"Please Call Me By My True Names"
- Thich Nhat Hanh
Do not say that I'll depart tomorrow
because even today I still arrive.
Look deeply: I arrive every second
to be a bud on a Spring branch,
to be a tiny bird, whose wings are still fragile,
learning to sing in my new nest,
to be a caterpillar in the heart of a flower,
to be a jewel hiding itself in a stone.
I still arrive, in order to laugh and to cry,
in order to fear and to hope,
the rhythm of my heart is the birth and death
of all that are alive.
I am the mayfly
metamorphosing on the surface of the river.
And I am the bird which, when spring comes,
arrives in time to eat the mayfly.
I am the frog swimming happily
in the clear of a pond,
and I am also the grass snake who,
approaching in silence, feeds itself on the frog.
I am the child in Uganda, all skin and bones,
my legs as thin as bamboo sticks.
And I am the arms merchant,
selling deadly weapons to Uganda.
I am the twelve-year-old girl, refugee on a small boat,
who throws herself into the ocean,
after being raped by a sea pirate,
and I am the pirate,
my heart not yet capable of seeing and loving.
I am a member of the politburo,
with plenty of power in my hands.
And I am the man
who has to pay his "debt of blood" to my people,
dying slowly in a forced labor camp.
My joy is like Spring, so warm it makes flowers bloom.
my pain is like a river of tears,
so full it fills up the four oceans.
Please call me by my true names,
so I can bear all my cries and my laughs at once,
so I can see that my joy and pain are but one.
Please call me by my true names,
so that I can wake up,
and so the door of my heart can be left open,
the door of compassion.
5 comments:
Hey I'm glad you like the light hearted post
But Ginger, TNH is an activist, so please don't misrepresent him
Just because there is evil in the world, and compassion (God is most compassionate, most merciful) means we must love the sinner, doesn't mean we shouldn't take sides and hate the sin
There is, after all, rather a lot riding on this..
Jesus, for instance famously took sides with his parable of the evil tenant. And his chucking out of the moneylenders. And so he was famously betrayed by a man who used the money he thereby gained to buy himself a nice plot of land.
Presumably squatting, being like the flying birds in their nests or the foxes in the holes being too unsanitary.. ?
Muhammed took sides too, as have all the greatest prophets. And so then, whether we like it or not, must we.
Taking sides isn't easy at all.
The side of the capitalist is either a soul destroying or exploited one, while the side of the freedom fighter is, while soulfully amazing and eternally rewarded, very hard.
Jesus' yoke might have been easy, but he wept, got tortured and was crucified.
And for other reasons too, a freedom fighters lot is more-often-than-not, rubbish (relating mainly to the difficulty of maintaining faith in humaity, or God or that human beings will ever see the light, or, worse still, having to deal with the unsanitary capitalist consumer world's consistently rubbish and mediocre idea of freedom)
eg - hope for incremental change as the great 'light at the end of the tunnel' ~ well i suppose it could be worse, it's not an oncoming train
A bird, or even an ant is to my mind far freer than most human beings i know, even (especially) the most well adjusted richie from the enlightned west. Give me an African with nothing over a fat twat in his SUV anyday
Angels are fighting ~ can you tell? This is not a game ladies and gentlemen
So, here's a riddle to sort out the wheat from the chaff, so to speak:
Finally choose your chariots!!!
With bonus points regarding the wheels of fire and any useful information on the whereabouts of metatron.
OK, that's it. Bon nuit lovely angels of america
And if you're confused, never fear ~ answers will, kabbalah-like-appear
Taking sides is too easy in that it's easy to blindly form a judgment that is fed to you. In this case, TNH means that because we literally are both sides, we must be careful in our judgment making. I think that if we carefully consider the reasons we believe what we believe, then it is OK to take sides, but we must do it in a way that is humble and considerate of the other side, even if we disagree completely with that ideology/persuasion.
By the way, this is a direct quote from TNH in his essay also titled Call Me By My True Names.
Mark I really don’t understand where you are coming
from here. This voice of anger and attack is not who I
thought you were. Capitalists are not pure evil. Soul
destruction and exploitation are by no means
restricted to any one political system. And freedom
fighters are not pure light. Idi Amin was a freedom
fighter. Every day horrible atrocities are committed
by freedom fighters in the name of the cause. Maybe
you’re using some explicit definition of the term to
exclude those types of people.
What TNH is saying (and I agree, and I’m surprised you
don’t) is that we have to stop dividing the world into
Us and Them. There is no them, only us. We are all us.
When you create this artificial separation there are
only two options; contain the adversary or kill the
adversary. Which do you propose? We must try to
understand each other instead of cutting each other
off. If we understand and address the terrorists
legitimate complaints we can stop the recruitment of
suicide bombers. If we better understood the plight of
the German people we could have stopped Hitler without
destroying half of Europe. To enact meaningful change
we must reach out to those who oppose us. We can never
persuade the Other unless we understand him. Or are
you saying we should just throw rocks at him till he
goes away?
As for the African vs. SUVist comment, I understand
that the oil based culture is guilty of perpetuating
the exploitive world order, but the African with
nothing is the one raping the refugee, the one pulling
the trigger. How can you elevate the actual
perpetrator above the enabler. The ‘twat’ is by no
means guiltless, but as Hippocratic oath says, “First,
do no harm.”
Jesus was wholly understanding of the people he
encountered, asking that they ‘go and sin no more”.
The only record of Jesus losing his shit was the
account of the money lenders in the temple. Jesus
didn’t turn over their tables because they were
capitalists. Just after the parable of the teneants,
Mark reports that Jesus told those listening to pay
their taxes. So much for civil disobedience. He
disrupted the temple because the self-righteous
spiritual leaders were exploiting the people. The ones
entrusted by God to guide, who were supposed to be
pure, were corrupt. Every power structure faces that
very danger whether capitalist or communist;
revolutionary or establishment. Every system must be
aware of the possibility and probability of
exploitation and be ever vigilant in oversight and
accountability. Any new regime that believes itself
incapable of corruption is already doomed to fail.
But you know all this already, right?
"Do not think that I came to bring peace on the earth; I did not come to bring peace, but a sword. For I came to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law; and a man’s enemies will be the members of his household. He who loves father or mother more than Me is not worthy of Me; and he who loves son or daughter more than Me is not worthy of Me. And he who does not take his cross and follow after Me is not worthy of Me. He who has found his life will lose it, and he who has lost his life for My sake will find it."
"Our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the powers, against the world forces of this darkness, against the spiritual forces of wickedness in the heavenly places" (Eph. 6:12)
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