Liturgies

Today I am going to talk about choice and it will be centred around the true stories of two men, the choices they made and the consequences it had on their lives and the lives of those they loved.  Out of respect for their privacy I have changed their names and I have checked with my friends to check that it is okay to tell the story. It has also been necessary to omit certain details in order to protect people connected with their lives.

Hassan was a middle aged Iraqi academic and scientist from an educated, influential Sunni family who was in Australia doing research on a cancer prevalent in Iraq.  He met a friend of mine in a cinema and they began a relationship.   She figured that at first he considered their liaison to be a temporary, away from home affair.  However, they fell seriously for each other and Hassan became increasingly conflicted, for several reasons.

The quality of his intimacy with my friend was a new, liberating and powerful experience for him.  At the same time, every night he was in touch with home and becoming increasingly anxious about the state of his country and the welfare of family, for since the fall of Saddam Hussein and a switch in power groups, they had now become victims of persecution. Family members had disappeared and life was more fraught.  Hassan delayed his return, became more entwined with my friend and more tortured.  He was  told by those back home that if he returned he might be killed and by his university boss that if he didn’t return as soon as possible he would lose his job and all that went with it. Hassan was strongly committed to the work that he was doing.  His life was in the hands of Allah, his boss said. Inshallah.

Now Hassan was highly qualified, fluent in English and his life was threatened; he was in a very strong position to seek asylum and permanent residency in Australia. He could have continued to have a loving relationship with my friend.  But he was paralysed by inner conflict. During that time he said to her: I can live without money or without power but I cannot live without both; I cannot relinquish all that gives me my identity and purpose as an Iraqi and a man; I feel an overriding sense of duty to my country and suffering people; my role there is what my life is for and I would, in the end, rather not exist without it; you cannot understand what it is like for me, our cultures are so different….. and finally he returned to Baghdad.

After weeks of not hearing from him, my friend decided to try and find news of him on the internet, and she came across his obituary. For reasons no one will know he did not return immediately to the safety of his family home outside of Baghdad but remained at the university in the city.    One day he was standing on the pavement in Baghdad when a car pulled up and men dragged him into it.  He was later identified at the mortuary.  He had been badly beaten before being killed

The second story is of an Iranian man in his thirties, who was living in Tehran with his sister and parents.  Ali had a good job making great money and had every prospect of rapid promotions and success.  He had a large wardrobe of classy clothes and a taste for high quality consumption.  His life was in no danger.  But Ali began to find the regime of the Imams, the religion of his parents and the restrictions on personal freedom in his country, increasingly oppressive.  He secretly converted to Christianity,which is  illegal in Iran, and became discontented with his focus on materialism and power.  He felt that this was no longer the kind of life he wanted to live.  He gave away a lot of his money and bought his younger sister, an art teacher, her own art school for children; but he did not have specific plans to flee his home.

One night he had a dream: he was on a crowded boat in stormy seas. The boat sank and everybody was drowning, including himself, when a large, white hand came down out of the skies and lifted him out of the ocean, and he woke up.  Two days later he had a one way ticket to Bali.  Ali says that the dream was the catalyst for his decision to become a refugee.  He told his parents he was leaving them eight hours before his flight, knowing that if he mentioned it earlier he wouldn’t be able to resist their pleas for him to stay.  They did not know if they would ever see him again.  He remembers the last meal his mother cooked for him, one of his favourites, with eggplant.  He remembers their shock, their shaking and crying and they have refused to have any contact with him since he left, despite his letters home.

He wandered around Bali, with neither English nor Bahasa, waiting for a people smuggler to approach him.  There were days of stormy seas on the boat crossing to Australia and he recalls the constant crying and praying and the black, sodden nights. He spent time in Christmas Island, Darwin and Curtin detention centres. In large part due to his religion, he was granted a permanent residency visa.  As far as he was aware, he was the only one of the 53 on the boat who was given this visa at this time.

He got soul and body destroying work in the Wagga meat works before he left with a strain injury to his hand.  He enrolled in English classes in Brisbane, lived in a depressing hostel and went through what so many refugees do, particularly those who come alone: a sense that he had lost everything, acute feelings of homesickness, loneliness, guilt, remorse and alienation.  He suffered for a long time from insomnia, frequent headaches, depression and stress: he was in trauma. He sought medical help to little avail.  He fell into his dark night of the soul and for a time consoled himself with wishes for an early death.  And, as Hassan had feared, Ali found it almost unbearable to be rendered so powerless, so emasculated and doubted his capacity to cope.  But he had found a church shortly after his arrival in Brisbane and this community gave him much support and loving company.  He began to read spiritual and philosophical texts, listen to TED talks and talk about what he was going through sometimes with a few, close friends. And he continued to live.

