Lulu

  November 7, 2007 — I’ve taken up reading before dawn again, and I am embarrassed that I stopped for so long. Thinking about your life, as opposed to just rushing through it – some call this meditation – is all it’s cracked up to be. Food for the soul, for sure, and grounding. Thomas Merton, my meditation buddy,  writes that conscience is the soul of freedom, and I think he is right. Without conscience, freedom has no idea what to do with itself, and we have little idea what to do with it.
  So we plunge through life and work, often unthinkingly, until tragedy strikes or we stumble and fall, and then we have no choice but to think about what we do. The trick is to keep at it, to consider it as well so that when our time comes, we are not simply reacting.
   Freedom is a waste when it has  no purpose, context or meaning. It seems important every morning to make myself aware that life is a choice, and I choose to live each day in a considered and purposeful way, although I often fail.
  Acts without thought and purpose are random, diffuse, common in our culture,  unless they are about doing something good, worthwhile, meaningful. This is why I have come to love hospice work with Izzy. It gives real meaning to my days and to my life. It is a gift to me.
   Merton says we cannot make good choices unless we develop a mature and prudent conscience that gives an honest and knowing and accurate account of our motives, intentions and moral acts. It is difficult to be unselfish, harder to avoid being self-serving. The stories we tell ourselves in our heads about what we do make us look like  heroes, victims and pilgrims. We paint our own pictures, and our brush is not always true.
  It is difficult to see ourselves as we are. Sometimes we are fortunate enough to have good friends, lovers or others who will do us the good service of telling us the truth about ourselves. When we don’t, we can so easily delude ourselves, lose a sense of truth about ourselves, and our conscience loses power and purpose. Mostly, we tell ourselves what we would like to hear. We lose our way.
   The immature conscience, writes Merton, is one that bases its judgments partly, or even entirely, on the way other people seem to be disposed towards our decisions. The good is what is admired or accepted by the people we live with. The evil is what irritates or upsets them. The challenge is to define ourselves, no matter how others define us. The goal is self-respect, not approval.
  The immature conscience is not its own master. It simply parrots the decisions of others. It does not make judgements of its own, it merely conforms to the  judgments of others. That is not real freedom, and it makes true love impossible, for if we are to love truly and freely, we must be able to give something that is truly our own to another. If our heart does not belong to us, asks Merton, how can we give it to another?
  I saw true love this week, and a mature conscience as well, at the McClellan Funeral Home in Salem, where my friend Anthony Armstrong’s murdered sister was given a funeral, attended by many hundreds of people from the town of Rupert, Vermont and elsewhere. This family, like most families, has had its troubles but they took an awful, almost unspeakable tragedy, and turned it into something powerful, even beautiful.
   I can’t speak for the others, but I saw Anthony consider the plight his family was in, make a moral and considered choice to help, and thus gave unselfishly to his family. This was not something he did for  himself, but for others, and they returned this gift – his wife Holly, his mother and father, his brother Charlie and his wife Rachel,  loving himself and one another and their neighbors, family and friends back, finding true love in their awful suffering and loss. There was no anger in that room, no self-pity, only a sense of sadness and love and a fierce determination to go forward.
   Those who know Anthony well know how deeply he had to reach into the deepest and most painful parts of  himself to find this place of conscience, love and sacrifice.
  Isn’t it strange how we sometimes don’t really grasp our own true natures, until life pulls us out of ourselves and forces us to see ourselves through the prism and need of others? Then, sometimes in awful ways, we see who we really are.
    In doing so, he rose up, matured, found self-respect in every sense of the world.
  Dramas, openings, like tragedies, are ephemeral. The world moves on. Tomorrow, other  people in other places will suffer their own sorrows and joys. One of the cruelest and perhaps most merciful things about our world is how quickly we move on, forget, get absorbed in our own tiny, largely meaningless anxieties and dramas.
  This tragedy got me to thinking, considering, hopefully improving.
  So this gift, this choice, this opening might last a long time, or it might not last long, but that really doesn’t matter. While it lasts, it is real. I won’t forget it.
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  A trust/scholarship fund has been established for Karlie Armstrong-Gates, whose mother Felicia was killed last week. Contributions can be sent to the Karlie Armstrong-Gates Trust, c/o Banknorth, Main Street, Salem, N.Y., 12865