We shall miss Bob Schutz for his ideas, for his probing, for his vision, and for his loving support. The line in his Memorial Minute, "He had a style that some found difficult and others dynamic," put me in both categories, "some" and "others." Bob challenged me and the FCNL in ways that helped us to move on and up. Whether the concern was environment, poverty, mass communications, or development of a new Friends’ effort, Bob’s message conveyed the conviction that we must act and the confidence that our action could make a difference. He practiced hope and that is a pattern for us all. We’re thinking of you [Marie] and your family as we celebrate Bob’s many gifts to this world.—Joe Volk, Friends Committee on National Legislation, Washington, DC

As I reviewed the Friends Bulletins from 1974-1978 and Robert Schutz’s compelling editorials and articles, followed by the reading of the outpouring of gratitude, love and appreciation for his unique life, I found myself asking questions about the nature and definition of leadership among Friends. Robert was without any question a minister in and to the Religious Society and to the larger world, but many would recognize him at times a prophet and a visionary as well. This was a heavy responsibility into which Robert grew, allowing himself to be eldered, advised, criticized and loved in the forty years of his formal membership. What enabled him to survive such rigors was his irrepressible sense of humor, his good fortune in choosing Marie as his wife, his genius for friendship, and his never-failing hope that Friends would recognize the truth and take action to build the institutions of peace, social justice and community. Bob materialized institutional dreams, sharing leadership with other Friends in Pacific Yearly Meeting to create three communities in Northern California: Monan’s Rill, a rural community outside the city of Santa Rosa where he and Marie lived for twenty years; Friends House, a Friends Retirement Center with nursing facilities and an Adult Day Health Center open to all; and Santa Rosa Creek Commons, a cooperative apartment complex for mixed ages and economic backgrounds.

To live in these communities is to undergo the refining processes of Quaker decision-making and planning. Bob and Marie felt a compelling vocation to transform themselves in this way. Bob died May 4, 2001, as he had lived, at Friends House supported and cared for at home by Marie and his grown children, surrounded by their community.

A Pendle Hill Conference on Leadership in July 1979 addressed the definition of leadership in the Religious Society which has no paid ministry. In its pamphlet, Friends as Leaders, these characteristics of Quaker leadership were noted:

Friends recognized many of these leadership qualities in Robert Schutz and appreciated them. Sometimes, however, those who seek to teach and exhort us to make fundamental changes in our lives are abrasive to our ears. We don’t want to hear them. They ask too much of us. Dealing directly with truth can be a dangerous endeavor; it does not always lead to unity, as Bob acknowledged. There is also the possibility that we can be mistaken in our leadings. That is only human. But, as Bob reminded us, we must recognize our own foibles, recognizing some of his own:

We all need what Marie Schutz confided to me Bob needed during the many years of his passionate pursuits to transform greed to good in this world—"tempering." Marie is careful in her choice of words. In working with metal, tempering means heating and cooling under controlled conditions which imparts strength. It also means to moderate or mitigate behavior. Marie remarked that Myra Keen, Bob’s assistant editor, had been a major tempering influence in Bob’s work as Friends Bulletin editor. What Marie left largely unsaid was her own tempering role, though she admitted to calling on Myra to dissuade Bob in certain instances in which he wanted to forge ahead impetuously (or so his spouse perceived). None of us need to know the intimate complexities and accommodations of their 52 years of marriage during which Marie pursued her own ministries within the Religious Society—Quaker concerns, library projects, children’s concerns—but we can attest to the grace gained in our friendships with Bob and Marie and their children: Margaret Sorrel, Roberta Schutz, Karla Herndon and David Schutz.

Roberta speaks for her siblings and herself:

Early in their marriage which took place in 1949 at the Courthouse in Martinez, CA, Bob taught at UC Berkeley where he received his Ph.D. in economics in 1952. He became excited about the possibilities of joining with other pacifists in Berkeley to create a community-owned (up to then, unheard of) radio station. Bob met Lewis Hill and joined him and others to found KPFA and the Pacifica Foundation which began broadcasting in March 1949. Marie remembers Bob with hammer and nails in hand assisting with the building of the first KPFA studio in the Koerber Building on University Avenue in Berkeley. He went on to become the Public Affairs Director at KPFA-FM for its first five years, hosting an interview and public affairs show called "Men and Issues." In Bob’s last year with KPFA he served as its Executive Director. In 1957 Bob left KPFA to edit the Monthly Review for the Federal Reserve Bank in San Francisco.

