IT TAKES INFINITE LIFE

It Takes Infinite Life

We’ve embarked upon graduation season. Certificates and diplomas are conferred upon students of all ages to mark accomplishments, completions, and moving on. Commencement is a good word for the process because it signals new beginnings and new growth and meaning in a person’s life.

Reflecting on it, we are always in a state of commencement, minus the ceremonies and certificates. Every day in every moment, we engage with life in a manner of our choosing. What we think, say, or do now impinges upon what goes on in our lives further down the road. Of course, there are myriad other causes and conditions that also flow together into our lives, some that we fail to appreciate, many of which we are unaware, and those that are beyond our imagining. They enter our lives and become a seamless part of us, making it possible for us to grow and move forward.

I recently heard a story about a woman, Ramona Pierson, who had been hit by a car and suffered catastrophic injury. She awoke from a coma after eighteen months, blind and unable to talk, her body broken. After dozens of surgeries, at twenty-three years of age she was placed in a seniors’ home as a “lost cause.” The residents of the home rallied around her and took it upon themselves to rehabilitate her. A retired teacher displayed infinite patience in teaching Ramona through the necessary repetition—it turned out that the teacher had Alzheimer’s. Others got Ramona to form words again through grown-up games, allaying her self-consciousness about the infantile sounds that first emerged. When her walking was unsteady, she didn’t have to worry about how she looked. The seniors’ home was the perfect environment for her. Eventually, the residents realized that she needed more instruction than they could give, so they pooled their resources to send her to a school for the blind, where she was able to obtain a guide dog. When she regained sight in one eye she returned to school, motivated by her experience. Some thirty years later, she has two doctorates and melds together her expertise in neuropsychology, pedagogy, and software development to create tools to aid in the learning process, but she still credits the seniors for the critical role they played at that juncture in her life.

In a very different story, a janitor who works at Columbia University has made the news for graduating, with honours, from that prestigious institution with a bachelor’s degree in classics (Latin and Greek). As an employee, he gets free tuition but it has taken twelve years of midnight studies to get there—not to mention learning English first, since he is an Albanian immigrant, now naturalized. He had almost finished law school in Belgrade before fleeing the war but recounts that his family taught him “not to look for fame and fortune, but to have a simple, honest, honorable life,” adding, “The richness is in me, in my heart and in my head.” These words resonate the way my father urged us to look at life, his family having lost much in their exile to Canadian internment camps.

These stories remind us that life does not always go according to our plans. Still, it unfolds before us, thanks to the countless beings and causes and conditions that intersect our paths exactly in that moment to sustain us. Whether we choose to appreciate what is there and move forward is mostly up to us. Indeed, it behooves us to do all that we can with what we are given because it is given to us unconditionally by the compassion of infinite life. It takes far more than a village. Nobody does it on his/her own—“my” life is thanks to all. That is the richness that lies deep in the heart-mind of every being. Amida and I are one. Namo Amida Butsu.

Gassho,

Rev. P. Usuki

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