As he has pondered this same question in recent years, the Quaker author Parker Palmer has referred to one of my favorite passages from Rainer Maria Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet:
"…I would like to beg you dear Sir, as well as I can, to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don't search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer."Mariane Pearl is a refreshing and bracing model for living the questions in the world we now inhabit. She is a survivor who has salvaged wisdom from the front lines of the war on terror. She is a real woman, flesh and blood, passionate and tempestuous. She suffered a hideous loss in the kidnapping and murder of her husband. She might reasonably have chosen to despair. Instead she chose to fight. She was not interested in forgiving the people who did this, but she did work to understand the world which made it possible.
She says that years of Buddhist practice gave her the clarity to see what the terrorists' goals were and how to resist them, a spiritual practice of defiance that sustains her even today. And here is her definition of "winning" over terrorism:
If I was somebody who could not trust people anymore because of what happened to Danny, then they would have claimed some part of my soul. … If I was overwhelmed by bitterness, or if I hated Muslims… I knew that if I was going to be bitter, I was going to be half dead, and that's exactly what they wanted, right? I can't do that. It's impossible. But it's a defiance, it's not a forgiveness.Radio is about the spoken word; but one of its magical qualities is a capacity to plant pictures in our mind's eye — pictures painted by others that we nevertheless summon from our own depths. Of all the stories Mariane Pearl leaves me with this week, I am most pleased to possess her image of the Pakistani Muslim policemen who understood her personal tragedy as their own and who fight even today for their country and their religion.
She describes a "vision of the world" incarnate in the house in Karachi in which she awaited news of her husband's fate — a plural humanity, a mix of personal histories and faiths, that gathered light against the terrorist alternative of violence. As a Buddhist, Mariane Pearl offers a model of spiritual defiance that is both pragmatic and transcendent. As a woman, she offers concrete images of a world worth fighting for.
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A Mighty Heart: The Inside Story of the Al Qaeda Kidnapping of Danny Pearl
by Mariane Pearl
Mariane Pearl published this memoir just eighteen months after the death of her husband. The tone of the book is precisely that of the woman I interviewed: smart, irreverent, appealing, incisive.
Mariane Pearl's descriptions of her time in Karachi, both before and after the kidnapping, are in the present tense — and this gives the reader a sense of experiencing with her the long ordeal and her quest to make meaning of it. Sometimes I find the people I interview more engaging in conversation than in writing. But A Mighty Heart is a fine, necessary companion to Mariane Pearl's immediate voice.
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Comments: 11
I always find in writings something to think about, for a very long time.
It has occurred to me that the rationale for terrorism is likely broader and more complex than simple attributions to inherently evil, mentally deranged or religiously fanatic people.
Those are some of the same simple attributions I initially applied to Black Americans rioting in the streets of Detroit, Chicago and Los Angeles as I watched the nightly newscasts in the 1960's. Absent a coherent, clearly communicated mission, strategy, or even goal for the violence and destruction I was witnessing, I found it impossible to place it within any contextual framework at my disposal.
Only several years following those events, through reading and discussion, did I develop such a framework. Two of the most insightful books I read were "Soul on Ice" by Eldridge Cleaver and "Nigger" by Dick Gregory. They allowed me to vicariously share their experiences, and those of others they wrote about. And they led me to realize that there were no well thought out visions of what all that violence and destruction would achieve beyond implanting those TV images in the minds of the American people and, possibly, causing some of us to stop and ask, "Why?"
And the "why" boiled down to simply giving vent to the frustration and despair that had been simmering for years as the result of poverty, disenfranchisement and powerlessness. It had nothing to do with reason: it had everything to do with pent-up emotion.
Those revelations, I believe, are applicable to achieving an understanding of terrorism. While the potential violence and destruction are greater, owing to more widely available weapons and technology, the motivations are similar, and have been bred by the same sort of frustration and despair. But, in addition to the factors present in America in the 1960's, young men and women living in many third-world countries are reacting not only to the exploitation of their natural resources by the world's most powerful nations, but to the militaristically imposed attempt to supplant thousands of years of cultural development with a system that has been in existence for only a little over 200 years.
When you put yourself into the shoes of people living through that kind of oppression, the term "The Great Satan" takes on a whole new meaning.
As for "forgiveness" as Mrs. Pearl uses the word. I was once told by a wise spiritual leader that forgiveness is not giving your stamp of approval to another's acts. It is simply placing their fate in some other hands, perhaps G_d's hands. It is an acceptance of the truth of what has been done, and a letting go of being invested in controlling the retribution or punishment of the perpetrator. That is all.
This was written by Edmund Burke, who studied at an Irish Quaker school, became a scholar who then served for many years as a member of the English Parliament at the time of the American Revolution. He supported the colonists' bid for *freedom* from his king, warning all the time against any sort of inflexible governing, especially in times of conflict. His volumes of work are either hated or loved, but generally entirely misunderstood. He had even stronger words to say about the French Revolution's insanely violent quest for *freedom.* More than anything, he was passionate about the human spirit, whatever flavor or color. He is most remembered for the debates he led about holding the course of Britain's constitutional limits to the executive powers of his ascendant president, King George. It would be good for us all to reflect on what those words by Edmund Burke mean. It is probably about the hardest lesson for anyone to absorb in the midst of dramatic and emotional upheaval, when all our personal buttons from every side are being pushed. The meaning to these words are not immediately evident, for they have nothing to do with passivity and everything to do with responsible action.
John Newton became an acquaintance of his. The name may ring a bell for some. He wrote the words to "Amazing Grace." Oddly, Newton began his merchant career as the captain of a ship that sailed back and forth between Africa and the Caribbean with its cargo of shackled Africans. Frightened by a storm that seized his ship on one of those crossings, the beginnings of those words came to him when he saw that the chained Africans and he were all on a level playing field. According to a folk singer friend of mine whose father also was a folk singe, Newton immediately turned the ship around and released the Africans. That's not been historically confirmed. But he did realize the spiritual value of even a single human life above all other ideals, no matter how sanctioned by economic convention in society. He never again sailed his ship.
The point is, it is never ever too late for even the most arrogant human being to turn away from any course of action, no matter what the risk is to personal or national pride.
Krista, you've written a very cohesively brilliant article. Thank you.
is no doubt one of the hardest books I have ever read. I felt so deeply emersed within the story and felt the heartache and terror so vividly. I agree, it is a book well worth reading but it should come with a disclaimer....not for the faint of heart or weak of spirit...for it causes you to deal with many issues you might never have to otherwise.
Ah - and as a peaceful [spiritual] warrior, I think that actually we are only beginning to explore our true shielding abilities, which are not material/military/political at all! Those things only render us more vulnerable.
It's the folks who are mastering various spiritual arts who are discovering how to avoid creating the "echoed violence" effects of cloudy violent thinking - They practice clearing their minds of judgementalism and revenge and victim thoughts; they practice clearing their subconsciouses of negative victim-perpetrator scapegot/revenge dramas - and they practice sending out clear, strong, beautiful thoughts which can manifest more peace on earth.
The more people willing to spend just a few minutes a day even trying to do this, the sooner we'll stop this groupmind creation of hell-on-earth violence.
We are NOT helpless! We just need to clear our consciousness. We CAN do this.
The absence of God is Evil.
To proclaim evil in Gods name is truly a sad thing indeed!
This story of one's loss takes place each and every day around the world within some part of the globe. My heart is sad to see such evil done, my prayers are with those who die at the hands of such evil one's.