the time, made new.”
                    --Ursula K. LeGuin

    Regardless of gender, race or creed: attraction, lust, capture, consummation . . . then what? The greed slaked is supplanted by mechanics of ordinary life and friendship supersedes in time, as in “. . for better or worse, sickness and health . .”
    I knew a man who, like myself, had a child in distress. His council was correct: Tough Love, abandon wishful/magical  thinking, engage the problem with all objective resources available. --(derived) His child was misdiagnosed and died leaving him with bills to pay and three jobs. I cannot remember the incident giving birth to the topic but he defined marriage as: “A daily renewable bond.” I intuit his marriage prevailed while mine is no more. Being a failure in relationship I have chosen to remain celibate yet richer than my most extravagant avarice for wealth in sex or money or power through friendship. In some sense it is like Sex Addicts admonition extended from 100 to 1,001 ‘dates.’
    How would my ideal work in real time flesh and blood for others? I haven’t a clue yet celebrate the “not dying wondering.” My urge to merge waning and personal choice to not use another for mere pleasure defines my transition from adolescence at seventy-years-of-age. But then I am merely curious as to what and why I do every or anything . . . and I watch people closely, individually, corporately and communally.
    Another way of defining what I conclude is to say that laws in general are more often against than for. They defend status quo at the expense of transformation. Lamentably I have found no vessel to contain my love; neither personal nor institutional save that in the energy I call Beloved Friend. Who seems to spread my small drop of oily life upon the modest communal surrounding me in this life. The metaphor meaning to still the turbulent waters of our time--one-by-one in intimate relationship.
    In solitude I sometimes fall into the abyss. Awakening from slumber, not so much a blank slate, as absolutely nothing. Yet in unspoken covenant discover the Mother/Father Friend who catches me . . . would that I were so noble as my thoughts in flesh and blood reality. I am impaled upon the last words of Jesus, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Emily Dickinson and Gandhi. In their words and deeds I sense where I long to be: reverent to myself, mate, friend and enemy. Fully at peace with unknowing. Unity and completion is only potential in ourselves individually our relationships are from my vantage like two galaxies separate but drawn neigh. I know heaven is within us. Merged we may save life from extinction on this our nest.

120401 09:45 Addendum discovered this date:
" The curse which lies upon marriage is that too often the individuals are joined in their weakness rather than in their strength, each asking from the other instead of finding pleasure in giving. It is even more deceptive to dream of gaining through the child a plenitude, a warmth, a value, which one is unable to create for oneself; the child brings joy only to the woman who is capable of disinterestedly desiring the happiness of another, to one who without being wrapped up in self seeks to transcend her own existence."  --Simone de Beauvoir

120328 0234
    Too easily, even now, thirty-five years later I weep in memory of my children who left me. But then too I laugh with tears of joyful gratitude their brief lives gave me. The ebb and flow between thanksgiving and sorrow define our becoming fully conscious and can only be known to us in the uniqueness of our lives through surrender.
    186,282 miles per second, the speed of light measures a common rule in our communal life. And it measures the vast spread between Ideal & Real.
    Trauma & Grief are a violent, often instant, shift in how we define ourselves as safe or threatened. My emotional landscape, what I lovingly, and humorously call the cyclorama of perception and perspective, was torn asunder as if the sun had gone dark; water turned to stone the air become tar.
    Degrees of perception/perspective change as they must. This is the only measure of real life: being fully alive.    
    "Blessed are they who mourn for they will be comforted."
    I live and write from experience, not theory, and would, if I could, give you who suffer the violent collisions, convulsions, vicissitudes of the inevitable my humble peace now. I have found the end of my grief. . . . "God grant me the serenity to accept that which I cannot change” has evolved to 'God thank your for giving me the serenity. . . " coupled with an absence of fear in each and every precious moment of the infinite now. i ask that you forgive my trespass, pouring salty tears of either joy or sorrow into your shred heart. i can only say, in closing, that to me your heart is a sacred place, a cathedral domed by the starry, starry night and the glory of dawn.

