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CounterPunch
February
22, 2003
The 12 Steps to Peace
The Nature of
Humility (Step Seven)
By MICHAEL ORTIZ HILL
When Benjamin checked into the hospital, he didn't
know whether he came to die or get a new heart, and he didn't
care one way or another which it was to be. At sixty, he was
played out, and his heart was, as Tony might say, "dead
meat." When I became his nurse, it had been only a few days
since he'd received the heart of a man half his age. He couldn't
keep from resting his hands across his sternal incision, astonished
to feel another man's heart beating in his chest.
Benjamin was astonished also for an even
more profound reason. He was feeling compassion for the first
time. "I was never a man who was given to weeping,"
he told me, "but now it's all I do." I was moved to
watch him minister to his roommate, a young man who was himself
on the short list for a new heart.
Mostly Benjamin was weeping because he'd
spent forty years in the CIA, cold and efficient, "on company
business" in Laos, El Salvador, the Congo; supervising torture
in Latin America, clandestine operations in Africa and Asia.
"If only Americans knew," he kept saying. I suppose
for the two days I was with him, I represented the America "that
needed to know." He poured his heart out.
All this was far less melodramatic than
it sounds, maybe because he had utterly come to the end of his
rope. His grief was soft, reflective, and he was continually
surprised that he could feel anything at all. His new humility
was genuine, and every night his prayers were quiet as he began
his new life.
It is a beautiful thing, the prayer that
comes naturally when cruelty is acknowledged and razed to the
ground. "I thank God for removing that hard heart of mine,"
said Benjamin.
The twelve steps are a schooling in the
nature of humility from the moment we say "yes, I am incapable
of altering those patterns that cause such violence" through
uncompromising self-scrutiny to this raising of the hands in
supplication.
Step Seven prays from the knowledge that
for all our self-examination, we will never fully see ourselves
though we are fully seen. We will see more clearly after our
hearts are changed, but to be human is to be born with a measure
of blindness. Like Benjamin, we do not genuinely know what impedes
our relationship with God and the world. We must concede the
ragged heart to a wisdom quite beyond what we will ever understand.
Benjamin's story belongs to all of us
who live on the fruit of our countries' violence. Our hearts
have been likewise hardened by what has been routinely done in
our name. Can we locate the cancer of cruelty in our lived lives?
Or does it take the guise of indifference? Or do we just rely
on people like Benjamin to enact the cruelty that sustains an
unmanageable culture of addiction? You may discern a vague answer
to these questions, the outline of a hardened heart that is the
only heart we know, but no matter. Offer it up, as did Benjamin:
I am here. Heal me. For the sake of the world.
It is here we succumb to the generosity
of Spirit.
Michael Ortiz Hill is the coauthor (with Augustine Kandemwa) of
Gathering
in the Names ( Spring Audio and Journal 2003) and Dreaming
the End of the World. The full text of this essay is posted
at www.gatheringin.com
He can be reached at michaelortizhill@earthlink.net
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February 15
/ 16, 2003
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