The Rough Edges of Basic Goodness
by Michaela McCormick
Our Shambhala Center’s Listening Team, led by Mark Douglass, met recently to review the latest round of its interviews of a wide variety of our past and present members to learn the ways in which they participate in the Center’s activities and what encourages and discourages them to do so. Our attention went to our organization’s prevailing culture and its difficulty in embracing the many social differences among us. In many ways, our recognition of the basic goodness of us all makes us accepting of different ways of being. We do not overtly challenge each other’s behavior. But those of us who represent different ways of being, due to our race, ethnicity, gender or gender identity, age, sexual orientation, socio-economic class, physical, mental, or perceptual characteristics, or a variety of other less visible identities outside the dominant culture, often feel the pain of exclusion and censor what we say or do for fear of further rejection. Some of us, particularly the vast majority of people of color who have tried to find a place among us, have given up and left. Others have found a niche in groups like Queer Dharma and Young Meditators, but find other events or gatherings unwelcoming. Still others who can’t afford our programs and/or are put off by a Generosity Policy that requires them to set themselves apart as “exceptions” to full fee paying participants, just don’t come.
This habit of broad exclusion is not our fault. We, as Shambhalians, did not invent the social biases that blind us to the myriad of ways that we communicate our expectations of how people should behave at our Center. We inherited our prejudices from the broader culture we all grew up in. And there is much to honor in the gentleness, warmth, and generosity with which we receive those who come to us. We are truly basically good, and have the best of intentions. But while we are not to blame for our mostly subtle betrayals of universal acceptance, we are responsible for correcting them.
You may ask, “Why bother? Isn’t our invitation to rediscover your basic goodness clear and inclusive?” My response to that is a memory of a story I heard about our Sakyong meeting with a group of gang members in Chicago a couple of years ago, in which he posed a question to them something like, “What is your experience of being human, of your own basic goodness?” After long moments of silence and just before the Sakyong was about to leave, a young man in the back of the room said somethng like, “I have never felt like anything more than an animal.”
As wise and willing to listen as the Sakyong was, and is, his question was asking that young man something he was not ready to address. It was not relevant to him, at least not in a language that he could relate to. As far as I know, that conversation went no further that day. Gang members in the inner city of Chicago suffer at an entirely different level than you and me. Theirs is not just suffering perpetrated by ego-fueled habitual patterns, but real material pain and systemic oppression. There is a whole spectrum of suffering and pain that most of us, most of the time, in Shambhala are privileged to be protected from, but it is much closer, embodied in those outside the mainstream of privilege among us and who come to us, than we recognize.
In their book, Radical Dharma: Talking Race, Love, and Liberation, the Rev. angel Kyodo williams, Lama Rod Owens, and Jasmine Syedullah, PhD say, “… we’ve all acquiesced to minding our own business. And that’s not liberation.” (162) As part of our highly individualistic society, we have allowed our spiritual practice to be grounded in that same narrow pursuit of personal liberation. Yet, the Sakyong continually exhorts us to turn our attention outward and discover what we each have inherently to offer the world. In a time of renewed bigotry, scapegoating of the “other,” and deepening social and economic inequality, how can we use our commitment to creating enlightened society to make our message of basic goodness relevant to those outside our cocoon of privilege?
