Our Altered Future

All of us continuously imagine what we call the future—the next day, the next year, the next moment.  This future seems to have its own reality, there somewhere in the back of our minds.  We act, consciously or unconsciously, with a reliance on what we assume the future will be, and usually this gives us a certain steadiness or stability.  We think we know what to expect and we act accordingly.

Until one day, someone we love suddenly dies of a heart attack, or, in an instant, an unexpected tornado blows away a whole neighborhood, or, as happened yesterday, a presidential candidate is injured in an attempted assassination.

Then we are in shock, and the shock comes from realizing that our notion of a reliable future had been, all along, only a possibility, not a certainty.  We suddenly recognize that the best laid plans do go awry.

For example, yesterday, when the attempted assassination of former president Trump took place, from the former president to the spectators, from the Secret Service whose job it was to have planned better, to those of us later watching on television, we all discovered that everything in the future turns out to likely be different than we expected.

Whatever we had thought was going to happen in the days ahead has been suddenly impacted by the actions of someone beyond our control doing something beyond  our reasonable expectations.  Things have changed. The political landscape, for example.  Now it is necessary to try to reimagine what the future will hold for all of us.

Importantly, in these kinds of moments, we may have a period of clarity.  We may see, for example, how the actions of any one of us affects all of us.

In the immediate aftermath of shocking crisis—looking at the devastation after a tornado, or looking at the faces of people who were present at a mass shooting, etc.—after our initial sense of horror, we all usually feel, momentarily at least,  a sense of connection to those involved, to our common humanity; we share a concern, a soul-deep sorrow, or an uncharacteristically unselfish desire for things to be better, to find a new better future.

Then our reactions set in.

How we react at that point varies, and matters.

How we react can make all the difference to what the actual future holds for us.

After my shocked and troubled reaction to the shooting yesterday at former president Trump’s rally, as I watched a continuous replay of the scene on television, I became amazed at the reactions of the crowd on the bleachers behind Trump.

At the sound of the gunshots, some spectators immediately dropped down and tried to take cover, as Trump did.  Others just sat there, perhaps stunned into immobility, or unconsciously perhaps waiting for someone to direct them as to what to do.  And some people, strangely enough, it seems to me, immediately stood up, looking all around, I guess, to see what was happening, with or without thought that they were making themselves more of a potential target for the shooter.  One woman, apparently uninjured, just kept lying down long after everything seemed to be over and the other people were leaving.

How the rest of us react in our various ways to this shooting, to this violence, to this aberration of the democratic process and rule of law and order, how we react matters, just as the reactions of those people around Trump mattered.

A doctor, for example, who was later interviewed on television, immediately jumped over a barricade to get to the person near him  who, it turned out, was killed by a bullet.  The doctor’s immediate reaction was to help as he could, to be of service as he was trained as a doctor to do, just as the reactions of the Secret Service people leaping forward at risk to their own lives to surround Trump did as they were trained and obligated to do.

How are each of us trained to react?  What are we obligated to do?  How are we reacting?  In helpful ways, in the service of life, of everyone else?  How?

Already there are the “knee-jerk” automatic reactions of many, from pundits to party spokespeople to ordinary citizens outraged or grieving.  And some of those reactions are in themselves dangerous.

Blamings, accusations, imagined reprisals, even Trump’s fist in the air with the words “fight, fight, fight,” these automatic reactions matter in what the future will hold for all of us.

There are those who tell us that the ability to imagine a future and to plan for it sets us humans apart from the rest of creation.  I personally question the human-centered aspect of that notion, as I certainly don’t have the foresight or planning skills of a migrating bird or a hibernating bear! I do agree though that how we humans can adjust and change our ideas of the future can be a determining aspect of what actually happens, and being human could, possibly, mean being more “humane.”

Ironically, at the same time that CNN was running coverage of the shooting, a small banner was running at the base of the television screen showing how some Palestinian civilians had been killed (I think it was 90 something) in a raid that was said to be an attempt to find and kill one Hamas leader.  The irony of that juxtaposition on the television screen hit me, along with the enormity of the ways in which action, reaction, justice, revenge, and just plain ignorance, stupidity, and malice play into creating world-wide events that affect everyone on the planet.

I feel sure that the ordinary citizens of Palestine or Israel had no more part in the decision to carry out that deadly bombing strike in Gaza than did the spectators at Trump’s political rally have a part in the gunman’s decision to shoot at the former president.  But all were affected, and all will respond in various ways.  Just as each of us will.  What will our reaction be?  What new sort of future will we collectively shape by our reactions?  Anger, hostility, vengeance, reprisal, hatred, victimization, more violence?

So, once again, I am brought to my knees, to my meditation cushion, to my computer, hoping to make space in myself to allow to arise in me another kind of reaction to this assassination attempt.

I am aware that all of my own inner “villagers” are already raising their voices within me, with their perhaps irrational fears and their various demands. I have learned that in such a moment there is no reasoning with these inner villagers of mine, or with anyone, inner or outer, who is, for example, in a panic attack, or who is like an infant in an out-of-control fit of crying.  Instead of appealing to so-called reason, I have finally realized that by becoming calm, somehow, and then offering that calmness to the situation has proven to be more helpful than any other reaction. That perhaps has been my sort of training, as a minister, a counselor, a mother, an observer in my long life of all sorts of crisis.

