Cho Seung-Hui and Compassion....

I'd planned on writing this post later today. Julie has requested discussion on justice and forgiveness. It sounds like an interesting project. Her site has some of the most interesting debates in the comment forum I've ever seen!

I'd scratched a few notes together last night and this morning. While making the blog rounds earlier, I found a post that speaks to all the basics needed in any discussion of justice, forgiveness and compassion. It is located here. I can add nothing. I will let that post speak for me, although I don't have the writer's permission to do so yet. I can only expand on it, become a branch, using anecdote to show how we might get past the need for justice and forgiveness to finally find compassion.

In my own transformation, the greatest hurdle has been to achieve detachment from the need to equalize the scales, to make wrong things right and to have that ego-created sense of balance. Instant karma. That has been my ultimate spiritual challenge.

Letting go of that was ~ and still is ~ a struggle at times.

Yet in thinking it over in light of both my family news and the Virginia Tech shootings, I realize fully that it is not my place to exact justice or offer forgiveness. It's simply not my right to do so. I get that.

Who am I to judge another?

During the day yesterday, there were many reports about the Virginia Tech shooter, his background and his struggles. He was obviously a tormented human being. The red flags flew at full mast for a very long time before he walked into Norris Hall and opened fire.

Even given the havoc he wreaked on the community, I believe it is necessary to find compassion for him. His struggle was the struggle of many, although perhaps not to the same extreme degree. Human beings need community. We were created that way. In finding ourselves ostracized and rejected, especially without explanation, our minds take us to strange places. I posted about this last week. Some might become more inward, self-soothing with booze, drugs, promiscuity or fantasy. Others lash out, only finding relief in bringing harm to others, those they perceive as their oppressors. He didn't "snap". This decompensation has been escalating for a long, long time.

Cho Seung-Hui is the ultimate example of someone who tried to balance the scales on his own, to exact judgement and, yes, justice on his community.

It is easy to demonize and dismiss him. He did a terrible, devastating thing. If we dare to look at his humanity, we see our own reflection in his eyes. We see ourselves as a failed community. We see ourselves as a failed culture. We see ourselves as flawed individuals. Do we see in that reflection our own complicity?

So how do we find that compassion? I wish I had a packaged answer. I'm not the Dalai Lama but just one more struggling woman in the mass of humanity that surrounds me. I take comfort and wisdom from the Southeast Asian culture I have embraced. I have no ultimate wisdom, no superior understanding.

I know that when I go to that very quiet and still place within myself and allow it, I can feel it. The compassion. When I shed tears for the 32 murdered students, I can shed a tear for Cho Seung-Hui at the same time. The tears blend together and water the seed of compassion that lives in my silence.


Peace,


~Chani