November/December 2005 Featured Stories
The Unstoppable Force of Life

by Mary Manin Morrissey

Mary Manin Morrissey

We find ourselves in an unprecedented time in human history. War, tsunami, hurricanes, terrorist attacks, ethnic cleansing, earthquakes, global warming, the coming pandemic and I haven’t even opened the newspaper yet today.

The Buddhist philospher, Jack Kornfield, writes, "In human life, we look for happiness and understanding to bring light into our lives and our hearts. Often we look to the future, to some set of ideals, searching for the key to our wholeness and happiness as if it were somewhere else, yet the place to find wholeness, light, and well-being is here and now, even in the midst of our difficulties. There are moments in each of our lives when our personal world is filled with darkness. Tragedy, loss, bereavement, rejection, and failure are all common experiences. There is no living being who can avoid being touched by pain. No defense strong enough to make us invulnerable to the unpredictability of life’s changes. At times, attuning ourselves to the condition of the world we live in, we begin to believe we have entered into an age of darkness. We are appalled and horrified by the collective human capacity for violence and exploitation, or we despair over the seemingly inevitable destruction of our planet. We become distressed by the suspicion and alienation that are too often the hallmarks of human relationships. There is an art, however, in how to live with life’s challenges and hardships, to discover light amid darkness and to heal ourselves and the world around us. But like any other art, the art of living in peace calls for both great love and discipline."

As a student of world scriptures, I have learned that every hero’s journey requires a period of time in the dark of great difficulty. The stories found in the ancient texts give codes filled with clues as to how we might navigate through the many phases of human life, including difficult times, in such a way as to reap the full harvest such times offer.

In the Old Testament, there is a time in the life of David when he loses everything he has valued. He loses his career, his wife, his best friend, his mentor, his community and his homeland. He is unwelcome in the neighboring country (remember, he killed their premier warrior Goliath), so he runs to a distant cave where he hides. The great part of this story is how David learns to turn the trauma to transformation. What ultimately brings David out of the cave, and leads him to becoming one of the most beloved kings in the Bible, occurs through how he handles his time in the dark. Here are some ancient clues for modern times. We too can "discover light amid darkness and heal ourselves and the world around us."

Having logged some of my own time "in the dark of great difficulty", and walked part of that journey over the years with others, I have turned to these ancient stories as road maps. The path into new light has three distinct phases. The first step truly begins only when we "befriend" the darkness. Resisting or rushing to make things different, never really works. It is said that great gain and great loss are equally miraculous. A powerful first step is found in the practice of regarding the difficulty with curiosity. Curiosity, rather than resistance, helps us see what the difficulty has to offer or teach us. And there is always something.

As we practice releasing our resistance, we find in ourselves a space that allows the second step. The second step almost always involves a re-prioritizing of what is important. A friend’s parents lost their entire home and all their possessions in the recent hurricane in Mississippi. As they deal with the day to day sorting through of the rubble of what was, he called to say how proud and amazed he is by the rededication and new definition his parents are bringing to what is truly important in their lives. He said he and his siblings will forever be changed by the example their parents are showing as they refocus their lives. Dark times can help us gain a perspective of and a priority for what really matters.

The third step presents itself as we begin to integrate the learning from the release found through embracing the darkness, and the clarity that comes from a refocus of deeper priorities. We discover the "great force of life" within ourselves and begin to take action informed by our new learning. We start simply doing what ever we can do. In doing what we can do, we find that is it enough. We discover that our conscious acts begin to lead us into new light while making a contribution in our world.

Kornfield describes phase three in our journey this way. "I saw this force of life in the midst of tremendous desolation some years ago, in the dry and barren land of the Cambodian refugee camps, which I had visited to assist the refugees. After the Cambodian holocaust, only parts of families had survived - a mother and three children, an uncle and two nephews. And each was given a little bamboo hut, about four feet wide, six feet long, and five feet tall. In front of each hut was a little patch of land perhaps no bigger than one square yard. After only a few months of camp life, next to most of the huts in their little squares of ground, people had planted gardens. They would have a squash plant with two or three small squash on it, a bean plant or some other vegetable. The plants were very carefully tended. Little bamboo sticks for support, the tendrils of a bean sprout would wind up around the stake and over the roof of the house, and each day, each refugee family would walk a mile and stand for half an hour in a long line at the pit well at the far end of the camp, to carry back a bucket of water for their plants. It was a beautiful, beautiful thing to see those gardens in the middle of a camp in the dry season where you could barely believe that anything would grow on such a hot, barren field. As these war-shattered families planted and watered their tiny gardens, they awakened to the unstoppable force of life."

Dark times and difficulty are an essential part of life’s curriculum for every soul. As we embrace the darkness with curiosity we open to its gift. We can then gain a new clarity through re-prioritizing our values. This leads to a discovery of a deeper connection and access to the great force of Life. Taking conscious action based on our new learning, we find that like the seed in the ground, the dark time has been essential in our growth to the light. As we each take responsibility for our own darkness, there is a new priority given to what is truly important within the human family and for our planet. We each take whatever actions we can right where we are, for making our world a better place. As David in the Old Testament found, as Cambodian refugees demonstrate, we too can find ourselves connected to and guided by the unstoppable force of life.

Minister, teacher, and author, Mary Manin Morrissey holds a Bachelor’s degree in Education, a Master’s Degree in Counseling Psychology and a Doctorate of Humane Letters. Mary is the author of two bestselling books, "Building Your Field of Dreams" and "No LessThan Greatness". She founded and for 23 years served as senior minister of the Living Enrichment Center. Contact Mary Morrissey at mary@friendsofmary.com or c/o Friends of Mary, LLC, PO Box 14351, Portland, OR 97293