Following that, he became the CEO of the American Society of Eastern Arts which operated the School for Eastern Arts in Berkeley and brought Indian musicians and dancers, such as Ali Akbar Khan and Balasaraswati, to the Bay Area to perform and teach.

From 1963 through 1966 he organized the Lobby for Peace of Northern California and served as its lobbyist against nuclear warfare spending alternate months in Washington and in Berkeley reporting to supporters and the public via KPFA.

Then, until 1972, he was editor in chief of Annual Reviews, a publication of scientific advances based in Palo Alto.

The remainder of his life following 1972 was devoted to the Religious Society of Friends, editing the Friends Bulletin from 1974-1978, and building Friends’ communities.

Bob was a skilled clerk of committees and Meetings. He continued to speak and write on economic justice and led Friends in environmental concerns from the 1980s until his death.

Such a productive life was imbedded in the support, love and balance of Bob’s wife Marie and his family. And who supported and nourished this family? Yes, their Meetings—first Berkeley Meeting, which they joined in 1961 after nine years of attendance, and then Redwood Forest Meeting, in which they were early members. Yes, their many friends and community neighbors participated in their lives. But this family also had an angel, Eva Louise Olson, librarian colleague and Marie’s friend from UC who was the "essential person" always there, arriving with food for meals and assisting with the care of the children. This relationship was a mutual adoption which ended physically with Eva’s death earlier this year.

The spiritual and intellectual lights of this universe do not operate in isolation. Bob knew firsthand the generative power of cooperation and compassion which are the bases of any successful community and of all enduring marriages.

As editor of Friends Bulletin, Bob proceeded in his bold and fearless ways to solicit the very best of current Quaker insights, leadings, and wisdom by writing certain Friends inviting them to publish their views. He found that his solicitations failed him in the December 1975 issue in which only one Friend responded to the proposed topic, "On Property." Undaunted, with tongue in cheek, Bob wrote three articles and signed them: "Surplus" by Anon Y. Mous, "Do Simple Livers Miss The Boat?" by I. Magnan Amity and "Revolution in Property " by X. I. Stential and Con C. Quential. This feat has no equal in the archives of Friends Bulletin! It endeared many of us to Bob’s distinctive humor which was, at base, sincerely serious. It certainly called us to attention. How Friends hold property, use the surplus we earn, relate to one another in a Religious Society interrelated to national and global cultures were the hard questions Bob raised. Early Friends, Bob reminded us, had communities in which they assumed unlimited liability for one another.

"What is my Father’s business which I must be about?" Bob asked in one of his first editorials. "The crying need is for vision."

Another example of Bob’s humor I treasure is this editorial from the November 1975 issue in which his playfulness takes on the cadence of a family romp:

Of the 41 issues of Friends Bulletin which Bob edited and published, 24 contained the dominant themes which were Bob’s deeply-held hopes for radical economic and social reform: the right use of resources, simple living, Christianity and materialism, Quaker values and economic systems. Friendly communities. Friends, money and violence—to list a few. It was in 1996, 18 years after Bob’s retirement from Friends Bulletin that he published his book, The $30,000 Solution (Fithian Press) in which he proposed a simple solution to the unfairness of our current American income and wealth distribution. Bob noted that unearned income is now divided among the wealthy. By dividing it instead among all Americans, and by setting a cap on very high salaries, each American could be guaranteed $30,000 annually in unearned income in addition to whatever a person could earn by working.

Bob and Marie attended a Basic Income European Network meeting in Amsterdam in 1998 where Bob made international connections with others seeking solutions to the great and dangerous disparities between the world’s growing poor and wealthier nations. National and world events since September 11, 2001, have underscored the urgency for our nation to understand the sources of the hatred and fury that have been unleashed on America. Bob understood long ago the consequences of greed and elitism.

