The Rev.
Two Buddhist
monks were on a journey to a distant monastery when they came to a river. There on the bank sat a young woman. “I beg you” she asked, “could you carry me
across? The current is strong today and
I’m afraid I might be swept away.” The
younger of the two monks remembered his vows never to look at or touch a woman,
and so he simply crossed the river without a glance at the woman. The older monk showed compassion, and
although it was difficult, he allowed the woman to climb on his back and he
carried her to the other side.
After
some hours of walking in stony silence, the first monk could no longer contain
his anger at the second. “How could you
look at that woman?” he fumed. “How
could you allow yourself to touch her, let alone carry her across the
water?” “You have put our reputation at
stake!” The first monk simply smiled at
his companion. “I put that woman down
way back there at the river bank, but I see that you’re still carrying her.”
It
is amazing, how much we can learn from difficult people. In fact, if life is a school where we are
sent to learn, difficult people are the faculty members. As the Dalai Lama often says, the people who
are easy for us to love do teach us something – but it is the truly difficult
encounters we have in life that help our souls to grow.
In the
story about the monks, the younger monk perceives the older monk to have
horribly transgressed his vows, and in the process reflecting poorly on him as
well. From another viewpoint, one might
recognize that the older monk has his priorities straight – he can adapt his
behaviors in the real world so that his compassion is lived out. The woman might have perceived the younger
monk to be haughty and uncaring – the way he so haughtily swept past her and
ignored her pleas for help. From another
viewpoint, he was simply inexperienced and trying to live within his narrowly
prescribed sense of propriety. But
notice who in the story ends up carrying the burden – not the woman, who is
helped, and not the older monk, who seems able to live in the present
moment.
It is the younger monk who carries the burden of anger for several hours until
the older monk helps him to see things from a new perspective.
How many
of us are carrying around burdens like that?
How many of us are loaded down by our negative opinions of others and
their actions – p
Mark
Twain used to say: “Nothing so needs reforming as other people’s habits.” Perhaps the person who is driving us crazy is
mirroring back something we don’t like in ourselves – something that we need to
address about our own shadow being. Perhaps
an encounter weighs on us because it uncovers older, suppressed feelings that
are painful – feelings we might need to work through in order to be freed from
a limiting past. Perhaps the person
really just is plain malicious or evil, and we have something to learn from
them about the power of compassion to overcome such trials. In every case, difficult people have
something to offer us, if only we can get far enough past the anger and
frustration to find an opening in our own hearts.
One man
that really used to drive me crazy was a very talented painter who shared many
acquaintances with me. He thought he was
better than most people, so I decided, because he used to do that annoying
thing that superficial snobs always do – every time I’d run into him at one
function or another, he looked right past me, scanning the room for more
important people to talk to. It was like
I was invisible. I’d been introduced to
him at least half a dozen times, and each time I met him again it was like he
had never even seen me before – he never remembered my name because clearly I
didn’t rate on his social status meter.
Then one
day, after officiating at a very small, intimate wedding ceremony held on a
veranda by the side of a small river, I was enjoying the sunshine, and the warm
glow of friendly conversations at the reception, when in walked this gentleman. “Oh brother” I thought to myself when I
spotted him, “Here we go again with the ‘nice to meet you’ and the
disinterested conversation.” Well,
wouldn’t you know, he actually remembered who I was, and we sat down and talked
for what seemed like hours. I learned
that the reason he seemed so distracted all the time was that his partner was
dying of AIDS, and he stayed up most nights tending to him. He was exhausted. Getting out anywhere was a rare thing, but in
general when he did get out he felt overwhelmed and unable to focus. I had completely misjudged the situation due
to my own insecurities. Had I once
simply said to him, “You seem distracted, is everything OK?” I might have not
only made a friend much sooner, but also been able to provide some compassionate
support to him.
Since
that day by the river, “Jim” has become a cherished friend. Although they weren’t officially UU, I became
“Phillip’s spiritual confidant through many hospital visits in his last months. When Phillip died, I conducted his funeral,
and a year later, I sat and read Walt Whitman to Jim as he recovered in the ICU
from a heart attack brought on, I believe in part, by simple raw grief. Now, Jim has moved to the Southwest to find
inspiration for his incredible paintings, and just to start a new life. We keep in touch, and I hope to visit him
there some day. All this, from someone I
found incredibly irritating.
The
kicker to all of this, was that not long after that break through event where I
really got to know Jim, I found out that I had done the very same thing to
someone I had been introduced to on several occasions, but whose identity I
could never seem to remember. Every time
I had met this woman, it had been at a faculty party for my husband’s
department, and what she didn’t realize was that I usually was meeting
something like 30 new people, all of whom intimidated me a little because they
were smart, talented art professors and I was just, well, me. When she finally had the courage to tell me
how annoyed she felt that I hadn’t remembered her, we were able to talk and
laugh about all of our quirky perceptions and insecurities.
Oh, the
tangled webs we weave! While I do not
deny the presence of truly hateful people on the earth, I feel I am safe in
guessing that at least 90% of the people we deem to be difficult, mean, needy,
or just plain annoying are actually just either distracted, exhausted, or
insecure. None of us are at our best
when we are stressed, ill, or intimidated, and usually that very thing that we
judge most harshly in others, if we are brutally honest, is a characteristic we
ourselves share with the object of our derision. I get annoyed with poser, hypocrites and
liars. Yet I myself pose, lie and act
hypocritically. [I know, it’s hard to
believe coming from a minister! And, I
try to act honorably, and to clean it up when I fall short!] Even doing out best, we all are capable of
the worst that we see in others, and like it or not we are all imperfectly
human.
