Yesterday had an apocalyptic tinge to it.  The statement by the mayor of New Orleans that hundreds, maybe thousands of people have been killed in that city was a shock.  And then the news that approximately 1000 people were trampled to death in Iraq suggested a world turned upside down.   Just a horrible, horrible day.

     We each have our own ways of dealing with tragedy.  I find some solace in Taoism.  I know it may not appeal to many Americans, but Chuang Tzu’s writing about the meaning of death puts such bad days in a much broader perspective.  And, perhaps, for some, there may be some comfort in that….

     Chuang Tzu was writing in the Warring States  period, when there was a great deal of fighting and death crashing all around him.  Yet in the midst of those bad days, he, and other Taoist thinker, was able to step back and see things in a cosmic context.  He understood the individual human life as a fleeting moment in an endless expanse of time and transformation.  We are all born, we experience moments of happiness, moments of sorrow, we decline, we die.  Although we might want to invest our lives with special significance, some sort or personal uniqueness, Chuang Tzu, while recognizing the particularlity of each living thing, saw that, ultimately, all living things were equivalent in that they would be swept up into the vortex of endless change.

     What can we take from this for dealing with Katrina and Iraq?  When faced with death and destruction on such as scale we must, of course, first mourn.  But then we should see that such terrible changes are beyond our control.  What has happened has happened; what we have before us now is different from what existed before, and, so, we must find our way, our life, in the new circumstances we face.  Bad days will come and go; good days will also be transitory.  We must accept the bad and the good and see them both as essential elements of life.  Maybe then we appreciate the beauty of life in all of its difficulty and wonder.

    Chuang Tzu:

Birth and death, living and dead, failure and success, povery and wealth, honor and dishonor, slander and praise, hunger and thirst, hot and cold – such are the transformations of this world, the movements of its inevitable nature.  They keep vanishing into one another before our very eyes, day in and day out, but we’ll never calibrate what drives them.  So how can they steal our serenity, how can they plunder our spirit’s treasure-house?  If you let them move together, at ease and serene, you’ll never lose your joy.  And if you do this without pause, day in and day out, you’ll invest all things with spring.  (75).