"To live a spiritual life we must first find the courage to enter into the desert of our loneliness and to change it by gentle and persistent efforts into a garden of solitude." --Henri Nouwen

    . . . "Spiritual", Think: whole, wholeness, holiness forged from the hammers blows. Do no harm to anyone or anything especially yourself. And in the end we will be no longer an ego. Becoming I am not this body, face, life . . . this pain and suffering is not about me, or you, but us. Though devastated now, the garden of our heart will be renewed in time.

“This life of separateness may be compared to a dream, a phantasm, a bubble, a shadow, a drop of dew, a flash of lightning.” --Buddha

“If the only prayer you ever say in your entire life is thank you, it will (suffice) be enough.” --Meister Eckhart

120318 11:00
    In the not too distant past--or so to say--’Once-Upon-A-Time’ . . . I was as closed as a chrome plated, high tinsel strength, trailer hitch; impenetrable. More like, than unalike, the metaphor describing my parents. Who then seemed lawn ornament gazing balls adoring the yards of my childhood, reflecting the world spherically and shedding my love as rain indifferent.
    Then too, escaping my unconscious projection, now apparent, the imagery is incomplete without the pedestal upon which they were elevated God like and omniscient to my vision/version of them.
    It is my nature to deconstruct relationships, events and psyches. What arrogance! A blind man groping experience attempting to describe the meaning of life. The oddest part is that the numinous doesn’t mind and responds with hints, suggestions and manifestations slaking my greed to be loved . . . and if by God’s will . . . be love for/to others.
    It is a process available to all people (nearly fell into the feminist trap of “Mankind”, in this context it would have been generic or vernacular for consciousness. Before God we are neutered souls . . . as Einstein fabulously said: “Equally foolish and wise.” Humor being the best antidote to “Divine Rights” self derived or subjugated by.
    The Shepard’s Crook is about to sweep me from life’s stage, as are my mentors, soon to slumber in apparent death. It is for me “The sound of one hand clapping.”
    I am moved from my silent integration of tectonic shifts ongoing from various sources in the ordinary of my life.     Today I discovered a reminder of the women who loved me in ways independent of pleasure. Who in moments of converse penetrated my distemper and malevolent self-disregard forged between the inconvenience of my birth and these latter days. The distance between pleasure and joy are measured in light years.

. . . 120325 discovered this date and placed in my ‘Quote Diary”:

 “On its outer surface time is vulnerable to transience. Regardless of its sadness or beauty, each day empties and vanishes. In its deeper heart, time is transfiguration. Time minds possibility and makes sure that nothing is lost or forgotten. That which seems to pass away on the surface of time is in fact transfigured and housed in the tabernacle of memory.”  ― John O'Donohue, Anam Cara: A Book of Celtic Wisdom

 “Transience is the force of time that makes a ghost of every experience. There was never a dawn, regardless how beautiful or promising, that did not grow into a noontime. There was never a noon that did not fall into afternoon. There was never an afternoon that did not fade toward evening. There never was a day yet that did not get buried in the graveyard of the night. In this way transience makes a ghost out of everything that happens to us.”
 ― John O'Donohue, Anam Cara: A Book of Celtic Wisdom

 “When you look at some faces, you can see the turbulence of the infinite beginning to gather to the surface. This moment can open in a gaze from a stranger, or in a conversation with someone you know well. Suddenly, without their intending it or being conscious of it, their gaze lasts for only a second. In that slightest interim, something more than the person looks out.”  ― John O'Donohue, Anam Cara: A Book of Celtic Wisdom

 “...to gaze into the face of another is to gaze into the depth and entirety of his life.”
 ― John O'Donohue, Anam Cara: A Book of Celtic Wisdom

120222 04:50
    I have a premise, not unique, but specific in a broader application: You/I/We become what we consume . . . oddly reminding me of a physiological evaluation given to me individually in elementary school via word association: “Catacomb” Reply: “Entertainment”
    I was required to expand my response: to which I said I learned from a movie that people had to worship underground.
    Sixty or so years later I found another epiphany suggested via this article: I have immutable faith, belief and confidence in us -- ‘WE THE PEOPLE” -- by and within which I include all of us without boarders or boundaries, no exceptions allowed.