Despite
this most of us spend a lot of time judging others; inventing incredible
scenarios for ourselves about other people and their bad thoughts or behaviors. I can’t tell you how many times, as captain
of my club tennis team, for example, I had women who are normally self-reliant,
rational people, get their feelings all tied up in knots because they read
things into other people’s words or actions.
One example was a time I had to substitute a player into a doubles match
because one of the players had a sick child at home. I thought that the reaction of the original
doubles partner was odd when I told he someone else would be playing with her,
but it wasn’t until days later that she called me, clearly upset, to ask if it
was true that her original partner didn’t want to play with her because
everyone thought she was a bad player!
Talk
about carrying the woman from the river along the hot dusty road! And yet, this is something we humans do, and
it is simply a part of our learning process.
How many times have we read something negative into a situation that
really wasn’t true? How long did that
thought torture us before we got up the courage to talk about it? Might we gentle our own paths to
self-awareness and spiritual growth by taking a slightly different approach? What if we said thank you for the difficult
encounters, and tried to look at them through the lens of possibility – for the
deeper lessons and insights we could gain?
Author
Mark Rosen writes in his book Thank You for Being Such a Pain, Most of
our spiritual lessons are not easy, obvious, or comfortable.
The hardest ones are the ones
least likely to be learned voluntarily… Because
spiritual growth demands that we overcome our character flaws, and because it
is so challenging to do so, we need a special teacher.
The
teacher would have to be someone who would shatter our incorrect feelings,
frozen beliefs, and self-delusion.
Someone who would help us break free of our current, limited
understandings. Someone who could uproot
the very things in life that we are most invested in holding on to and keeping
the same. Someone who causes so much
pain that we finally out of desperation must begin to make the necessary
changes that we have resisted for so long.
It
would have to be a difficult person.
I’d like to make two caveats to
my own argument. Psychologist William
James once wrote “The art of being wise it the art of knowing what to
overlook.” The other side to this is
knowing what not to overlook. First,
often due to addiction or mental illness, many of us have family members or
acquaintances whose behavior, while not intentionally cruel, has become so
harmful to our own well-being, that we are forced to severely constrict or cut
off further contact with that individual. There is a difference between embracing the
lessons to be learned from merely difficult people, and putting up healthy
boundaries with individuals who are truly toxic.
And
second, there are those rare individuals who are truly just despicable,
immoral, or cruel. Rabbi David Wolpe
says of such individuals:
Those who commit terrible deeds
are not monsters. They are human beings
who have done monstrous things. If they
truly were beasts, they would be blameless.
They are human and responsible because they have betrayed their
humanness.
If you
encounter someone who deliberately engages in harmful, violent, destructive
acts, and justifies these acts by projecting a warped sense that the victim is
deserving of such treatment and thus lacks the ability to feel remorse, it is
best to remove oneself from that person’s sphere of influence. Such people cannot be reasoned with, placated,
or avenged. There will be times through
collective action, when such “evil” will have to be faced and overcome, but
this is not usually achieved through individual valor.
This all
may seem obvious, but when the face of malevolence is also the face of one’s
sibling, spouse, mother, father, or a person in authority who has abused their
trust, there is a tendency to blame oneself for the treachery, and to try over
and over again to try to ameliorate the situation. This is why the cycle of abuse is so
difficult to break. I remember well the
case of a woman who was staying in a local women’s shelter after being beaten
within inches of her life by her husband.
Yet she returned to this man, much to the consternation of the staff at
the shelter, and a few days later he stabbed her to death. The staff could only offer her a way out –
they couldn’t force her to take it. Abuse
has a twisted logic all of its own, and a magnetic force that is difficult to
break.
Just as
we need to remove ourselves quickly and avoid all future contact with a person
who truly has a malicious intent, we need to be very cautious before labeling
someone who is merely difficult as evil.
Again
from Mark Rosen:
Giving
someone the benefit of the doubt means that you are willing to consider the
possibility that you don’t have all the facts and might not be seeing the whole
picture. It means that you are willing
to extend to the other person your silent goodwill until all the evidence is
in. It means that in your personal life
you practice the same principle that applies in a court of law. Difficult people are innocent until proven
guilty.
I suspect that all of us
have a lot to learn about dealing with difficult people. There are lessons in every challenging
encounter – lessons of forgiveness, of forbearance, of maintaining a sense of
grace and humor, and lessons to learn about the sides of ourselves we don’t
want to examine. Mark Rosen says that
“learning from others requires humility,” and perhaps this is a good place to
begin. If we can admit to ourselves that
we aren’t perfect, and if we can allow our defensiveness to abate just a bit,
we will begin to discover the hidden fruits of wisdom in seemingly aggravating
circumstances. If we need some help
getting there, the best people to talk with aren’t the ones who will just agree
with us or even gang up against the identified “bad one.” The ones who will lovingly challenge our
false assumptions will ultimately be more helpful.
In your
order of service I’ve quoted the poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, a Unitarian, who
wrote these words:
If we could read the secret history of our enemies, we should find in
each person’s life sorrow and suffering enough to disarm all hostility.
It would be nothing short of a
miracle, if we could truly disarm all hostility. Peace begins in each human heart when we
learn to accept our own faults, and then those of others, until our compassion
grows wide enough to embrace all of humanity.
It doesn’t mean we become floor mats to be walked all over, but it does
mean that we learn to hold it all in our hearts in appropriate humility. May we leave our burdens at the riverside. May our hearts be open, our minds
inquisitive, and our lives transformed. Remember
that pain often comes out as anger. May
we seek first to understand, then to be understood. And may we walk in peace.