On Burning and Place

[a portion of a personal correspondence]

Some years ago, I had a deep insight into things, and it left me with the conviction that "everything has a place." Thinking of place and personal story today, I feel an equally deep and perhaps even more lucid impulse to add, "and that place is on fire." Sakyamuni Buddha once said, "All things are burning." The world is burning. We are burning. What are we to make of this?

Fire is a potent metaphor in many traditions. In the Lotus Sutra, the buddha uses a tactful trick to lead his children out of a burning house and out into safety. A common maxim of the Zen school is that one should practice "with urgency, as if your head is on fire." The Hells of the world's imaginations are all conspicuously aflame. Wendell Berry has referred to the destructive and exploitative modes and motives of our late civilization as "the combustion economy," which I think very vividly and completely captures the essential features of the modern way of life.

This has always bothered me, and it bothers me more as time passes. Feeling the heat of the flames, knowing that the world is burning, how can we possibly hope, and without hope, how can we possibly live? I have grown accustomed to living my own life astride the fault line of contradictions, but even familiarity cannot drown out the din of conflict. This has had many faces in my own past, but today I think of myself at the heart (though not the center) of a huge technological, economic, and social complex whose ways I find monstrous and inhuman, and my own heart is deeply troubled as to how I should live.

Why are there two worlds? We see a world of pastoral nature and a world created by man. Why are there two Americas? We see before us the America that is given, and the America that is taken. These division are not merely conceptual; they have become real matters of habit and of fact. More and more, I see these differences not as mere discriminations, but as deep wounds. Seeing this, I find that I want nothing more than to see these wounds healed, by wholeness and by peace.

But still the world burns, and we are in it. It burns with division. It burns with strife. It burns with vicious self-consumption. There is no way to simply remove ourselves, or to be above it. Even if this were possible, it would only be another division, bringing with it still more war and more hatred. There is no individual merit, and there is no individual guilt. We are all in this together, and we must take what we are given. But then what do we do?

The events of September 11, 2001 have become a deadly potent cultural symbol for us as Americans. I say this having largely disregarded their significance myself, until very recently. That occasion seemed to bring into sharp focus exactly the painful divisions, of worlds, of Americas, that we all now suffer from. It is the vividness and suddenness with which that division was manifested that made that episode so deeply terrifying to so many. The essential image is one of burning, and collapse. This is not, however, the only image. One of the stories most heralded, and most remembered by those involved was that of firefighters entering the doomed towers in search of the trapped and the wounded. It was an action of unmistakable selflessness and heroism, and one that spanned the divisions of that awful day and of the awful things it embodied.

I had not given this much thought until today, when it suddenly came into clear focus, and I said to myself, "Everything has a place, and that place is on fire."

We all give our lives to something, though we may not acknowledge it. As humans, each of us only has so much time, and so the use of our time is ultimately a gift to someone, or to something. When we willingly dwell in this burning world, we give our lives to a world that is imperiled. But does this fire ever go out? Is it within our grasp to extinguish it? These questions are matters for those who are trying to hold onto lives, rather than give them. It is thus that Jesus said, "whoever tries to save his own life shall lose it"; life is not a thing that is kept or obtained, it can only be a thing that is used. It is in search of peace that we enter the ground of war. It is in search of unity that we embrace division. It is only loving action, though our lives and according to our own capabilities, that can make things whole.

Things are different. People are different. We all have a place. When we go to our place, even as it burns, it is an act of selflessness and heroism. Fire is not only destruction, but warmth and light. These, ultimately, become the gifts of our own lives.