Acts of Love
By Chris Hedges

February 20, 2012 "TruthDig" --- Love, the deepest human commitment, the force that defies empirical examination and yet is the defining and most glorious element in human life, the love between two people, between children and parents, between friends, between partners, reminds us of why we have been created for our brief sojourns on the planet. Those who cannot love—and I have seen these deformed human beings in the wars and conflicts I covered—are spiritually and emotionally dead. They affirm themselves through destruction, first of others and then, finally, of themselves. Those incapable of love never live.

“Hell,” Dostoevsky wrote, “is the inability to love.”

And yet, so much is written and said about love that at once diminishes its grandeur and trivializes its meaning. Dr. James Luther Adams, my ethics professor at Harvard Divinity School, cautioned all of us about preaching on love, reminding us that any examination of love had to include, as Erich Fromm pointed out in “Selfishness and Self-Love,” the unmasking of pseudo-love.

God is a verb rather than a noun. God is a process rather than an entity. There is some biblical justification for this. God, after all, answered Moses’ request for revelation with the words, “I AM WHO I AM.” This phrase is probably more accurately translated “I WILL BE WHAT I WILL BE.” God seems to be saying to Moses that the reality of the divine is an experience. God comes to us in the profound flashes of insight that cut through the darkness, in the hope that permits human beings to cope with inevitable despair and suffering, in the healing solidarity of kindness, compassion and self-sacrifice, especially when this compassion allows us to reach out to others, and not only others like us, but those defined by our communities as strangers, as outcasts. “I WILL BE WHAT I WILL BE.” This reality, the reality of the eternal, must be grounded in that which we cannot touch, see or define, in mystery, in a kind of faith in the ultimate worth of compassion, even when the reality of the world around us seems to belittle compassion as futile.

“The courage to be is rooted in the God who appears when God has disappeared in the anxiety of doubt,” wrote Paul Tillich.

Aristotle said that only two living entities are capable of solitude and complete separateness: God and beast. The most acute form of human suffering is loneliness. The isolated human individual can never be fully human. And for those cut off from others, for those alienated from the world around them, the false covenants of race, nationalism, the glorious cause, class and gender compete, with great seduction, against the covenant of love. These sham covenants—and we see them dangled before us daily—are based on exclusion and hatred rather than universality. These sham covenants do not call us to humility and compassion, to an acknowledgement of our own imperfections, but to a form of self-exaltation disguised as love. Those most able to defy these sham covenants are those who are grounded in love, those who find their meaning and worth in intimate relationships that cut through the loneliness and isolation of the human condition.

There are few sanctuaries in war. Couples in love provide one. And it was to such couples that I consistently retreated. These couples repeatedly acted to save those branded as the enemy—Muslims trapped in Serb enclaves in Bosnia or dissidents hunted by the death squads in El Salvador. These rescuers did not act as individuals. Nechama Tec documented this peculiar reality when she studied Polish rescuers of Jews during World War II. Tec did not find any particular character traits or histories that led people to risk their lives for others, often for people they did not know, but she did find they almost always acted because their relationship explained to them the world around them. Love kept them grounded. These couples were not able to halt the destruction and violence around them. They were powerless. They could and often did themselves become victims. But it was with them, seated in a concrete hovel in a refugee camp in Gaza or around a wood stove on a winter night in the hills outside Sarajevo, that I found sanity and peace, that I was reminded of what it means to be human. It seemed it was only in such homes that I ever truly slept during war.

Love, when it is deep and sustained by two individuals, includes self-giving—often tremendous self-sacrifice—as well as desire. For the covenant of love recognizes both the fragility and sanctity of all human beings. It recognizes itself in the other. And it alone can save us, especially from ourselves.

Sigmund Freud divided the forces in human nature between the Eros instinct, the impulse within us that propels us to become close to others, to preserve and conserve, and the Thanatos, or death instinct, the impulse that works toward the annihilation of all living things, including ourselves. For Freud these forces were in eternal conflict. All human history, he argued, is a tug of war between these two instincts.

“The meaning of the evolution of civilization is no longer obscure to us,” Freud wrote in “Civilization and Its Discontents.” “It must present the struggle between Eros and Death, between the instinct of life and instinct of destruction, as it works itself out in the human species. This struggle is what all life essentially consists of.”

