I Am Through You So I Read online

  JK: I find that playing against each other has its charm as well, so long as it is a game and does not create shame or fear.

  DSR: And as long as one can feel joy if the other wins.

  JK: I play soccer with others, and I also want to shoot a goal myself. But when someone else from my team has that opportunity, I am overjoyed with him.

  DSR: Can I not also feel joy when the other team scores a goal? Is it about winning against the opposite team, or is it about an exciting joint game? The better I play, the better I encourage others to play. That is competition as it is supposed to be, but unfortunately not as it is.

  JK: Competition in quality, not competition for resources.

  DSR: Yes, those are helpful concepts in dealing with this difficult subject. One aspect of competition at any rate, the effort to surpass oneself for the good of all, furthers a healthy development and should be viewed positively.

  JK: The other idea of competition divides people into the successful—the winners—and the losers. We see that in the world at large: some economies are designed to leave others behind, and that has social consequences when competition leaves those other nations behind in their race for social and economic development. From the point of view of the system, that cannot be healthy.

  DSR: The system is the important thing. One must look at the larger picture and see how the success of the individual affects that. In the larger framework, surpassing oneself should be seen positively, but self-actualization at the cost of others does not seem to support the system at large.

  JK: Primarily because it comes from a wrong experience of the self. In the end, we are always from others, through others, and toward others.

  DSR: Indeed! The wrong view of competition does come from an isolated, cutoff, and thus “sinful” I, from the Ego and not from the I-Self that knows itself connected with all others.

  JK: Additionally, ever since Descartes, this Ego has been living in a bubble, imagining that it is only an I because it thinks. But thinking is only one possible self-description of a human being. By contrast, one might also say he “is” because he feels compassion, or is connected, or because he is at all—from the point of view of existence.

  I was surprised that in the French Revolution’s apparently secular program of Liberté, Égalité Fraternité, you see a program for new social order. You know that after the Revolution, thousands went to the guillotine in the name of these ideals. After the revolutionary impulse of liberation, a state terrorist regime followed, which was finally ended by another nationalist leader, in this case Napoleon, who tried to extend an imperialist reign over all of Europe. Why do you believe that with liberty, equality, and fraternity, we might have found a program for a new social order on which our lives may even depend?

  DSR: Yes, of course, the French Revolution ended up completely antithetical to its origins. But the original ideal of liberty, equality, and fraternity—forgetting for a moment the historical derailments and looking only at the concepts themselves—is exactly what Jesus tried to realize. The truth will set you free (cf. John 8:32). You are all brothers. The greatest among you shall be the servant of all.

  JK: So, you would see love for your neighbor as a brotherly love?

  DSR: Yes, because we are all children of God.

  JK: Today, liberty is enthusiastically advocated in the West but also elsewhere in the world. We want to be free and understand this freedom as very individual. But what we do not see enough is that there are societies that are captive; that is, that we also need liberation within society, not liberation of the individual for his or her own autonomous choices. The freedom of choice in our Western societies is very great. But liberty must be connected with justice and equality. We like to overlook that. I am thinking of a global justice, seeing the world as a system.

  DSR: A just order implies both rights and duties. Of what we call justice today, the Romans said, “Summum ius summa iniuria” (extreme justice is extreme injustice). Justice as we see it in the criminal justice system, for example, is merely legalized revenge, as I see it. I was delighted to learn that, regarding criminal justice, the Argentinian constitution states (I’m paraphrasing): “Crime should not so much be punished as corrected and its repetition prevented.” True justice belongs in a context of restitution and healing, not of revenge and punishment. In the case of a crime, that means—without excusing or minimizing it—helping criminals to become solid members of society again instead of locking them up or executing them.

  JK: In Europe, we are currently experiencing the end of the economic growth model as we knew it even into the end of the 1990s. Our economies are no longer growing, or growing only insignificantly. At the same time, industrialized countries can no longer afford the road of expansive growth, purely for ecological reasons. If we want to realize the climate goals of limiting global warming to 1.5°C as set down by the United Nations in the 2015 Paris Agreement, that means that we need to quickly stop using fossil fuels and at least halve our use of resources, which would lead to a radical change in the Western lifestyle. If we do not manage that, we risk catastrophic climate events that will endanger our lives. We will see even greater wars and refugee movements than we do today, which is something we wish neither for ourselves nor our children. Pope Francis has recognized and stated this clearly in his encyclical Laudato Si’. Where do you see the duty of religion in these linked political, ecological, and economic questions? Does it have a duty there?

  DSR: Yes, the very word religion points toward that duty. Related to Latin re-ligare, the word religion connotes a retying of broken bonds: bonds between us and our true selves; between us and all others; between us and the Great Mystery. Correcting our ecologically destructive activities is unquestionably a central aspect of mending our fractured relations to nature, to the world community, and to genuine humaneness. Pope Francis clearly understood this. As a voice in the wilderness, he keeps pointing out the connection between destruction of the environment and social destruction as its consequence. This is revolutionary and arises from his deeply contemplative insight.

