Bearing Witness
...the soul must weep, to be a soul at all.
...the heart breaks, and the words fall in.
Hasidic tale
...the soul must weep, to be a soul at all.
Richard Rohr, The Tears of Things, p.6
A great deal has happened since our last post.
The blockade of the Strait of Hormuz, and a worldwide shortage of fossil fuel and fertilizer.
Israel’s invasion of southern Lebanon.
The continuation of the fourth year of Russia’s invasion of the Ukraine.
The Supreme Court’s gutting of section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, in its Louisiana v. Calais decision.
Another “assassination attempt” on the President of the United States. (investigation continuing, hence the quotation marks)
Further attempts by the US Department of Justice to provide show trials of the imagined enemies of DJT.
I was going to cap the above by providing you with the number of unconstitutional acts committed by the Trump Regime since 30 March 2026, but when I asked Google Gemini AI to provide us with that list, this was its tempered and legally correct, response:
“Determining the exact number of ‘unconstitutional acts’ is a matter of ongoing legal debate, as an act is generally not legally considered unconstitutional until a court—typically the Supreme Court—issues a final ruling to that effect.”
Nice one, Google. Invoking SCOTUS as a final authority was a particularly ironic touch. I think I’ve made my point, anyway.
Things, as they say, have gotten worse. And now the Regime is exporting our domestic turmoil. It doesn’t matter if you’re not buying it, world, it’s coming to you as a free gift from the people of the United States of America. It’s going to cost you your way of life, but be of good cheer: you are not alone. Most of us can’t have ours, either.
For the last three posts, I have attempted to explore the plausible reasons for this dark, chaotic time in an attempt to explain why we are going through it.
As you must know, any mental understanding, even if one accepts it, will not support us through those times.
What will? An understanding of how to suffer. It is a lesson that many around the world-- and some of us in the US-- have learned: suffering is both a fact of life and an important passage. One that is long-overdue in a country that has emphasized, sold, and bought comfort. (Odd that Jesus never said, “Blessed are the comfortable,” don’t you think? It would have been so fitting for the padded pews to come.)
If you do as I have done and exhorted all of us to do: Grounded your intentions in your values, and coupled your attention to your intention, how do we handle the daily assault to those intentions, and the numbing of our attention? How does one live in a country that casually violates those values , robs, and further oppresses its people? How does one live, knowing that those who are supposedly representing the will of the people are worried more about their political survival and financial portfolios than they are about the welfare of the people they were elected to represent?
This is the tragic gap: the difference between what you know is right and what is happening. (One can also have a tragic gap in one’s own life, between what one intends and what one does.) The Quaker elder Parker J. Palmer recounts:
“There is an old Hasidic tale that tells us how such things happen. The pupil comes to the rebbe and asks, “Why does Torah tell us to ‘place these words upon your hearts’? Why does it not tell us to place these holy words in our hearts?” The rebbe answers, “It is because as we are, our hearts are closed, and we cannot place the holy words in our hearts. So we place them on top of our hearts. And there they stay until, one day, the heart breaks, and the words fall in.”
Parker J. Palmer, A Hidden Wholeness
Dear friend, the word is your intention, and the breaking of your heart opens the way: mindful, intentional suffering. The word must travel through that heartbreak in order for your intention to flower and bear fruit.
The first part of bearing witness is to allow this opening of the heart, to stay with the heartbreak. To weep, if you are able. To return to the pain.
Do not turn away; see and remember. Do not distract yourself; pay attention to the suffering. Refuse to say “I can’t watch/read/hear anymore.” Verify what you are seeing/have seen until you have the measure of that gap, or at least as much of the measure you can stand. But: once you have that, you don’t need a podcaster or opinion writer to provide more insight and agree with you.
You need to place that measure on your heart. Breathe with it there. (This also works for personal gaps.)
When it is a collective tragic gap, you want to say, “There’s nothing I can do about that, except feel bad.”
But you are doing something when you carry what you witness on your heart, when you “feel bad.” You are reinforcing your values and intentions, when you weep for others. You are moving past the door of empathy into the chamber of compassion.
I know: This isn’t easy. This isn’t the way it is supposed to be. This may not be what you signed up for, when you took that first painful breath out of the womb. Me either.
But here’s what happens when we show up to the gap, and it makes its way into our hearts:
Your values deepen. Your intentions become more concrete, more specific. They carry you beyond who you are, they become what you intend, and what you do. This is the first part of bearing witness.
I’ll address the second part in my next post.
We are born in suffering as the vast majority of mothers will tell you - - of their own suffering. There is no more compelling proof that suffering is to follow us all of our days. Many of us are also born of love at the least from the same mothers no matter how mis-directed it can become. Like pinball machines (part of my study discipline for law exams) we are the balls launched into its universe of potential free games, "play again" bonuses and top scores believing we can control the outcome with flippers and occasional body slams and eventually accepting chaos as the ruling force. (Love the machines that hold balls and then release them all at once as you desperately try to keep three in play, sacrificing each for the other until there are none.) I could carry forward pinball analogies for pages if for no other reason than they are more amusing than any of the things to be learned for those exams. But I really wish I had the facility you always had to absorb and repeat teachings of substance. And I will take to heart your teaching from the teaching of the Rabbi. Thank you for that.
Well writ this script launched, as it were, like Artemis II, on its digital orbit around the moon of our half lit, half dark reflective (one hopes), lives!
A thought this stirs about birthing awareness, (attention and intention) to suffering, be it beguilingly covert or painfully overt: If to breathe is to live outside our womb-tomb, (or, perhaps even more, ‘tis to soar), was my first crying breath “painful” or “wonderful”?