Down at the depths, so radically stripped of all the props that support our sense of identity, worth and security, he encountered insight.  He realised that he could continue his journey to the bottom or fundamentally change.  He came to the realisation that what he had, that pretty much all that he felt he had now in his life, was just the present moment and that what he needed to commit to, was a rigorous attention to his inner self and to honouring what it told him, no matter how painful this would be.  He made a commitment to be uncompromisingly true to himself.  His decision to leave Iran began to make some sense.  He contemplated on Jesus’ dictate to destroy your deepest attachments, even to your mother and father, in order to be able to truly pick up your cross and follow Him.  Sometimes he feels his parental destruction has been a literal one and he deals with this.

After coming to this understanding, starting to practise healthier habits of mind and body, listening deeply to himself, he began to get stronger, less unwell and find some peace of mind. He began to embrace a new way of being in the world and in so doing, acknowledged a compelling, personal need for much solitude and contemplation.  He now works as a carer, lives a simple, quiet life and says he is a completely different person from the man in Tehran a few years ago.

The stories of these two men are both strikingly similar and different. Both men were sophisticated, weel educated and enpowered, living in Islamic cultures and imbued with a strong sense of male pride.  Both men made choices that involved a possibility of their deaths.  Both had experienced oppressive regimes causing much suffering to their people.  Both put themselves in positions where the choices they made would involve great suffering to themselves and those beloved to them.  Both experienced anguish and confusion and feared for the loss of their reason for living. Both went through hell. Yet the choices they made, the reasons for them and the outcomes, were so different.

At one level, this is a story about the ways different individuals react to their times and circumstances.  At another level, their juxtaposed experiences transcend history and become the stuff of mythical, masculine archetypes.  One, who needs to be a respected leader  in service to home and people, a  myth of service and self sacrifice.  The other, who renounces family, duty and country in order to honour an essentially spiritual directive, an inner quest or compulsion.  It recalls the dichotomy in the Bible of Mary the contemplative and Martha the one who serves.

But at a more elemental, existential level, this is a story about choice and what it is to be an adult human being; for all our lives are ceaselessly propelled through time by the endless choices made and the unfolding consequences of those choices.  A choice is difficult if we fear that it will result in suffering of ourselves, others or both. Otherwise it is not a difficult choice.  The choices these men had to make were born of extremity but for nearly all people nearly all of the time, such significant choices, ones we envisage having major consequences, are made rarely in our lives: the choice of marriage, divorce, children, abortion, for example;  the choice of this congregation to leave its church.  The kinds of choices made result from the kinds of characters making them in particular contexts and there needs, I think,  to be a deep acceptance of this in ourselves and others. As Thich Nhat Hanh says, “we are all doing our best.”

But in our everyday lives, the real stuff of our living, continual and apparently unremarkable choices are being made. There is no stopping or avoiding them.  And our relationship not just to how we make those choices but our reactions to them once we have made them, is inextricable from who we are and can become.  It is all those humble, daily decisions that we make that form the foundation of our being and doing in the world and that are the ground on which the really big choices are made; so that having a mindful commitment to how and what we choose can take on the nature of an endless, devotional practice, one we hold seriously and lightly in our hearts and minds; a quiet pact we make with ourselves to choose with discernment. We must make our choices with faith, aware that we cannot completely predict their  short term consequences and certainly not the pattern of their ongoing unfolding in changing circumstances and relation to the choices of others.

Ali made his choice to leave Iran in the time it takes to wake from a dream, shockingly informed his parents at the last minute and now has a new life.  Hassan eventually decided to return to Baghdad after months of agonising and went to his brutal, but not surprising, death.  Both have left people grieving.  Hassan could have sought asylum, Ali could have made changes to his life in Iran and his parents could have forgiven his choice and stayed in contact.  But they did not. Choices made within the limits and form of character, beyond our judgement. Stories complex beyond words. And ultimately mysterious.

Eckhart Tolle said something like this: whatever you do with absolute wholeheartedness, will get you there.  We can choose to have tea, not coffee, this morning, wholeheartedly. And if after our first sip, a little stab of regret hits that we made the wrong choice, we can, wholeheartedly, let it go.