We are tempted, indeed in a consumer culture encouraged, to reduce life to a simple search for happiness. Happiness, however, withers if there is no meaning. The other temptation is to disavow the search for happiness in order to be faithful to that which provides meaning. But to live only for meaning—indifferent to all happiness—makes us fanatic, self-righteous and cold. It leaves us cut off from our own humanity and the humanity of others. We must hope for grace, for our lives to be sustained by moments of meaning and happiness, both equally worthy of human communion. And it is this grace, this love, which in our darkest moments allows us to endure.

Viktor Frankl in “Man’s Search for Meaning” grappled with Eros and Thanatos in the Auschwitz death camp. He recalled being on a work detail, freezing in the blast of the Polish winter, when he began to think about his wife, who had already been gassed by the Nazis although he did not know it at the time.

“A thought transfixed me,” he wrote, “for the first time in my life I saw the truth as it is set down by so many poets, proclaimed as the final wisdom by so many thinkers. The truth—that love is the ultimate and the highest goal to which man can aspire. Then I grasped the meaning of the greatest secret that human poetry and human thought and belief have to impart. The salvation of man is through love and in love.”

Love is an action, a difference we try to make in the world.

“We love our enemy when we love his or her ultimate meaning,” professor Adams told us. “We may have to struggle against what the enemy stands for; we may not feel a personal affinity or passion for him. Yet we are commanded for this person’s sake and for our own and for the sake of the destiny of creation, to love that which should unite us.”

To love that which should unite us requires us to believe there is something that connects us all, to know that at some level all of us love and want to be loved, to base all our actions on the sacred covenant of love, to know that love is an act of will, to refuse to exclude others because of personal difference or race or language or ethnicity or religion. It is easier to be indifferent. It is tempting to hate. Hate propels us to the lust for power, for control, to the Hobbesian nightmare of an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. Hate is what people do when they are distressed, as many Americans are now, by uncertainty and fear. If you hate others they will soon hate or fear you. They will reject you. Your behavior assures it. And through hate you become sucked into the sham covenants of the nation, the tribe, and you begin to speak in the language of violence, the language of death.

Love is not selflessness. It is the giving of one’s best self, giving one’s highest self unto the world. It is finding true selfhood. Selflessness is martyrdom, dying for a cause. Selfhood is living for a cause. It is choosing to create good in the world. To love another as one loves oneself is to love the universal self that unites us all. If our body dies, it is the love that we have lived that will remain—what the religious understand as the soul—as the irreducible essence of life. It is the small, inconspicuous things we do that reveal the pity and beauty and ultimate power and mystery of human existence.

Vasily Grossman wrote in his masterpiece “Life and Fate”:

    My faith has been tempered in Hell. My faith has emerged from the flames of the crematoria, from the concrete of the gas chamber. I have seen that it is not man who is impotent in the struggle against evil, but the power of evil that is impotent in the struggle against man. The powerlessness of kindness, of senseless kindness, is the secret of its immortality. It can never be conquered. The more stupid, the more senseless, the more helpless it may seem, the vaster it is. Evil is impotent before it. The prophets, religious leaders, reformers, social and political leaders are impotent before it. This dumb, blind love is man’s meaning. Human history is not the battle of good struggling to overcome evil. It is a battle fought by a great evil struggling to crush a small kernel of human kindness. But if what is human in human beings has not been destroyed even now, then evil will never conquer.

To survive as a human being is possible only through love. And, when Thanatos is ascendant, the instinct must be to reach out to those we love, to see in them all the divinity, pity and pathos of the human. And to recognize love in the lives of others, even those with whom we are in conflict—love that is like our own. It does not mean we will avoid suffering or death. It does not mean that we as distinct individuals will survive. But love, in its mystery, has its own power. It alone gives us meaning that endures. It alone allows us to embrace and cherish life. Love has the power both to resist in our nature what we know we must resist and to affirm what we know we must affirm.

Chris Hedges, whose column is published Mondays on Truthdig, spent nearly two decades as a foreign correspondent in Central America, the Middle East, Africa and the Balkans. He has reported from more than 50 countries and has worked for The Christian Science Monitor, National Public Radio, The Dallas Morning News and The New York Times, for which he was a foreign correspondent for 15 years.

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