And so, today, my response to the shooting has been reserved, solemn and prayerful.   Since my limited knowledge and my troubled assumptions about the assassination attempt are useless right now, I become still, and I wait for the arising of a wisdom from a depth of reality beyond my ordinary mind, to inform and shape a helpful response.

Call the source of this sort of wisdom what you will—God, the Beloved, the Great Spirit, Allah, whatever—by whatever name, there is, for me, a wisdom beyond the beyond, as the saying goes, certainly beyond my immediate conscious reactions.  And I choose to rely on that wisdom, mysterious and complex, recognizing that I will, soon enough, arise from my prayers, my cushion, my computer, and act somehow in response to all of this, to the attempted assassination, to what so many people are concerned about as to our altered future.

When I do, I hope I will look toward that initial moment after seeing images of the shooting, of feeling my connection to all those people, instead of instantly falling back into old patterns of separation that have not worked in the past.

This is a critical moment in our culture.  How any and all of us react is critical to our collective future.  Perhaps, perhaps, we can all pause for a broader perspective than our usual one.  We know, surely we know, that retribution, recrimination, self-directed one-sidedness, none of these serve.  Surely we can allow this critical moment to open us up to a deeper wisdom, another way of collectively creating the future.

I have learned something about this in the past few years when I have had to have complete anesthesia for several emergency surgeries. The latest one was a few weeks ago when, in addition to the usual dire warnings right before surgery about risks from anesthesia, there had already been some discussion among the doctors beforehand about whether the risk was advisable at my age.

I remember, as I waved goodbye to my friend who would be there in the waiting room, waiting, as I was wheeled into the operating room, I recall thinking, “Well, I hope I come out alive.”  All other concerns or big ways I had imagined the future, the importance of any of these dropped away as the so-called “incredible urgency of now” took hold.

And in that moment, holding that thought of an intense desire for life, that hope for a future, as the oxygen mask slipped over me, I was brought to consider how wonderful and amazing it actually is just to be alive, with options and choices and opportunities, even if without entitlements or expectations of any kind.  I was filled with gratitude and love for all and everything, every bit of all of it. I felt how sweet life itself is, how grateful I was to be a part of it all, in all its complexity.  I felt how dear and precious everyone and everything else is to me.  And so, just as I slipped into unconsciousness, I sent great love and gratitude out to everything, especially since I knew that possibly, in an instant, during surgery, I could lose it all, lose my life itself.  Or I could survive, and hopefully I would remember the power of that moment of connection and peace I had felt, giving myself up to the anesthesia and the outcome of the surgery.

This last surgery was on my face, involving a skin graft because of an aggressive skin cancer.  Now, a few weeks afterwards, it is hard to look at myself in the mirror.  Plastic surgery did not provide me with a lovely outcome, at least not for now.  The surgeon tells me that in time it will get better, smooth out, be more acceptable cosmetically.  But, for now, I have to keep reminding myself of those moments going into surgery, when just to be alive was the bottom line, the hope was for a future at all.  How that future looks right now, how my face looks right now, well, that I will have to find ways to adjust to the changes I hadn’t expected.

I think of all that today, after the attempted assassination.  This is a moment, I think, for our culture, for our nation, when we can, when we must make some adjustments to our changed expectations.

This could be a watershed moment.  It carries the possibility, the chance to be better, to change by being more aware of just how the actions and words of each one of us matters to all of us.  We could remember how our whole nation is in so many ways connected, how our united, yes, United our States could be, our people could be.  There is a chance to stop the deadly divisiveness that likely led this young shooter to the extreme decision to act, violently.

If it is true, and I believe it is, that ultimate reality is a great oneness, connectedness, inseparability, a circle, then any reactions to this situation must consider that a circle has no right or left sides; it is a circle, whole and complete.  It has no arbitrary divisions, as political parties or cultural differences may tempt us to believe are the ultimate reality.  It’s all a circle, we are one circle, one Whole Thing.

Getting our lives, our political lives, all aspects of our lives to reflect that awareness is the great work before us as we together create a new future.

This attempted assassination may remind us that we are all human; we are all dodging actual bullets or the various “slings and arrows” of outrageous fortune.

I hope I remember that, that we are all human.

However reactive I may be, however much I initially waver from this bedrock value of mine, I must continue to bring myself back to working toward a future that encompasses an awareness of wholeness, inclusiveness, forgiveness, tolerance, non-violence, loving peacefulness, and a creativity that evolves from that reality.  I hope I do not regress but remain open to some kind of new vision of the future.

May divine wisdom guide us all in the days ahead.  May we be protected from our own many deluded notions of what is really important and of the uncertain future.  May we imagine and envision and work for a future that embodies a greater good for all.

I have felt a need to speak my own experience here.  I hold a place of honoring your experience as well.

Glenda Taylor, July 14, 2024