Treasure Hunt - LETTING GO - Summary of Carry On, Warrior: The Power of Embracing Your Messy, Beautiful Life - Book Summary

Summary of Carry On, Warrior: The Power of Embracing Your Messy, Beautiful Life - Book Summary (2016)

Part V. LETTING GO

Chapter 41. Treasure Hunt

Although I’m fascinated by the idea and have been reading about the subject for years, I still don’t understand what Zen is. For now, let’s oversimplify and agree that Zen is perfect peace derived from the transcendence of human suffering through meditation. Imagine the smiling Buddha, the one who holds the secret to life: he is enlightened, beyond desire, beyond frustration, beyond suffering. Zen. If there is one word that represents the opposite of how I experience life, it’s Zen.

In fact, I find life to be constantly and excruciatingly difficult. A while ago Sister told me about a mother who came to her East African law office and explained that her five-year-old daughter had been raped by a neighbor. This mother had tried for two weeks to have the rapist arrested and get her daughter free medical attention, since she didn’t have the two dollars to cover her care. Because she kept getting turned away, she couldn’t work for two weeks, and her five children were home starving—still living next door to the rapist.

In Night, by Elie Wiesel, a Holocaust survivor describes watching Nazis throw living Jewish babies into fiery ditches and grown, educated, uniformed men publicly hang Jewish children.

I have three dear friends who’ve watched their marriages, parents’ health, and dreams for their families crumble in front of them this month.

And the oil spills, the animals, our earth—Jesus. How will our children forgive us for continuing on like we have planets to spare?

As the curtains are lifted and we discover the greed, carelessness, and apathy that led to all of these disasters, I just want to walk outside and scream forever. But how can I rail against it all when I sense so much of that same greed, carelessness and apathy inside of me?

The paralyzing pain and impossibility of life is why I believe that there is something True about Jesus. Not Christianity, necessarily, the way it has come to be understood, but Jesus. His story. The cross. Because when I look at that man hanging lifeless and bloody, nailed to the cross, I understand him to be just the symbol that a God who knows the states of our hearts and our world would send to represent the Truth. To make us feel understood. Loved, even.

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As I finished reading Night, forever changed, I imagined Elie Wiesel, after the war, sitting in my living room and telling me the story of how the Nazis killed his family.

He would tell me that this happened to thousands of families. While the Earth kept spinning. While people all over the planet kept eating their breakfasts and getting dressed and going to work and having picnics and listening to the radio. And how it’s still happening now. Right now, to powerless people all over the world. How humanity has not learned from his family, from his people’s suffering. That our world has yet to say … ENOUGH.

But he would add that he still has hope. That despair is not an option. And then the room would get quiet.

I can’t imagine, for the life of me, showing the young Wiesel the smiling Buddha. I cannot imagine suggesting to him that his suffering could possibly be transcended. I can only imagine showing him a picture of Jesus hanging on the cross, bloody and beaten and mocked and spit upon and abandoned and God forsaken. And I can only imagine whispering, with trembling hands and voice: Is this how you feel?

I’m curious about people who have found a way to transcend the world’s collective pain and their own personal suffering. But I respect people who don’t try to escape permanently. Who run toward the pain. Who allow themselves to suffer with others, to become brokenhearted. I respect people who, enlightened or not, roll up their sleeves and give up their comfortable lives for suffering people. Or who don’t do any of those things but pay close enough attention to know and admit and care that life can be brutal. Who understand that their comfortable reality is not enjoyed by all.

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Years ago, my hopeful, faithful, joyful minister surprised our congregation by saying: Life is pain, and anyone who tells you different is trying to sell you something. I squirmed in my seat and thought … Jeez. How negative. But now I’m older, and I think … How true. Life is hard and terrifying and unfair and overwhelming. Life is the cross. And if you think that’s overly dramatic, please pay close attention to the evening news. After that, read up on the international child sex trade and spend the next afternoon in your local middle school cafeteria observing how kids who look different are treated. Finally, on your way home, stop by the children’s oncology unit at the hospital. Then we’ll talk. Life is pain.

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BUT.

There is beauty to be found in the pain. Life is brutal, but it’s also beautiful. Life is Brutiful. So I look hard for the beauty. I try to drown out my fear voice, which wants me to run away from the pain, and listen instead to my love voice, whom I call God, and who is asking me to run towards it. To allow my heart to be broken open, because a broken heart is both a badge of honor and the most powerful tool on earth.

That love voice—she’ll help you find treasure. But she’ll guide you right into the minefields first.

So that’s why I write—to find the treasures in the suffering. And as I write, my memories change ever so slightly. Reality and writing work together to create my memories, and the final result is that I remember events more beautifully than they actually happened. Or maybe in writing them down, I’m able to see for the first time how beautiful they really were.

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I do not know Zen. I just know gratitude. I am grateful for the beauty in the midst of suffering. I am grateful for the treasure hunt through the minefield of life. Dangerous or not, I don’t want out of the minefield. Because truth, and beauty, and God are there.