| Subject: Saniel's Second Letter |
Author:
Cassie
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Date Posted: 02:46:37 09/12/01 Wed
In reply to:
David M.
's message, "Saniel's Letter" on 14:02:31 09/11/01 Tue
Dear Friends,
Yesterday I dictated a message in the early hours of the catastrophic attacks and disasters that occurred at the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and in Pennsylvania. I was mostly feeling into the shock and distress that I knew members of our community and those close to us would all be feeling, and I was wanting to offer everyone some orientation that might be of help to us.
Linda and I spent the day continually in front of the TV screens, as did probably as many people as could. We felt we just had to be there and offer our heart-prayers and blessings and tears for all those who had died or were dying or injured, and their families, and everyone who is missing. It's just such a horrific thing.
Later I read back through the typescript of my hastily dictated letter and saw that I didn't even mention all of our blessing and holding each and all of those people. It was just implicit to me, but I feel bad that I didn't say it; and I hope my letter did not give you the impression ihat I don't care about the real human devastation and loss of life and family, the massive catastrophes at the human level of all those who are directly and indirectly affected by this. I do, of course, and so today I just want to follow up on that. It's practically pulverized all of us, most of us anyway.
When the Federal Building in Oklahoma City was bombed, our entire country went into shock. Still, compared to this, the human scale of that terrible event was small. We know the exact number who died--168 as I recall. We were exposed to many of their particular stories in the days and weeks that followed. The horror of the tragedy was huge, but its scope was in some manner comprehensible. A list of the names would only fill a few pages, after all. And they were all identified.
This is a disaster on another order. The authorities may never even come close to a precise count of how many died. Even if the eventual number reached is fairly accurate, it will still be so immense as to be, as New York's Mayor Giuliani said, "more than we can bear." To think of ten to twenty thousand or more people instantly dead--and many others no doubt to die soon in the rubble, and others in hospitals after struggling for their lives--and the other thousands dreadfully maimed and wounded--it's more than we can get our minds around. But that is the reality.
Trying to deal with this today, with Linda and me both often breaking down and crying as I know people were all over our country and around the world, I came up with a personal way to try to hold the immediate human reality of this catastrophe despite its vastness. And that is this: I began just starting to count, first silently and then audibly, to myself, a number for every person who has died or will soon die in this series of atrocities. Please follow this simple rite of remembrance to you as well, if you are moved to do something similar. For me, it feels like a way to say "no" to the fiendish dissociation and hatred that motivated these acts to begin with. Whatever righteous grievances any of the perpetrators may have had, their victims certainly had long ago ceased to be anything like real human beings to them. If they ever were! They were faceless, nameless, "the enemy," "the devil."
I hope many of us will give blood and do other practical things during this time. I also hope some of you will find ways of remembrance such as this one that came to me, ways to concretize the devastation. Even remembering every single number until you have reached whatever the authorities conclude is a likely final figure, is better than just allowing the scope of the human loss to be incomprehensibly immense. Maybe later, someday, someone will be able to put together a list of the actual names of the known dead. That would be a great honoring, also--to simply read those names aloud, whether privately or in groups, and bear witness to their suffering and their terrible, unchosen sacrifice.
Let us also maintain a vigil for weeks, months, and years to come for all the survivors, including the wounded and all the families and loved ones whose lives are just ripped to shreds forever by this horror. Their traumas will not cease to govern and poison their entire lives even long after the news has made a habit of following up on them. In any case there are so many, it's too much for any news media to try to depict. Let us not forget. If twenty thousand people died today, that is twenty thousand real human individuals, every single one of whom had loves and longings, hopes and dreams, cares and issues, great strengths that they may not have really even appreciated and weaknesses that probably plagued them, they had fathers and mothers and siblings and kids, uncles, aunts, cousins, they had foods they liked to taste and ways they liked to be kissed, or maybe they were desperately lonely for someone to love, they had careers they cared about or not, they loved the feeling of warm sunshine and marveled at the stars sometimes--each was living the whole actual event of a real human life. And all of them just wiped out in a few terrifying moments. It really is more than any of us can bear.
The remembrance that comes just by counting up the numbers into those thousands, one number after another, the whole number every time--in other words, not just "five hundred twenty-seven--twenty-eight--twenty-nine," but rather, "five hundred twenty-seven"--[pause]--"five hundred twenty-eight"--[pause]--and so on--that way of counting, and just feeling that soul, and blessing that person on their journey, helping each one know that they really have died, but also honoring that they also really did live, giving them our love and blessing and sad but strong confidence that Existence does not end and they now need to move on to the next stage of their journey--all of this is perhaps a way that we can keep ourselves grounded in both the human and the spiritual realities of this present tragedy. Victims of sudden, shocking, violent death can tend to become ghostlike presences; they don't know where they are or what is happening, and can feel as if they are locked in an endless, horrible nightmare--which they are. They often need the prayerful, blessing help of spiritually aware souls who remain embodied in order to be able to grasp, at last, that they are no longer embodied themselves, and must let go and move on. Likewise, those still living have also entered horrible bardos of pain and bwilderment and horrific, sudden loss. Let our prayers and continual thoughts on their behalf help them find their way through the darkness. It's not as if they will ever really "get over" what has just happened. But they may very well be able, someday, to grow into finding a new and fundamentally happy life even while bearing this wound always. Our blessings can help them.
Finally, tapping into the actual human immediacy of the real stories of what has happened here, as well as forms of remembrance such as counting the numbers of the dead, will be one of the primary ways we really can serve all of our and all humanity's "dropping" into sensitivity to the real conditions of our lives. That's what I meant yesterday when I suggested that it would be good to keep exposing ourselves to the TV and other media images and stories of what happened and its impact on the people it touched. And that's where the work of "holding" all this is so profound and important for us to learn all the better how to do, individually and together.
Well, it's late and it's been one of the longest and most painful days of all our lives. I send everyone my love and blessing and thank you in advance for everything you do to feel this terrible new gash in the tissue of human trust and then to find and apply the salve of healing from your own true Heart.
Much love,
Saniel
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