FIERCE PRACTICE: FACING UP TO THE TERRORISTS WITHOUT AND WITHIN

A PLOT FOR OUR TIME

This post is about the really hard stuff, which we have to face if we're going to move forward in truth--collectively and in our personal lives. 
            The 2012 film, “The Attack,” directed by Lebanese filmmaker Ziad Doueri haunts me still. It is a tragic quest tale in a contemporary setting, concerning the painful modern issues with which we are so familiar. The object of the quest is an answer to the questions we routinely ask in the face of evil: Who was this person, and how could they do this? And the next equally terrifying question: Am I complicit?

            The film’s protagonist, Amin, is a highly successful and assimilated Arab surgeon in a Tel Aviv hospital, well loved by his Jewish colleagues. His privileged world is shattered when a suicide bombing kills 17 children at a birthday party in a popular café. Horrifically, the bomber turns out to be his own wife. Once released from police interrogation and the shock worn off, he decides to discover the truth about this woman Sihem, with whom he had shared a loving marriage—or so he thought—for 15 years. His quest is a classic heroic journey plot that takes him away from the white buildings and orderly avenues of Tel Aviv to the ancient, teeming village of Nablus on the West Bank.

            Ever deeper and higher he climbs through the old stone streets; through shocking conversations with his relatives, who express pride in Sihem’s martyrdom; through being tossed out of a local mosque by men who are enraged with this secular Arab’s violation of their sanctuary; until he finally ascends the steps of a church where he confronts the radical cleric who was Sihem’s mentor. Cold and implacable as he lights candles for the evening service, the priest tells Amin, “Your trip here is a waste of time. I have nothing to say to you. We have nothing to discuss.”

            “The Attack” is not a political film. It is an impassioned but even-handed exploration of what happens when a population is subjugated, left powerless and voiceless, and in thrall to a charismatic leader who exploits their hatred for the oppressive system.

            Following this encounter, one truth after another emerges as Amin discovers that not only was his own nephew part of the plot, but that the Tel Aviv cell used his own apartment for planning sessions while he was at his hospital. At the end of this heart-wrenching encounter, his nephew hands him a video of his wife’s last moments.

            Watching it, he sees that Sihem tried to call him before she left on her mission. Unable to speak with him, she wept and called his name. He is left not with a why, but with the knowledge that there was humanity in this woman after all: she betrayed him and she loved him. Amin becomes a man in possession of a more terrible truth: his unknowing complicity in this crime through his blind self-absorption in his career. Tragically, he ends his quest as a divided soul, belonging nowhere in his bifurcated world. We last see him in flashback, standing at the bus station where he dropped Sihem off for what he thought was a trip to see her grandfather. “Every time you leave, I die a little,” he says. Amin’s entire life and identity has died.

The film is built around everything that makes story a powerful vehicle of self-expression in chaotic times: it holds the ambiguity of reality, the both/and over the either/or view of life. Later, at a café across the street from New York’s famed cultural complex, Lincoln Center, in a neighborhood much like the bombed-out Tel Aviv streets in the film, I sat with a friend pondering the questions the film doesn’t answer: How could he not know? Where will it all end? We ended our conversation hours later with our personal memories of betrayal and questioning our own complicity in our country’s oppression and war-mongering. 

FIERCE PRACTICE: GIVING SAFE VOICE TO THE MONSTER

I returned home in a self-reflective mood. My life as an adult has been dedicated to peace; in my work I create safe environments—I call them “story sanctuaries”—where through writing, sharing and listening, people are able to create coherent inner lives and warm, resonant relationships with others.

            Yet, when I sat down to write in my journal and on impulse rewrote Amin’s meeting with the radical cleric, taking the role of the priest, the language of hatred and contempt for the privileged and unconscious visitor who violated my space flowed easily. Perhaps it came from my anger and disgust with the U.Ss government for which I was writing propaganda to pay my bills, or perhaps my deep well of anger came from trying to thrive as a member of the #MeToo generation and a woman in a male-dominated journalism industry, or from the forgotten adults who had dismissed me as a girl child, the layers and layers of disgust that had piled up over a lifetime. Whatever its roots, I realized that I had the potential for rage within me, just as you might—more than even I knew, even with the many years of healing work, especially forgiveness, I had done on myself since a serious depression in 1989.

            Giving expression to those walled off feelings opened the channel to a wellspring of emotions and memories that I had erased from conscious memory. Feeling the pain while writing in the metaphor of a terrorist, which I was unable to feel when writing in my familiar voice, was at first a relief and then liberation into a deeper vulnerability and love for myself and others. I felt emboldened by my writing, as I always do when I spill the truths that only my writing voice knows and reveals through the metaphors of character, place and plot of story. I subsequently became conscious of the almost imperceptible hints of this shadow reality in my daily life: the aversion I felt so easily and the way I cut off people who I perceived had hurt me, the subtle ways in which I tended to narrow my life to an aloof existence up a long flight of stairs—as disconnected from visceral inner pain as from my neighbors.

ON YOUR PATH OF TRUTH

            My point in sharing this experience with you is to assure you that you are not alone in harboring unacceptable feelings. All of us tend to suppress the unwanted figures in our psyche, much like the oppressor country in the film locks up the displaced people in refugee camps outside its declared borders, only to reap the violent results of violent denial in times of change, when we are stripped of our defenses, much like the naked trees, stripped of leaves, reveal their essential shapes in winter. The truth is, we cannot move forward wholeheartedly toward a happier future until we make that hard journey to the abode of our inner monsters.

            When we invite a better life for self and world, we meet old selves that once upon a time were hurt or crumpled, and that remain as frozen places in body, mind, and spirit  in ourselves, and regressive attitudes and actions in the world, such as falling in thrall to Destroyers who pass themselves off as leaders. These unconscious, icy selves keep us stuck in, old stories that no longer serve. The work of emergence becomes to welcome these uninvited members back to the story fire, listen to their stories without being pulled into reliving them, and hold their space within the circle until they can absorb the warmth of fully aligned living. We are left with a raw heart, but no longer the demonizing story that has damaged people and planet collectively and crippled our individual lives and sabotages our dreams.
     Ask yourself:

• What is trying to emerge here?
• What is being asked of me?

       The next time you are waylaid by a monster in your outer or inner life, know that you are coming close to your highest possibility; you are being awakened to the fact that your perspective is too narrow. The monsters without and within are in reality agents of destiny--challenging us to stay with it, preparing us to break through to a deeper self and higher reality.

         The ancient tellers and shamans understood that hearts break not to suffer but to open to a deeper and more numinous stream of life. The stand-out moment in a story, the strangest part of a dream, or a series of coincidences can be a sign for the truth that is struggling to emerge. “One thing that comes out in the myths is that at the bottom of the abyss comes the voice of salvation,” Joseph Campbell said to Bill Moyers in their conversations on the power of myth. “The black moment is the moment when the real message of transformation is going to come. At the darkest moment comes the light.”[1]

            Know that you are exactly where you’re supposed to be right now on your unique path.           

            Here, in this place of utmost difficulty, you will find your grail.

[1]Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth. 44.

© Juliet Bruce, Ph.D. 2018, Excerpt from forthcoming book