He asked the Religious Society how we can change our egocentric thinking and transform our lives and thus change the culture around us. He provided visions for this. Bob’s words on ethics are as timely now as they were in the November issue of Friends Bulletin 1976 :

In 1985 Bob was a founding member of the Pacific Yearly Meeting Committee on Unity with Nature and enthusiastically supported the prophetic ministry of Friend Marshall Massey whose The Defense of the Peaceable Kingdom was first published serially in Friends Bulletin in 1984. Later, as editor of PYM Social Order Series, Bob collaborated with me in republishing The Defense of the Peaceable Kingdom as a pamphlet which then found a much larger readership. Bob was also the founding editor of EarthLight Magazine, a quarterly of spiritual ecology with its headquarters in Oakland. He served on its board of directors until his death. His efforts were central in mobilizing Quakers toward caring for the earth. Bob was joined by Marie in his annual travels to Friends General Conference where they participated in developing the Friends Committee on Unity With Nature in which Bob was active until his illness prevented traveling in the Spring of this year.

Bob lived his life consciously and with zest even as his strength waned. He played the lead in a Friends House musical with a final performance in March. Even the night before he died, he had given an impromptu performance from his bed of his radio personality remembered from the 50s and 60s when he hosted a public affairs program for KPFA. This, to amuse visiting grandchildren. He read the flood of love letters from old friends who had received the Schutz’s letter informing them of Bob’s prognosis.

We fail at any attempt to recapture a life on paper. We can only publish approximations, fragments of memories, the swift movement of feelings, the love in our hearts, and the words our loved ones have left as legacy. Here follow a few of the tributes which blessed Bob and Marie and their family:

You are one of those rare individuals who can combine both creating and holding on to a vision with creating the means to get there. —Shelley Tanenbaum

Thank you for all you have done on behalf of our home, planet earth, and for many other good causes. Earth is a better place because of you.—Elizabeth and George Watson

I have a memory of standing beside you at the Berkeley Draft Board in 1967 or so, hearing you converse reasonably with some unreasonable people about the war and conscientious objection. Your steadiness and conviction have served many of us over the years. —Andrea English

We hope that through all this Bob can be comforted by knowing how very much he has given to Friends and to the wider world. But it is individual friendships that mean the most and how grateful we are to be among those friends— friends of both of your dear selves.— Leonard and Martha Dart

What a full and giving life he had and how greatly he will be missed! My own tribute would include gratitude for all the ways Bob encouraged my writer’s vocation (as editor of Friends Bulletin, especially).—Jeanne Lohmann

I consider you, Bob, my teacher and my inspiration for how to pursue a Quaker concern. Our shared concern for Mother Earth became a Friends’ concern mostly through Bob’s efforts and wisdom. I came to know you both because of the Friends Committee in Unity with Nature (FCUN)connection... and FCUN remains central to my concept of spirituality. What a gift FCUN has been to my spiritual life!—Michael Dunn

Along with Ben Seaver, Bob was my mentor in my first years with the AFSC in San Francisco. And I know I was a tough student just as he was a tough teacher. But affection and respect infused our relationship then and for the thirty years since.—Claire Gorfinkel

Bob had many gifts; but above all the rest, he was a remarkable listener—a consummate Friend in that respect. He had that rare ability to listen a shy person up to self-confidence and a pompous person down to humility, an emotional person back in to her still calm center and a rigid ideologue back in to a connection with her feelings… It was an amazing practice of kindness.— Marshall Massey

What a full life of work, witness, service and love he led! We will miss his strong clear presence at the Gathering, and in the Quaker World.—Bruce Birchard, Friends General Conference

Bob, I love and honor the witness of your life and of your lives together, the two of you. For me personally, that letter you wrote to me at Pendle Hill 19 years ago took me to task for not being my larger Self. To be loved as I was by you in the writing of those words shifted me in a way, so that both the shift and the memory of that letter stay with me, a comfort in the bones I will treasure forever.—Elisabeth Dearborn

...from my storehouse of wonderful Robert/Paul memories:

You reassured me that to be Quaker carries a material responsibility. We are not mere goody-goodies.

