What do you do when you come up against something that you don’t agree with? Atheist: you meet fundamentalist. Liberal: you meet conservative. What happens when you talk and you find they are the opposite of everything you stand for?
How do you react when someone tries to hurt you, or take from you?
Thomas Merton wrote of a Buddhist story he read:
One evening [a farmer] heard some noise in the garden. He noticed a young man of the village atop a tree stealing his fruit. Quietly, he went to the shed where he kept his ladder and took it under the tree so that the intruder might safely make his descent. He went back to his bed unnoticed. The farmer’s heart, emptied of self and possession, could not think of anything else but the danger that might befall the young village delinquent.1From Zen and the Birds of Appetite, pg 111
This is very, very far from my usual reaction, which might be to throw stones at him, or at the very least, wish that he breaks something when he comes down from the tree. There is so much anger that rises in me at something like robbery. But is this anger necessary?
For peace to be solid, you need to be at peace with everything. This sounds radical, but it’s the only way to be free.
I don’t mean to let the whole world walk all over you. If someone robs you, call the police. But you can call the police without hating the intruder. The integrity of our world does not depend on him being caught and brought to ‘justice’.
There is no deep freedom if our peace can be stolen from us, in addition to our possessions. If a robber can steal our peace too, we are completely at his mercy. I don’t want to be completely at the mercy of robbers.
When we are friends with the world, we make peace with both the pretty and the ugly, the giving and the thieving, and then we are free.