The Crucible

There is a letter that has been waiting for me to be ready to write about it. I am not sure I am, but the readiness may not be the point.

Some years ago, a man named Steve and a woman named Anita lost their young daughter, Rachel. She was raped and murdered. The phrase has to be said plainly because every softer phrase is a kind of lie about what they were asked to survive. They wrote to Ram Dass, whom they had never met, because they did not know where else to write. He wrote back.

The letter he sent them is, in my reading, the most honest thing he ever wrote. It does not flinch. It also does not console. Or rather, it does the only kind of consoling that does not insult the size of what they had lost, which is the kind that refuses to lift them out of the fire. It tells them the cosmic truth and tells them they must still burn, and it holds both of those at once, and it does not allow one to defeat the other.

That holding is what this dispatch is about. The rest of what I have written this year was, I think, preparation for being able to write this one.

I. What He Refused

Most consolation is a kind of refusal to be present to the size of the loss. It works by lifting. It offers a vantage point above the pain from which the pain might look smaller, or temporary, or part of a pattern that makes sense. They are in a better place. Time heals. Everything happens for a reason. These are not always lies. But they are always, when offered to someone whose child has just been murdered, a smallness pretending to be a comfort. They ask the bereaved to make their grief more bearable for the consoler.

Ram Dass does not do this. The second paragraph of his letter is the one I cannot get past.

For something in you dies when you bear the unbearable, and it is only in that dark night of the soul that you are prepared to see as God sees, and to love as God loves.

He is not telling them their pain is fine. He is telling them their pain is real and is doing something. The dying that happens inside a person when they bear the unbearable is not an injury they need to recover from. It is the work the unbearable is performing on them. He goes further.

I can't assuage your pain with any words, nor should I. For your pain is Rachel's legacy to you. Not that she or I would inflict such pain by choice, but there it is. And it must burn its purifying way to completion.

Your pain is Rachel's legacy to you.

That sentence does what almost nothing else in spiritual literature does. It does not separate the love from the grief. It says the grief is the love, continuing in time without its object. To try to remove the pain would be to try to remove what remains of the relationship. The pain is not an obstacle to honoring her. The pain is one of the forms honoring her takes now.

And the burning is purifying. Not because suffering is good. Because something is being made in the burning that could not be made any other way.

II. The Other Thing He Said

He did not stop there. He gave them, in the same letter, the cosmic recognition too.

Rachel finished her work on earth, and left the stage in a manner that leaves those of us left behind with a cry of agony in our hearts, as the fragile thread of our faith is dealt with so violently. Is anyone strong enough to stay conscious through such teaching as you are receiving? Probably very few. And even they would only have a whisper of equanimity and peace amidst the screaming trumpets of their rage, grief, horror and desolation.

The cosmic recognition is fully present. Rachel finished her work. She has not been cut off mid-sentence. She has not been deprived of a life she was owed. The teacher is saying, with the steady voice of someone who has spent decades looking directly at death, that her time was complete. The soul does not end. The work she came to do is done.

And in the same breath, he tells them that only "very few" are strong enough to stay conscious through what they are receiving. Even those few will have nothing more than "a whisper of equanimity and peace amidst the screaming trumpets of their rage, grief, horror and desolation." They will still have the screaming. The rage, the grief, the horror, the desolation, and the whisper, all at once. He is not asking Steve and Anita to choose the whisper over the screaming. He is telling them the screaming is the cost of being awake to the love. And he is telling them the whisper is real too.

Both things. At the same time. He does not let either one cancel the other.

This is what every other piece I have written this year has been pointing at without having to look at this directly. The cosmic giggle works because the bad day is small. The koan works because the gripping was the problem. The Renewer works because the universe is being remade. All of these teachings are technologies for finding the vantage point from which the suffering can be seen more truly. They do their work by up-leveling.

This is the dispatch where the up-leveling stops, and rightly so. Where the cosmic perspective is genuinely available and refuses to do its usual job, which would be to make the human grief smaller. Ram Dass gives Steve and Anita the cosmic view and he tells them they must still walk through the fire. Both. Always both. The view does not earn you the right to skip the burning.

III. The Crucible

He used to put it this way in his talks. The stuff of life is the crucible in which we are forged. I have heard that line for years without it really meaning what it means.

A crucible is the vessel in which metal is melted so it can be reshaped. The fire is not incidental to the forging. The fire is what does the forging. There is no way to be made that does not pass through the heat. There is no shortcut, no view from above, no piece of insight that can take the place of the actual melting. The thing you are becoming is being made by the burning of the thing you were.

This is what Ram Dass is saying to Steve and Anita. Their grief is the crucible. Rachel's death has placed them inside a fire that is going to make them into something they could not otherwise have become, and the only honest counsel he can give is to let the fire do what it has come to do. It must burn its purifying way to completion. Not because the loss was good. The loss was not good. But the only thing worse than the burning would be to refuse it, because refusing it would mean staying who they were before, and who they were before is no longer who they need to be in order to keep living.

The cosmic recognition is what keeps the crucible from being meaningless. The love is what keeps the crucible from being cruel. The burning is what does the actual work. All three at once. None of them substitutes for the others.

I do not think there is a more honest description of what it is to be a human being who has loved and who has lost.

IV. Why This Letter

I have spent this year writing dispatches that are, in one way or another, technologies for being less afraid. The traditions that converge on the perennial recognition all do this, and one of the things they do well is to soften the grip of dread on a life. They give you the vantage point. They give you the cosmic giggle. They let you set down the weight you were never asked to carry.

But there is a fear that is, I think, very nearly universal among parents. It is the fear of losing a child. I carry it. Most of the people I love carry it. I do not believe any amount of practice ever fully releases the grip of that one, because it is not a delusion to be seen through. It is the natural response of love to its own most precious object. To not feel that fear would mean not to love.

What this letter does, what it has done for me on the days when the fear has caught up with me, is not to tell me the fear is unfounded. The fear is not unfounded. Children die. Other people's children, sometimes. And the letter is the proof that even when the worst thing happens, the work that the teachers have been doing is still useful, but in a different way than I had understood. It is not useful as insulation. It is useful as company. The cosmic recognition does not stop the fire. It walks into the fire with you and refuses to leave.

The reason Steve and Anita could survive what they survived is, in part, because someone wrote them a letter that did not pretend the fire was not real and did not pretend they had to face it alone. Both things. The cosmic and the human. The whisper and the screaming. The teacher who knows that her work was complete and the friend who knows that nothing in this life will ever be the same again.

That is what the dispatches have been pointing at. This one is just the place where the pointing stops being a metaphor.

V. Closing

Steve and Anita lived. Years later they appeared in the documentary Fierce Grace, sitting in their kitchen in Ashland, Oregon, with their other two children playing in the background. They talked about the letter that had given them the courage to go on. The pain did, in the way Ram Dass said it would, burn its purifying way through them, and what came out the other side was not unbroken. It was forged. It was something that could carry what they had to carry. Not because the loss made sense. The loss did not make sense. But because what they did with the burning, with the help of a letter, was to let it make of them what it had to make.

I do not have anything else to add to this. There is nothing to summarize. The letter is the teaching. The crucible is the form. The holding of both is the work.

Both things. Always both.

This dispatch follows Dispatch 11: The Renewer, the immediate predecessor in this year's arc.