After the ungodly carnage of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, monk and activist Maha Ghosananda crisscrossed his homeland helping to heal and reestablish communities. Millions had been slaughtered in the "Killing Fields." Everywhere he traveled he found the orphaned, the bereft, and the terribly traumatized.
One of his practices was to gather communities together and have them chant for hours,
Everything passes away.
You have lost so much.
Now you know how precious everything is.
You must learn to love again and let new things grow.
What a gift to have a compassionate, wise, courageous presence at the heart of trauma and rebuilding.
It's my experience of myself and of Western tendencies in general that we resist the notion that "Everything passes away." In our relatively wealthy and stable lives in America, things don't exactly pass away, we think, they just wear out and we buy improved versions.
Of course, whatever our perceptions are, everything does pass away, and over time, if we're honest (and fortunate) we come to realize it personally, profoundly, and persistently.
When I was 20, my father had a heart attack at breakfast and died. I tried to revive him with 'the kiss of life' but failed. In a profound way, as I failed to give him the kiss of life he succeeded in giving me 'the kiss of death.' He bequeathed to me in that terrible moment an unshakable knowing that everything indeed passes away.
But it's taken me decades to shake that revelation free of enough of it's trauma to be able to experience it as the wisdom it is. I'm now 3 years older than Dad when we died. I knew 40 years ago that I had 'lost so much.' I know it much better now. And now I also know much, much more deeply 'how precious everything is.'
What a treasure it is to know in the marrow of our being 'how precious everything is.' But we only come to access this treasure when we take the time to take to heart that indeed 'everything passes away.' When we take the time to let go of the sleepy way we live with denial instead of affirmation, our minds and hearts develop a new capacity to hold Something Else.
Letting go of our strange notions of the durability of the stuff we've come to count on is not easy, but it frees us more and more to live where we live, with life as it really is. And the emptying of denial and delusion makes room for filling full with truth. And the truth is pregnant with wonder. Ah, loving again, letting new things grow. I want that.
O God, O God, O God, how precious everything is.
Your mercies are new every morning.
Thank you, thank you, thank you.