You invited and facilitated my personal expression and the expression of many others whose lights were obscured ‘til you lifted the bushels.

You cared about the environment before most of us were even aware of it; now we are beginning to define ourselves as members of the Creation.

You marveled at my intuitive understandings, and you did not try to be like me, thus permitting me to marvel at your strength, your boldness, and to honor my own powers.—Paul Niebanck

….we wish to acknowledge the great gifts that both you and Bob have given us in the years of collaboration with the scholarship program. Bob served so diligently when what he deserved was an easy retirement. Without his careful and expert management of our funds and your faithful support of him with that and the hard work of sales, we could not possibly be in the good condition we are today.—Guatemala Friends Meeting and Guatemala Friends Scholarship Program

...You have been and are an adventurer, Bob, creative in your thinking and actions This is your opportunity to "go deep and dwell deep" as our Quaker forbear advised.

You who have enabled so many can allow others who love you to be your enablers now. Life teaches us humility and acceptance.

...I need to add to the chorus of your friends my thanks to Life that you became my mentor as I followed in your footsteps to edit and publish Friends Bulletin. You were support and inspiration as well as a teacher of all things practical and necessary.

Your leadership around the environmental truths of Massey’s The Defense of the Peaceable Kingdom has had far-reaching effects. And you were able to trust my potential to grow as an editor without peering over my shoulder, giving advice, or visibly wringing your hands!

Congratulations, Bob, for listening to and following your Inward Guide and for keeping your sense of humor and balance! You are a treasure in the best of Quaker tradition.—Shirley Ruth

This reckoning of Bob’s life and death has been written in gratitude for his spirited spiritual leadership and to celebrate his strong and lasting partnership with Marie which so enabled and enriched him, their family and many others. There is a process of the heart which Friends label "tendering." Having experienced this transformation personally, I often recognize it in others, as I did in Bob after he witnessed the birth of his grandson, his daughter Margaret’s son. Bob’s gentleness was as strong in him as the iron in his soul.

Now, as a fare-thee-well to Bob—no solemn songs, but the full, vibrant orchestra and choir of the "Hallelujah Chorus"! If you look carefully, you’ll see Bob in the front row. Under his choir robe, his shirt collar will be a little rumpled, his hair ruffled, his face bright with its infectious grin. If you listen carefully, you’ll hear Bob’s resonant bass undergirding the performance—robust, assured, joyous, ready.

This old versicle and response rises up:

Thanks be to thee, O God!

Several years ago, after being very sick for a long time, I was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s Disease—a lymphatic cancer. For me, having a life-threatening illness was an extraordinary opportunity. As I went through chemotherapy and radiation treatments, I experienced every moment with overwhelming vividness and richness, and found a sense of larger and deeper meaning in even the most mundane or miserable moments. And, at the same time, my illness was filled with experiences of humiliation, pain, grief, despair, frustration, and fear.

The "good" and the "bad" qualities of my experience, the mundane and the profound, all came together. I could lie still for hours finding infinite delight in the way that light struck through the window and fell on the blanket; yet simultaneously I could be squirming with pain and nausea, longing for something to distract me from the intensity of the moment. I could feel sheer love, gratitude and tenderness as my partner stroked my back to soothe me to sleep; yet simultaneously I could feel a desperate grief and anxiety at the thought of what I was putting her through, the helplessness we both felt as my body wrestled with cancer.

My sense of the presence of God (an unpredictable Trickster of a God) was constant during this time. And this sense of presence did not come through the joyful side of things alone; it came through the paradox of the joy and the pain coinciding. I sensed something that went beyond the joy and the pain, something larger than either.

Paradoxically, this seemed to be an experience greater than my own capacity for experience. It was certainly greater than anything I can describe. So, I will try to tell of it through stories, through my own sorts of Trickster tales, through instances of particular contradictions.

