Building On Trauma 10

What is this fire, love, that goes on burning?  I bear it as I can.  Who can say that love is a boon?  Love is disquieting.

That is a poem from the ancient Vedic writings of India, called the Upanishads. 

I mentioned fire in yesterday's post as a metaphor without particularly specifying what it could mean.  It is a metaphor for the pervading presence that creates, sustains and unites all things throughout the Cosmos, from inanimate matter to the human brain. 

St. John the Apostle, in his first epistle, wrote that God is love.  So then love, or God, is that force, that fire.  Here is a song that I wrote back in 1992:

In the vault of the heavens,
in the cradle of the earth,
at the moment of death,
in the agony of birth,
sages of old have sought to know the worth
of the sacred fire, the luminescent flame
whose tongues have embroidered and licked the mystic name
that is born in the pupil of the shining eye of God
that has burnished the places where the saints have trod;
it pours down holy mountains and immolates the land
where rocks and stones split open and crumble into sand
melting desert wastes into regions bright and grand.

Fire of destruction
from eternity you roar,
fire of creation, our spiritual core,
Fire of destruction
from eternity you roar,
fire of creation, our spiritual core.

In your all-exposing light we are naked and alarmed
we crawl nearer to your flame for our bodies to be warmed
where you burn within our hearts to reveal the dwelling place,
the Theophany's new home where we measure out the grace
that will recreate for each of us a face
where we'll sing in the silence to the mystery of your name
that melts our bones like wax as we plunge into your flame,
our beginning and our end, forever the same.

Fire of destruction
from eternity you roar,
fire of creation, our spiritual core,
fire of destruction
from eternity you roar,
fire of creation, our spiritual core.

One thing we all share in common is our fragility.  And our sense of human dignity.  This morning I saw the usual nicely dressed creative class Millennials enjoying their lattes on the patio of the JJ Bean in Yaletown.  Right next to them under a blanket lay a young man sleeping on the pavement.  Very easy to lay blame on the yuppies for being self-obsessed, selfish and uncaring, and they probably are.  But really, they are also victims.  They share the same trauma as the homeless man lying less than two metres from them though it manifests very differently.  It is the trauma of life.  We are all victimized by the same fire.  Knowing there is nothing they can do with their limited resources to help they play deaf and blind, even if they could at least acknowledge the homeless man's existence, but they don't want to know that he exists, so they would rather pretend that he isn't even there.

This is soul death.  Those yuppies have been brought up in a system that is soulless, selfish and uncaring and that leaves them ethically bankrupt and morally useless as adults and too afraid to reach out to the suffering in their face that paralyzes them into inaction.  I don't feel sorry for them.  I do understand them.

Children brought up without ethics or morals become hollow adults unable to operate in real community.  Our world, our city, is full of people like that.  Our most successful citizens, in the professional and materialistic sense, are such persons.  Easier to post a photo or selfie on Facebook and count the likes than do something, anything, to help alleviate the misery of a vulnerable man sleeping out in the open, just six or seven feet away.

We are all warmed and burned by the same fire.  When we embrace the fire it becomes heaven.  When we leave it to embrace us, then we are in hell.