Point of View: Light That’s Seen

The other night on the “NewsHour,” our source for horror on weeknights, they showed the light that could not until recently be seen in what was heretofore thought to be vast outer blackness.

It was comforting. “We’re looking at heaven,” I said, “all the light that can now be seen.”

Well, I didn’t mean by that to imply I’d been convinced, though, as I say, it was comforting inasmuch as the revelation did nothing to disabuse me of a feeling that has persisted, to wit, that despite the suffering that attends us, all will be well. Or, as my French stepmother used to say, “Tout s’arrange.”

“It’s nothing,” my father reported his mother-in-law as having said to Lucette and him on her deathbed. There’s nothing to be afraid of.

I do wonder sometimes if the life to which we cling so isn’t a dream from which we’ll awake. Sometimes it almost seems as if it’s a sideshow. Nay, most often it seems like a freak show, so confounding at times that I’m prompted to seek refuge from the madhouse in Mud House.

And refuge in “The Book of Joy,” a compendium of conversations in which the Dalai Lama and Archbishop Tutu engaged not long ago, two leaders who know well what suffering is, but who, despite that, are joyous, their joy being linked to suffering. Theirs is a state, I presume, beyond happiness and beyond mere optimism. 

There is a large photo of the Dalai Lama laughing in our daughter and son-in-law’s house, and sometimes I wonder why he is. I can only conclude that it is because he is supremely accepting, that he’s never trying to force the issue. Still, inasmuch as I’m a citizen in an exhortatory nation, I would like to have a bumper sticker made that says, “Strive for Beauty.” For me that sums it up.

“We are same human beings,” the Dalai Lama says at one point, and, at another, Archbishop Tutu says, “We are wired to be caring for the other and generous to one another . . . human beings are basically good. . . . Ubuntu says: A person is a person through other persons.”

Theirs too is a light you can see, and much closer, and yes, it too is comforting. Jack Graves