Redemption of a Bad Situation

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One of my experiences that repeatedly astonishes and delights is to find a situation joyful and right that seemed lost, wrong, backward, devastating, awful. I suppose this a variant on the alchemy idea that I've blogged about before: what seemed a defeat turns out to be a blessing.

It's on my mind a lot because of last year, an “Annus Horribilus.” Last year was devastating for me, when everything went wrong that could go wrong, and I felt that I died in a very real sense.

But I not only recovered but am now humbly grateful, not just for surviving that year or so, but for having the devastation.

So I'm reading Huston Smith's “The World's Religions” last night and I come across this passage in his discussion of Hinduism:

Hindu literature is studded with metaphors and parables that are designed to awaken us to the realms of gold that are hidden in the depths of our being. We are like beings who, falling victim to amnesia, wander our kingdoms in tatters not knowing who we really are. Or like a lion cub who, having become separated from its mother, is raised by sheep and takes to grazing and bleating on the assumption that it is a sheep as well. We are like a lover who, in his dream, searches the wide world in despair for his beloved, oblivious of the fact that she is lying at his side throughout.

There is a story like that in the Lotus Sutra, where a father sends his son out into the world with just a ragged overcoat, but has sewn a valuable jewel into the back of it, unknown to the son.

Smith's book is fifty years old but is clearly a classic. Bill Moyer's blurb on the jacket says “This is the one book on world religions I can't do without. I return to it often – and always with reward.”

Here is just one more quote, this time from the introduction, in which he expresses caution about the institutionalization of religion, or of many other things, I imagine:

Lincoln Steffens has a fable of a man who climbed to the top of a mountain, and standing on tiptoe, seized hold of the Truth. Satan, suspecting mischief from this upstart, had directed one of his underlings to tail him: but when the demon reported with alarm the man's success – that he had seized hold of the Truth – Satan was unperturbed. “Don't worry,” he yawned. "I'll tempt him to institutionalize it.”