One afternoon, at the peak of my chemotherapy treatments, I went out for a walk in an effort to distract myself from severe nausea. The anti-nausea medicine I’d been taking only worked provisionally and the effects wore off quickly: I was doing my best to get through the last hour before I could take another dose. Walking was difficult because I was extremely weak. Periodically, I would stop and sit down on the curb and weep almost absent-mindedly, because I seemed not to have strength enough to go any further. I knew that I presented a strange and disturbing spectacle to passersby: a gaunt, shivering, bald young woman sitting on the sidewalk weeping. I felt embarrassment and loneliness when I saw how people turned away from me, yet I also felt a detached understanding that I was doing my best and that they were doing their best as well, and that it was not necessary to explain the situation to myself or anyone else.

By the time I reached home, my knees were trembling with exhaustion and I was ferociously dizzy and nauseated. My left arm was in a sling because my first chemotherapy treatment had leaked from the vein and damaged nerves and tissue; my other arm had taken all of the chemotherapy since then, and it was badly bruised, with the hand cramped and weakened. I fumbled my keys out of my pocket with that hand and struggled to still my trembling so I could fit the door key into the lock. Then I tried to turn the key, but the lock was tight and my hand did not have the strength. Weeping with frustration and desperation, I fought with that stiff, unmoved key for what seemed ages. I stopped and sat down and sobbed, then stood and tried again. Finally, the bolt turned and I was in.

My anti-nausea medication was there on the table, but as soon as I picked up the bottle I knew that I was in trouble. The child-proof cap was twisted tight: with my hands in this condition, I could not open it. Again, I struggled, cried. I thought of breaking the plastic bottle with a hammer, but with my shaking hands I was afraid I would crush some of the pills or scatter them everywhere (the pills cost about $20 apiece and were precious).

Finally, I took the pill bottle and went out into the neighborhood, knocking on doors, looking for someone who might be home on a weekday afternoon to help me. About a block away, a young man answered his door and, looking at me with mingled suspicion and compassion, he opened my medicine. I went home, crying with relief now, and also laughing at myself and the situation.

During the hour or so that this adventure took, I was a walking paradox. I was utterly abject, helpless; and I was detached, curious about what would happen next, gently amused. I noticed nothing but my own misery; and I noticed that I was being humbled, challenged, shown the world and my neighborhood from an entirely new perspective. I was humiliated by appearing as a beggar on a stranger’s doorstep; and I was touched by the simple humanity of our interaction. Peculiarly, I felt grateful not only for the relief of taking my medication and lying down safely at home, but also for the experience itself as a whole.

When my own hands failed me, I found myself "in the hands of God." Ultimately, I was handled with care, respect, protective reassurance….yet, God had also handled me rather roughly, as a puppy plays with a slipper.

When I speak of God "handling me roughly," I am speaking metaphorically, rather than literally. I don’t think of God as a being who determines or even influences my personal experiences in this direct sort of way. Instead, I feel that I’m "handled" by God in the same sense that I am "handled" by life itself. There are patterns that emerge in life, and I believe that such patterns are meaningful. This meaningful tendency toward pattern and purpose is what I recognize as God interacting with our experiences. Perhaps how we interpret and respond to this interaction is what gives our relationship to God fluid, unpredictable, tricksterish quality. My own interpretation of my interaction with God is characterized by paradox. I am reminded of the apparently contradictory biblical phrase, "I believe. Help thou my unbelief" (Mark 9: 24), although I feel a sense of deep "rightness" and ultimate faith in this God of pattern and purpose, enough belief to address God in my own mind as present being, the very nature of my belief is that it is reinforced (or diminished) by my own willingness (or unwillingness) to flow along with experiences and meanings I do not understand. The raw (sometimes very raw) material of experience offers opportunities for belief through unbelief while absolute certainties can close our minds to revelations of truth that do not fit our preconceptions. Acknowledging our doubts and confusions, our unbelief, can leave us room for new and surprising interactions with God. Only by trusting in the midst of my unbelief can I learn to interact with the tricky unreasonable aspects of my life, and thus find openings to God beyond the grasp of my reason….