  JK: In this context, he used strong words: “Such an economy kills” (Evangelii Gaudium 53).

  DSR: Yes! It is high time that religious representatives speak out in this regard.

  JK: Not only speak out, but also live as role models within their institutions.

  I was astonished that already in your early seventies, you were preparing for your eventual death. Not that it is completely unrealistic to engage with the idea of death, because we move toward death from our birth. But it surprised me how rationally you dealt with it. You moved to an old person’s home in Ithaca, New York, which was made possible for you by good friends. But it evidently all turned out very differently. How did that happen?

  DSR: What pulled me back out from my retirement was the creation of the website “Grateful Living.” Initially, I did not regard this project as a task that would shape my future. It was just that friends recommended a website and insisted on the need for it. So, I gave in, and this website6 turned out to be a small seed that suddenly burst forth and kept growing.

  JK: You mean that it fell on such fertile ground that it now has versions all over the world?

  DSR: No one could have foreseen that. But since I had some coresponsibility for creating this website, I wanted to do justice to that responsibility. That called me back out of my reclusiveness. My helping with the website made travels necessary. So, one thing led to another.

  JK: This “Network for Grateful Living”—what is it, and what isn’t it? Could you go into more detail about the fundamental reason behind it? What makes it so attractive and a possible alternative for people from completely different cultures and religious backgrounds?

  DSR: Our Network for Grateful Living is a network of networks connecting people who have discovered the joy of living gratefully. From the very beginning, our website was conceived as a tool to support, all over the world, groups who are making an effort to li
ve gratefully—small groups of people who help each other to live grateful lives, small networks that connect with one another. The website wants to provide online support for off-line action. Its phenomenal expansion showed us the power of this idea. Gratitude appeals to everyone. Thus, gratitude can connect people, and we are in urgent need today of ideas that connect. Gratitude can connect religions; every religion stresses gratitude as a high value. Gratitude can connect cultures; any child can understand it, and there is no culture that does not value gratitude; it is universally recognized. That is why today there seems to be a wave of gratitude spreading throughout the world, which is what we wanted to achieve—and I hope we contributed a bit. The idea has proved itself. Of course, questions arose: For what are we truly thankful? Can we be thankful for everything? And that led us to our next task for the site: to explain the concept of gratitude.

  JK: How would you explain what gratitude is about and what it is not about?

  DSR: Grateful living is an attempt to face life with trust, look for the opportunities life offers in each moment, and taste the joy of making the most of them.

  JK: And why with gratitude?

  DSR: Because the present moment, with all the possibilities it offers, is the greatest gift one can imagine. Everything there is can be understood as a gift to everything else there is. When we recognize that and live by it, we connect with all living things in each moment. That goes far beyond anything one imagines when one first hears the word gratitude. Unpacking its riches, exploring its meaning, and spreading the joy of gratitude is the goal of our website.

  JK: Let me play devil’s advocate once again; I can imagine someone saying, “Brother David is calling me to be grateful. So now I need to practice gratitude if I want to be a good guy. It’s suddenly another duty I am saddled with, another effort I must make. And besides, when I look at my life, I see so many things going wrong, so many things for which I cannot be grateful. With all my illnesses and other blows of fate, I’m lucky to have survived at all.

  DSR: Or as someone quipped: I’m grateful for my bad luck; it is the only luck I’ve got!—But seriously: The most important keyword for grateful living is opportunity. Even the most challenging situations keep giving us opportunities for which we can be grateful: opportunities for learning to deal with adversities, for growing by dealing with difficulties, completely new opportunities for proving ourselves, and maybe even for creative protest. Those are gifts we did not wish for, but with a grateful attitude, we can recognize the opportunities they give us as gifts and use them creatively. A grateful life is a creative life because we learn to ask, “What opportunity does this present moment offer me?” By using that opportunity creatively, we show ourselves to be grateful.

  JK: Even the fight for more justice in social conflicts—that too is a form of grateful living.

  DSR: Definitely. I fully agree. We must not think about grateful living as if it were a private affair. Life means connectedness—in the end, limitless connectedness. That is why social responsibility is necessarily a part of grateful living.

  JK: What you say about a grateful life sounds to me like a strategy for happiness.

  DSR: Yes, our longing for happiness is the driving force behind grateful living. What we humans are looking for in the end is lasting happiness—happiness that does not depend on what happens. I call this type of happiness “joy,” and joy even in the midst of unhappiness is a real possibility. We feel joy when we trust life, are in tune with life, give a full response to life—and that is what a grateful person does. Happiness has rightly been called slippery; it slithers away between your fingers. But the joy that springs from gratitude is solid; it remains the bedrock of life, even in our unhappiest moments.

  JK: That means that I do not need to be happy first in order to be grateful.

  DSR: On the contrary, I need to be grateful first, and that will make me happy.

  JK: Why is that the case?

  DSR: Because joy is identical to gratitude. If we give children some little gift and they get joy from it, we know that they are grateful, even if they do not say “thank you.” By saying “thank you,” they show that they are well socialized; that’s something different. But true gratitude is joy. That holds true also of gratitude in adults. Living with joy means living gratefully, and living gratefully means living joyfully.

