Bearing Witness

Summer is passing by fast, vacations have been taken, my daughters are getting ready to go back to school, and I noticed it has been a while since I have posted here. To get back in the blogging routine, I thought I would share some excerpts from Margaret J. Wheatley’s book TURNING TO ONE ANOTHER – SIMPLE CONVERSATIONS TO RESTORE HOPE TO THE FUTURE. In particular, her essay “What Am I Willing to Notice in My World” struck me.

“Many times I have fled from others’ grief and pain. I’ve seen this behavior in many others . We don’t know how to fix the situation or make the pain go away. There is nothing we can do to help, so we flee in the opposite direction, turn off the television, avert our eyes from the pictures, stop talking to our grieving friends. […]. As hard as we try to close people out, we never really lose awareness of their suffering. The world still gets in and gnaws at our insides.”

“If you’ve ever experienced grief, you know how healing it is to just have friends sit with you, not saying a word, not expecting anything from you. You don’t need them to do anything except be there, bearing witness to your loss and sorrow.”

“How we respond to so much suffering is our choice. We can feel hopeless and overwhelmed by this world; we can turn away and just live the best life we can. Or we can learn to bear witness.”

“I’ve tried other ways to bear witness. Standing and patiently listening to someone I’d rather avoid. Or consciously reading stories of tragedy, torture, massacres—instead of changing channels or turning past the page in the magazine. I used to feel that these horrors were just too much for me to bear. But now I’m learning to read through to the end by reminding myself that I have a role here. If people have survived such atrocities, I honor them by reading about their experiences. They lived it; the least I can do is read about it.”

“We can turn away, or we can turn toward. Those are the only two choices we have.”

I had an opportunity to practice bearing witness during a recent biking vacation that took me through Lincoln County in Wyoming. I came across the Cumberland Cemetery, a small plot of land tucked in to the sagebrush covered hills near the abandoned mining towns apparently known as Cumberland 1 and Cumberland 2.

The graves that still had markers of some sort or another indicated that the cemetery was filled with children – most them had died in infancy during the early 1900’s. As I walked around looking at the various graves, I wondered about the suffering that must have gone on in the families with the loss of such young children.

It was an opportunity for me to choose to turn toward the suffering. Granted, it is much easier to bear witness to those who have died long ago then it is to those who still live, but it was a time to simply stop for a moment and spend some time, something I need to do more of with those who suffer today.