******

At various times during my own experience with cancer, I had tiny glimpses of the kind of transcendence that may be found through suffering. There were many miserable and painful side effects from chemotherapy, radiation, and the cancer itself that left me exhausted and often despairing—but almost always when these troubles reached a pitch that seemed unendurable, there would be a kind of breakthrough: not an easing of symptoms, but a shift in attitude and a sense of peace.

During the six weeks when I was receiving high daily doses of radiation, I experienced my whole body, in fact my whole being, in a state of continuous suffering. My esophagus was being badly burned by the treatments, so I could not swallow solid food, and swallowing even small amounts of liquid was very painful. There was a constant trickle of saliva running down the back of my throat, and I was perpetually fighting the gag reflex and the impulse to swallow repeatedly. If I became preoccupied by this sensation, I would begin to choke: gagging, coughing, and hiccuping convulsively. The skin on my chest, back, and neck was burned. I was weak and nauseated, hungry but unable to eat, and deeply depressed as a result of the helplessness I felt.

One day, all of this reached an unbearable pitch, and I found myself hunched miserably on a kitchen chair trying to choke down a dose of liquid pain medicine, fighting tears because crying itself was painful. I felt utterly sorry for myself, and it seemed that there was absolutely no point in being alive when things were this bad.

But, in the moment of having this thought, it occurred to me simply and immediately that my very helplessness was a unique and incredible opportunity. There was absolutely nothing I could do in that moment but let go and experience being alive—I was not responsible for imparting meaning to my life, for "doing" anything in the world, for proving anything to myself or anyone else. I was not, at that moment, capable of doing or being any of the things I’d always identified with; no label would fit, not even my name. And, paradoxically, this absence of identity and attachment filled me with a deeper sense of individuality. I felt myself as a "soul" flowing from God and returning to God. No aspect of my true self was lost, only an old, superficial skin was sloughed off. There was also that indescribable sense of a presence that went beyond myself--a perception of God as something or someone real and immediate, not human-like at all, but of an entirely "other" order of being. I experienced this not in a flash of illumination, but in a deep yet familiar and almost ordinary certainty and trust.

The entire process of my illness was an encounter with the prospect of my own eventual death, and the physical and emotional suffering I experienced along the way was in a sense an experience of death on a small scale: the erasure of immediate ego-identity and the glimpse of another sort of identity beyond.

Nevertheless, I want to emphasize that my physical suffering was not eased in the slightest by this realization of a larger order of being. In fact, I was very much aware of my body’s misery, and very much afraid of identity-loss and ultimately of death, but I also felt a deep compassion for that misery, as though it were happening to someone else. I was able to perceive that true compassion was expansive enough to include all suffering, not merely my own.

******

How can the divine compassion of God encompass the horrors of human suffering? Of course, this is a paradox that theologians and religious seekers of all kinds have wrestled with for centuries. Whether God is seen as a Father-creator or a Light or a Trickster or something still more indescribable, God is generally perceived as an embodiment of compassion. In a recent workshop on Quaker faith as it relates to death and dying, we were asked to speak of our most basic assumptions and beliefs. One particular phrase was repeated by many of those present: "God is love."

Yet the universe seems so unloving! Not only are there horrors like genocide and torture, but the simple reality of all of our lives is that we will die, and that death involves loss: both emotional and physical pain. We will all, in the course of our lifetimes, suffer pain in varying degrees, and for most of us there will be at least brief experiences of excruciating pain. We will all lose people we love, and suffer large and small tragedies of many kinds.

I have always found the Buddhist concept of universal suffering a bit hard to swallow, since I am fairly optimistic and tend to enjoy life most of the time—but it is also clear that the worst misery that any person on earth has suffered is not alien to my own experience. Pain and grief are inevitable, and every time we love or feel joy we are opening ourselves to the pain of an ending. My reverence for the beautiful things in my life is tempered, and strengthened, by the awareness that I cannot keep them. Although I have survived one bout with cancer, I know that this very body that I think of as myself will sometime within the next thirty years or so, sooner or later, die and disintegrate. I know that the work I’ve done and the love I’ve felt in the world will be absorbed into something larger, as a wave settles back into the sea. I can only trust and hope that some personal essence extends beyond this lifetime. But I do not know what such an essence might consist of—and I feel sure that it will not include most of the features of my present identity.

