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| Sunday, 21 April 2002 |
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Let us praise all ordinary people : A Celebration by Susil Sirivardana Our society is passing through a period of extraordinary spirituality. It is a collective inner quietude that we savour so rarely. For a society savaged by so much violence it is an extraordinary transition - or, a beginning of one. Peace and peacefulness, new found and deeply felt within each of us, expressed in a new serenity, is the measure of the change. Ordinary folk trapped and fettered in a nightwood of violence and destruction, suddenly find themselves walking and moving at will wheresoever they wish to go, at all times of the day and night. We had almost numbed ourselves completely to the point of forgetting what is to live without the tensions of imminent fear. Over decades of withdrawal into the innermost recesses of ourselves however, we never allowed the flame to extinguish itself and drown us in irrevocable despair. The ordinary women and men possessed resources of sensitivity and spirituality to overcome such dark nights of the soul. Ther was an invisible collective unconscious which underpinned our fears and sufferings. It was nurtured and nourished by a power of resilience and resistance which we hardly knew existed within ourselves so deeply. That's why it is so appropriate that we celebrate this precious fusion of the nation's humanity! Complicity Two long decades of war and destruction had ravaged our inner spaces. They were exhausted to the point of being no longer able to react to the intensity of daily violence. Tension became existential. We were all diminished by the sense of complicity in collective self-destruction and self-abasement. And what of the anger and hate, the doubt and the distrust, that flowed out of us. Can we send her to school today....? Will get back home in the evening after work....? Fears wracked us in our homes and in our workplaces. There was a pall over the space that we inhabited. However we persisted in striving to live justly. We summoned all the courage we had. We were going through a process of silent change. We were learning a new language. It was a language of the spirit. We were compelled to challenge ourselves from within. We were re-making ourselves in the process. Values were seized and restored. We were now able to transcend our petty fears and enlarge ourselves.. Then many things crystallised rapidly. We found that we had built new capacities within. Our women and mothers were particular. They led society into new values and new spiritualities. They led us into paths of inner conviction. They possessed stocks of infinite patience strength and hope. They thought through the darkness at noon. The elegies of dead sons on either side of the divide, the sufferings and destruction of the bombs and weaponry, inspired them to exhaust all faith in war. The minds of these mothers and women were transformed. They became beacons of hope and icons of the human spirit. Strange the paradox. They never verbalised rationalised or wrote up their story. They carried it quietly within them and communicated through the personhoods of people. They touched and kindled life-giving hope. This wordless exercise in mingling and interacting bears celebration. They went about their daily chores and silently worked for peace until it became a nation's resolve. They were resolved to exert maximum empathy on their political leadership. And fortunately for the country, the leadership rose to the challenge and summoned the courage to cross the threshold of total commitment to peace. Not so strangely, it happened simultaneously on both sides of the divide. That is how the unknown works. It leaps across the impossible and makes it a part of the possible. Trust is rebuilt. Trust in massive doses. Trust which can undermine the most intractable of protagonists. That is when leaders rediscover hidden sources of their challenges We have challenges to meet. New challenges to address. And we have duties to perform. There is no interval for complacency. We need a million dialogues amongst ourselves amongst each other to reveal renewed selfhoods and infuse each other. Not to attempt to persuade, but to quietly share our empathies and concerns. That will help build layers of solidarity, resolve and determination to protect the fragility of the process. Swimming upstream all the way, is our collective destiny. Let us praise all ordinary women and men for this gift of mindfulness. |
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