Cosmic Malice
This is a story of one stop on my spiritual path, just after I graduated from college, in which my belief in a force for goodness in the world was challenged by the pain I saw around me. I questioned whether that goodness even existed and painfully joked about the reign of Cosmic Malice.
Right after I graduated from college in Davis, California, a small college town where our transit was via bicycle, I moved to the Bronx to join an urban volunteer program with a spiritual base. We first gathered for an opening retreat at a beautiful place in Pennsylvania near the Appalachian Trail. We were an earnest bunch, wanting to change the world with our service and motivated by our values and spirituality. Of course, hearing that you already know that we were the ones who would be changed.
Our community of 5 volunteers left the retreat along with 5 more volunteers bound for Newark, New Jersey in a rented passenger van. The Bronx crew was dropped off first and I remember feeling like I’d landed on Mars. In the steamy August afternoon, we looked up and down the block at the apartments standing shoulder to shoulder, 6 stories high. We hauled our gear into our apartment on the top floor, and settled in. I remember us sitting by the fire escape and gazing down into a street full of people, activity, sound, smell, and heat. No doubt the sounds of Miami Sound Machine’s Conga drifted up – it was everywhere in 1985.
There were all kinds of wonderful things about living in the Bronx that year, and I learned and grew a lot. New York is like nowhere else I’ve ever been in terms of the layers of life being lived, sensation and energy. I lived with a great group of young adults, friends still, who were trying to figure out this new world together while our naivete and assumptions about “social justice” and our place in the world were challenged.
There were comical instances of being a fish out of water. Waiting for my first solo subway trip, the train arrived, the doors opened, and the train was clearly full. I watched others push their way into the train while I waited dutifully for the next train. I watched a train arrive on the opposite track, also full. It began to dawn on me that a spacious train was not coming. So when the next train arrived, I took a deep breath and pushed my way in. Another time I was waiting in a long line at the bank. It was finally my turn, and I walked up to the teller’s window. Before I could open my mouth, she said “you’re not from around here, are you?” I said no and asked how she knew. “You move slow.”
But in truth, it was also a very difficult year. I was assigned to tenant organizing, and I was not successful for a whole lot of reasons, some my own and others not. It was my first big experience of failure. I found a new job placement, but it stung.
It was 1985 in New York and crack cocaine and violence were decimating the neighborhoods in which we lived and worked. Bronx neighborhoods were scarred by arson and abandonment. AIDS was exploding and a near certain death sentence. I had never been exposed to the grind of urban poverty until now and I found it overwhelming.
I began to question my spiritual values and motivation for being there in a big way. I began to question the God I had believed in, the God that cared about all of those on the margins. If this God was so loving, how could s/he allow this pain? I began to joke (but not really) about the Cosmic Malice, a term I made up to express the opposite of a force for love. I had always believed that there was a divine force for good surrounding all of us, but I just couldn’t see it anymore. I had been through this cycle of doubt and alienation before, but still I found it painful. The feeling of separation from the Divine was deeply unsettling.
The following year, I began to find my way back to the spiritual connection I craved, helped by beginning to understand the Divine in new ways. I found spiritual teachers that helped me let go of the Cosmic Malice to see a divine compassionate one who cared deeply about the pain of this world. I connected with feminist theology and new ways of imaging the sacred.
How about you -- have you felt estranged from the God of your understanding, the Universe, the Web of Life, however you name it? What pushed you away? Have you found ways to reconnect?