However, the idea that pain, sorrow and transience make this an "unloving" sort of world is only a superficial judgment. In fact, the greatest paradox of all seems to lie in the fact that pain and sorrow are just as much at the heart of God as are joy and contentment. Compassion unites grief and love in a perfect paradox. It is a state of sheer intimacy and openness in the face of deep suffering: it is a transcendence of separateness that comes about through the most palpable experience of separateness.

******

After the nerve injury to my arm during chemotherapy, I had several weeks of intense pain, which could fortunately be controlled by keeping the whole arm literally half-frozen, with the constant application of ice packs. Since the pain could be turned on and off with ice, and since it was confined to a limited area, it offered me an opportunity to experiment with my own pain thresholds and with pain management techniques. At one point, I worked with a friend who is a therapist, in an effort to further explore what pain actually is and how to cope with it.

We began by setting the ice pack aside, and he asked me to focus on the sensations that developed in my arm. In a short time, the pain was enough to make my breathing rapid and shaky, and I had the frantic impulse to retrieve the ice pack and stop the whole experiment. I resisted and held on, as my heart started to race and I broke out in a sweat. It felt as if the tissues of my arm were shot through with electricity. It felt as if the veins in my arm were pulsing and swollen with a molten liquid. A moment later, these specific sensations gave way to a vast, dizzying spiral of pain, like a hot, harsh light that swirled all around me, sucking me down.

Still, my friend urged me to enter the pain itself, to imagine walking right into it. He suggested that once I was inside of it, the pain would change and end. It did not happen like that. Instead, as I imagined walking into the pain, the light brightened and the pain increased.

And then, I was aware that I seemed to be experiencing this from two distinct perspectives at once. I was in the very center of the pulsing pain—burning alive, absorbed utterly by suffering. And, I was also aware of this suffering as if from the outside, observing it. As soon as I recognized this larger point of view, I felt a rush of empathy and protectiveness towards the part of me that was suffering.

The suffering was increasing steadily as I watched, yet at the same time I could observe this suffering objectively, with complete detachment. It’s too bad that "objectivity" and "detachment" are the only words available to describe this feeling; in our everyday language these words imply a kind of coldness, an absence of caring. In fact, however, the particular kind of objectivity I am trying to describe was anything but cold, anything but neutral. It was a paradox of compassion—a huge tenderness toward the one suffering pain, yet a detachment that made this tenderness expand to include all pain suffered by anyone, ever.

I am trying to describe the indescribable. The pain was very real, and it grew all-encompassing—not only my own pain, but the essence of pain itself. And yet the compassion was just as vast. I felt that I comprehended, with grief and tenderness, the meaning of all this pain, and could see no separation between myself and every other being who has ever suffered. The suffering and the love both seemed to be essential to what we are at the deepest level. And God seemed to be present in the brilliance of this profound, paradoxical compassion.

This was rather overwhelming, of course, and yet it was only a brief, easy step away from ordinary experience. My friend and I sat in his living room; someone upstairs was moving furniture; it was raining outside. But the power of the experience was real and we both felt it. I couldn’t have adequately described the sensations to my friend and didn’t try, yet we both felt the compassion and both entered into it or were gathered in by it. For perhaps half an hour, we sat there sharing the pain and beaming with joy. And then it seemed time to return to normal. My arm hurt and I had had enough. I put the ice pack back on and went home to sleep for a long time.

******

I’ve been self-conscious about recounting this experience of compassion before now, because I’m afraid that if I cannot express the paradoxical nature of it, then it will simply seem melodramatic if not megalomaniac. Here are the pieces of the paradox, all tumbled together like chips of colored glass in the lens of a kaleidoscope: the experience was extraordinary, and it was an experience available to anyone, anytime; it was a help to me personally in coping with pain, and it was not about my private pain at all but something in comparison with which my own pain was nothing.