The Meaning Of Compassion: An Excerpt from Jim Harrison's "Returning To Earth"

I have spent the last 35 years as a student of Bawa Muhaiyaddeen. I am convinced he is an avatar of God as were Jesus and Buddha and some Zen Masters (oh hell, a cast of thousands!). Buddha and his best buds usually aren't talked about in such a context, although Incarnation is a word with which all religions seem on good terms. I know people that still object to Buddhism because Buddhists don't use the word 'God' much or ever. Duh! There is a point at which God and Man empty into each other, and then we have open space and clear roads forever. Or so I am told by the avatars. And always thrilled by this teaching.

The other day, during a Sunday morning meeting at the Bawa Muhaiyadden Fellowship in which I participated, the leader said, in a rapture of enthusiasm for Bawa, that he was "the greatest teacher who ever lived." I felt at that moment like I was choking on an anchovy. I just don't like it when followers of a teacher set him apart from all others. What we revere in our gurus, masters, teachers, etc. is that they are conduits of the truth, passage-ways for the teaching into human life. To say one man who became such a vessel is greater than all others is to forget that the vessel is meant to hold water or wine, and that the teacher is only such when the cask is uncorked.

These days I dread the subtle sin of separation through reverence, love that places the exemplar out of emulation range, deification that threatens alienation from the very teachers we love. I realize that surrender is necessary, and that part of that surrender is to see or hear or cling to no one else until the transubstantiation of student into disciple is complete. But afterwards, like after days of steady rain, the world is literally dripping with instance and reminder. The sound of tires on the streets makes a soft sibilance of remembrance. We have lived to become as much of a constant as our teacher.

I've been reading the histories of religions. Even peaceful, imperturbable Buddha who sat under trees rather than be nailed to them had to face defiant students at the end of his life who told him he was an old man and to step down. Wars of succession were fought even before he died. This pattern keeps repeating itself. No wonder Bawa once lectured a gathering in San Francisco on the dangers of calling him anything. "I am teaching you a way to make good your escape. Even one title and you will be blocked from moving through the narrow tunnel out of this world."

So when friends and wife tell me we were blessed to study with the "Qutb of the 18,000 universes," a six-star general of wisdom, I feel forlorn, as if God's messengers needed to hand out resumes. It's why I object to the exclusivity of Jesus Christ based solely on crucifixion and resurrection--as if his teaching was in no other way validified. I find myself congenitally incapable of believing that God appoints just one or two revealers and explicators per century or, worse, age. God manifest is, to me, the highest and best use of this human being, and thus a condition of ultimate well-being that everyone can attain. What we call deliverance is not just from suffering but to a blessed state of adequacy and true self- sufficiency. In this state, living itself is"articulance" of supreme understanding. To reach this state, we need, I am convinced, a teacher who stands, as Christ stood, as "holy ghost," as mediating spirit of the divine. That spir it does not have to resurrect in any other life than mine and yours. This town ain't big enough for the three (Father/Son/Holy Ghost) or two (me/you) of us. Our life is learning to count to One.

On this road to well-being (well meaning both healthy and also deep reservoir) and completeness, we are asked more and more for compassion, to act as if none are worthy of hatred or contempt or denial of love. The unity is first. As poet Jack Spicer put it, "The Union can sure as hell be scabbed on--but never broken." Yeah, I find compassion hard whenever I see the diabolical duo of Bush and Cheney, but I am slowly learning not to give way to rage. They are scabbers not Union busters.

Okay, so I have a teacher at the center of my life. And he asked me to practice love and compassion no matter what. So what is compassion? How does it operate? Well, I have some clues and indicators to offer today--courtesy of author Jim Harrison, whose latest novel, "Returning to Earth," I have just finished. The book consists of 4 narratives--the first that of Donald, a northern Michigan contractor who is half-Chippewa, half-Finn, and dying of Lou Gehrig's disease. As a remembrance, he has been asked for a memoir. Debilitated by his disease, he must dictate it to his wife Cynthia, who often annotates (to the annoyance of some family members). Donald, it turns out, is far more Chippewa than Finn and even has a medicine man guru.

