Can Spirituality Be Emailed?
By Dana Gerhardt

I think it was Jane Austen who, on learning of thousands dead in a distant war, said:  “How happy not to know any one of them.”  Even then, the world’s suffering, if collected into a single consciousness, could overwhelm the heart.  Against the media-flood of suffering in our time, most of us have constructed “tune-out” coping strategies.  But now there’s email.  “I don’t know what to do anymore,” said my friend “with all those heart-wrenching emails.”  I understood what she meant.  I’d just gotten one from a friend in Sweden, forwarded from Spain, about the oppression of women in Afghanistan. 

“Please do not ignore this email,” it begins.  This is the third time I’ve seen and ignored it.  Guilt-ridden, I scan the text.  I’m always stopped by the same image:  rooms of depressed women, lying motionless, wrapped in burquas, unable to eat or sleep, just wasting away.  My thoughts turn to the email’s sender:  What does she expect me to do?  What did she do, besides multiplying these images in cyberspace?  I consider the petition I’m supposed to sign (I notice that my friend didn’t).  Even the original author of the email isn’t sure of its value: “I don’t know if this is going to help, but take three minutes out of your life to do your part.”   I ponder the calculation that “my part” can be discharged in just three minutes.  I check my watch.  My 10:00 am meeting starts in less than two minutes. 

Enantiodromia is a Greek word for “a thing turning into its opposite.”  It’s what occurs when emails meant to engage our compassion serve to shut us down instead.  Campaigns that might enlist our hearts get lost in cyber-babble.  Or they simply exhaust us.  A friend writes about a spiritual circle organized during the recent election crisis.  “As events began to unfold, and everyone kept getting those constant emails, with endless prayers and meditations, one of the members mentioned how ‘exhausted’ he felt from the effort -- and everyone let out a sigh of relief.  We all were so overwhelmingly overwhelmed!” 

Cyberspace is instantaneous and loops repetitively.  We might wonder how a genuine spiritual rhythm can keep pace with this technological one.  Compassion’s rhythm is more like breathing.  Or a beating heart.  If we hear about the suffering of someone we don’t know, we might need time to digest this news, something that traveling through real geography can take care of. Cyberspace creates no space really for traveling into our work of caring. There is little time to feel, forwarding our email instantaneously, sending it back into the same nowhere it came from.  Discharging our part at technology’s pace, we’re taken away from the true spiritual work of bearing witness to the suffering of the world. 

Reclaiming my own spiritual rhythm was the least I could do.  Last month I began putting such emails into a special “full moon” folder.  At the full moon, one’s heart is full; one is most sensitive and connected; the world is ripe and open; truths can be revealed.  Sitting in the moonlight, I drew sacred space around me, then one by one, read my emails.  I used a Tibetan compassion practice, tonglen, taking in each image of suffering on the in-breath, and on the out-breath, sending imagery of compassion and relief.  It’s a different kind of “petition,” but may be closer to earlier nuances of this word (first as “prayer,” and before that “wing”).  Did my full moon petitions take flight and accomplish something?  Did they help to change the world?

Spiritual action is not like the political kind.  What we accomplish is less straightforward.  All we can really know is how we find ourselves transformed along the way. Reading emails in my moonlit circle, in spiritual time, I was no longer exhausted, nor afraid to care about things that couldn’t be fixed in an instant.  I could at least keep my heart open.  And only wonder at the mystery of whether this would help or not.  I finally understood why I’d been so undone by that image of lifeless women in their burquas.  Without diminishing the reality of their suffering, they also mirrored my own depressed feminine soul, as overwhelmed by demands and opportunities as an Afghani woman by the lack of them.  How many modern women, like myself, move like robots, at technological speeds:  our humanity undone by a different kind of fundamentalism. 

So I have my full moon folder.  And moon by moon, I shall not be afraid to breathe for us both:  the Afgani women rendered lifeless and invisible; and the overwhelmed ones, living like machines.  And I'll breathe for whatever other sorrows reach me at instantaneous speed, with the message “please do not ignore this email.”