  Peace demonstration with Zentatsu Richard Baker Roshi (center) and Thich Nhat Hanh (center-right); New York, June 12, 1982

  9

  Double Realm

  2006–2016

  As a young man on one of my first visits to New York City, I strolled up Fifth Avenue one evening and, at 59th Street, wandered into the southeast corner of Central Park. In the early 1950s, this corner of the park housed a small zoo. Most of the zoo’s regular visitors were children, and at this late hour, I was there alone. But suddenly, I felt a powerful presence, looked up, and saw a gorilla sitting on the roof of his hut. His massive form seemed to tower hugely in the dusk, and yet he was sitting there hunched over, as if grieving. As I approached, I could see into his eyes, but it seemed that he hardly noticed me, as if his thoughts were somewhere far away. He was old, maybe very old. I cannot say how long we stayed like that, holding each other’s gaze, but I know that it was a long time. Long enough to tell me something about aging, an intuition deep enough that I still have not fully plumbed it, not even in the last decade of my life so far—I say “so far” because I have learned to expect surprises, and because there do remain mysteries that wait to be plumbed.

  In this stage of my life, my inner plumb line tends to sink into depths that I can best explore with the help of Rilke’s term “double realm.” The poet writes,

  And though the pool’s reflection

  often blurs before us:

  Know the image.

  Only in the double realm

  do the voices become

  eternal and mild.1

  The double realm is one indivisible whole, though my thinking keeps wanting to pull its two aspects apart. Distinguish—yes! Separate—no. Looking at the world with eyes that try to encompass the whole, not permitting it to fall apart in my mind, I see that as my great task in aging. T. S. Eliot knows the difficulty of this task:

  Let me disclose the gifts reserved for age

  To set a crown upon your lifetime’s effort…

  As body and soul begin to fall asunder.2

  On some days, it really does seem as though everything were about to fall asunder: I accidentally drop my spelt roll into a plate of pumpkin soup with corn oil and splatter my white robe from head to toe in yellow and black—the Austro-Hungarian Empire’s Imperial colors. Is this my “second childhood”? In my first childhood, my mother told me that the first time she put a plate of spinach soup in front of me on the table, I got so excited about its beautiful color that I put both hands into it and painted myself green from top to bottom. Mother laughed, as she told me about it, and now the Brothers laugh kindly at my little accident in the refectory and suggest, “Perhaps one could call it ‘art in action!’” That is at least a more positive interpretation than that all is falling asunder.

  But what is it that suggests the image of body and soul falling apart in aging and death? I try to find an answer: I am aware that, on the one hand, my soul, my Self, lives in the Now and is thus not bound by time, while my body, on the other hand, has a beginning and is moving toward my daily approaching end. So, in my body, I am tied to time, and my I is ephemeral, while my Self has permanence. And yet I experience myself as a unit, as I myself—not as I and self. However, I am aware of this unity only as long as I live in the Now, in the moment, in the double realm of time and eternity. As soon as I hold on to the past or become entangled in fantasies of the future, I am aware only of the passage of time and the fact that my time is slipping away. (“I’m slipping, I’m slipping away, like sand slipping through fingers,” says the poet.)3 All the more, I consider it my great task to recognize that time and eternity do n
ot lie next to each other but are one in the Now. My challenge is to live in the dynamic tension of the double realm.

  While I am traveling, I have no choice but to meet that challenge; I can’t afford distraction; can’t manage unless I live in the Now. And what a gift it is that I am still able to travel. In fact, in the ninth decade of my life, I traveled more often, more extensively, and with lots more fun than ever before. This was due to the fact that now I no longer traveled alone. Since I can no longer hear the announcements in airports, need glasses to read the signs (but where are they when I need them?), and find that scanning electronic boarding passes is for a younger generation, I kept my eyes open for a young travel companion and found Anthony Chavez. He had just earned his college degree, was ready to take some time off, and proved willing to help me.

  It became an immense joy for me, in the late autumn of my life, to show a youngster “the wide world”—Paris, Rome, Sydney, Moscow, Mumbai, Buenos Aires, Shanghai, London, Hong Kong, Istanbul, Vienna (I could double and triple that list). No less work now, but lots more fun. We went to see the Mona Lisa and the Sistine Chapel, walked the labyrinth at Chartres, rode elephants in Thailand and camels in the Sahara, and on all those travels, “Monkey” kept us company. This mascot of ours was a thumb-size toy monkey who seemed to enjoy posing for photographs with the Eiffel Tower, Niagara Falls, the Blue Mosque, or Red Square as background. He traveled on Anthony’s lapel and, during our audience with Benedict XVI, the Pope’s bewildered glance went back and forth between Monkey and the Mohawk haircut that Anthony was sporting at the time. My young friend’s spirit and energy rejuvenated me: he got this old geezer to paddle a kayak in Alaska, climb the campanile in Florence, learn to surf on a boogie board, and go zip-lining on Kauai. But the best in all this was that we encouraged one another in the practice of returning again and again to the Now.