The fourth narrative is written by Donald's wife Cynthia and relates what happens to her in the year following her husband's death. It is a year of profound emotional and spiritual rehabilitation. This may sound a little like a summary of a soap, but you need the following details to understand what is going on. In this excerpt, Cynthia and her brother David are meeting in a Chicago bar with a lifelong friend named Coughlin who is a psychoanalyst. David has brought with him Vera, the daughter of his father's best friend, Jesse, whom the father raped as a teenager. As you can imagine, the conversation is intense, but also part of healing. Central to regeneration of Cynthia, David and Vera is to make peace with this father. Why, Cynthia wonders, did her mother put up with him? Gradually, she realizes that service in the Pacific during World War II, and loss of nearly all the men under his command, irreparably damaged, if not destroyed, him . I'll let Jim Harrison take it from here:

"Each of my three evenings we had dinner with Coughlin. The first one was a little iffy because we went downstairs in the Drake to the Cape Cod Room and halfway through the meal David [brother of the woman who is narrating] abruptly left for the ground-floor bar, where we found him eating a cheeseburger. He explained that the Cape Cod Room was where he'd had dinner with Father the evening before the fatal trip to Mexico [where the father died]. Things got even rougher when the subject of the war came up and I carelessly described a little research I had done on the World War II battles in the Philippines in which both my father and Vera's father [the father of the daughter the dad raped], Jesse, had taken part. A martini had made me half daft as I rambled on about the Battle of Cape Engano and also gruesome land battles where my father lost most of the men he commanded. Coughlin said he had met an ex-Green Beret medic while fishing in Montana who had tried to duct-tape tog ether several dozen children who were in pieces when our personnel had called in mortar fire in the wrong place. I wasn't hearing Coughlin clearly when he quoted some poet saying, "There's a point at which the exposed heart can't recover." I was looking at the increasingly pale face of my brother, who got up abruptly and walked out. Vera also looked stricken and followed. Naturally I was upset but at the same time amused that Coughlin continued drinking with relish. I raised an eyebrow.

"In thirty-five years of practice I've heard everything. There are no true monsters, only some people like your father who with regularity act like a monster. It's still episodic."

"Meaning?" I quickly drank a full glass of wine.

"Well, David managed to spent half his life researching the wrongs his family visited on everyone. Long ago I told him he should be looking into what happened to his father during the war. You managed to do so. It never works when you leave out even a small part of the picture. It's a little like the doctor who failed to diagnose the reason for a woman's stomach ache but then she failed to tell him that her husband punched her there. War can do horrible things to men. Most recover well enough to behave well and some can't. And some don't even seem to want to as if the horrors are encysted in their brains to be examined over and over almost as if they deserved affection or at least loving attention because what would be there is the horrors were taken away? In crude farmland lingo, pigs love their own shit."

"Even as a boy David never seemed to have enough skin. I mean his skin wasn't thick enough while mine was."

"Precisely. Once on the way to fish we stopped to look at a big snapping turtle crawling along the road and I said to David that it would be bright of him to take this creature as a model, you know, develop a carapace."

He paused because David returned sheepishly but with Vera looking as if she had told him an important secret. The old waiter stopped by, shaking his head at the cold hamburger, and David said he'd settle for a dozen oysters. Vera ordered a cold lobster "just in case" she had to leave again. She laughed and tickled him somewhere critical under the table.

"To close the conversation and get on to something more interesting like a beauty queen's perineum, true, I never gave my father the slightest break. Mother told me that she remembered him before the war and that's why she held on with the help of booze and pills. Let's give the dead a break today."

David raised his glass and we all followed. I felt slightly choked and Coughlin gave me a peculiar look that I . . . used to receive from the young men on Donald's work crew. I admit I felt pleased."

--Jim Harrison, "Returning to Earth," Grove Press, New York, 2007, pages 222-24.