'Just World News' with Helena Cobban

The planet as rickety boat

I got back home from my trip to China and California yesterday and managed to get to Quaker meeting this morning.

It was SO good to be back. Quakers frequently call Sundays, "First-day". It takes a bit of getting used to. So two weeks ago I totally didn't even have a first-day! It always amazes me, flying west across the Atlantic, how you can fly along through one single unbroken night and lose a whole day in there somewhere.

Last first-day, I was in California with Bill and Lorna. We'd spent the night before in SF, and then drove three hours northward to see Granny in the small town of Willits. I guess I could have gotten to a Quaker meeting if I had tried hard enough. But I'd only flown in from China the day before and I was still fairly badly jet-lagged (or jet-ragged, as my Japanese friends say, which always strikes me as even more graphic).

So today, I was determined to go. I made it to the Charlottesville Meeting's later (11 p.m.) worship session. The moment I walked in the door of the meeting-room I had the same strong sense of warmth, of spirit-power, and of existential homecoming I had the very first time I walked into this simple, square room some seven years ago.

Our meeting room was built from scratch as an addition onto an older wood-frame house some ten years or so ago. It has a lightly pitched, scissor-joisted ceiling with two (?three) long, thin skylights in one side of it, and windows around three sides of the room that look out mainly onto trees, but also onto some houses, a school, and a packing-warehouse. We have twelve or more long, old-fashioned wood benches arranged in three concentric squares on the heathered blue carpet. The walls are white.

There is no decoration apart from the view through the windows. In one corner stands a shelf with copies of the Quaker song-book we sometimes sing from after the one hour of mainly silent, "unprogramed" worship has come to an end.

This morning there were about 25 or 30 Friends there at the beginning. And then, after 45 minutes the youngsters came in as usual from their First-day School along with their teachers. Though they generally sit fairly quietly with us big 'uns--and today, they were totally silent!--their arrival is always a noticeable, indeed often keenly awaited, part of the later worship session. (People who prefer a quieter worship experience, or who have different schedules, go to the earlier session, at 8:30 a.m.)

Sometime, when worship is really "gathered", as we say, I have a very strong sensation of unity with the other worshipers. Sometimes I feel as if we are are all doing some grand celestial circle-dance together, raising our hands together to create gorgeous patterns and spirals in the sky. Like a Chagall painting. Sometimes I feel as if we are all standing as the staves of a broad tent or dome that provides shelter for us even as we sustain it. Sometimes these feelings are very deep, almost physical.

Today was certainly such a day.

I worked on my breathing a bit. Then I got to thinking about Thich Nhat Hanh and his teaching that sometimes, just by being calm, you can save lives. What I'd remembered from TNH was the example he gave of person on a rickety boat-- such as those used by the Vietnamese boat people--who merely by staying calm and lucid can save lives.

There is an evident analogy here between the rickety boat of a group of boat people and planet we inhabit today.

Actually, I'd forgotten that TNH himself made this analogy directly in the passage in question--pp. 11 and 12 of my paperback edition of "Being peace", which was first published in English in 1987.

It's altogether a powerful teaching, so I think I'll put the relevant three paragraphs right in here, with thanks to TNH:

Many of us worry about the situation of the world. We don't know when the bombs will explode. We feel that we are on the edge of time. As individuals, we feel helpless, despairing. The situation is so dangerous, injustice is so widespread, the danger is so close. In this kind of situation, if we panic, things will only become worse. We need to remain calm, to see clearly. Meditation is to be aware, and to try to help.

I like to use the example of a small boat crossing the Gulf of Siam. In Vietnam, there are many people, called boat people, who leave the country in small boats. Often the boats are caught in rough seas or stroms, the people may panic, and boats can sink. But if even one person aboard can remain calm, lucid, knowing what to do and what not to do, he or she can help the boat survive. His or her expression--face, voice--communicates clarity and calmness, and people have trust in that person. They will listen to what he or she says. One such person can save the lives of many.

Our world is something like a small boat. Compared with the cosmos, our planet is a very small boat. We are about to panic because our situation is no better than the situation of the small boat in the sea. You know that we have more than 50,000 nuclear weapons. Humankind has become a very dangerous species. We need people who can sit still and be able to smile, who can walk peacefully. We need people like that in order to save us. Mahayana Buddhism says that you are that person, that each of you is that person.

Things have changed some since TNH wrote that teaching (or maybe, he first delivered it orally.) The world's nuclear arsenals have been stepped down a bit-- though not nearly enough. Humankind has probably become a species even more threatening to longterm planetary health than it was 16 years ago... And then, we have the Bush administration's terrifying policy of globalized Manifest destiny, preventive war, unilateralism, bullying, and hegemony....

Breathe. Smile. Radiate love. Remain calm. Remain lucid....

We can all try to be "that person".