On October 12, 1998, Matthew Shepard died after being driven out to the Wyoming countryside five days earlier, pistol-whipped until his skull caved in, hung on a fence and left to die before he was discovered some 18 hours later, already in a coma.
The tragic gay-bashing of Matthew Shepard has stunned us as a nation, leaving many of us, gay and straight, to ask why this happened, and how it could be prevented from happening in the future. The national discussion of homophobia and hate-based violence is promising; but right now I want to probe deeper, into the nature of violence itself, and suggest ways we can help, even if we are never in a position to intervene directly.
Buddhist philosophy offers the idea that violence, verbal or physical, comes from “unskillful” ways of relating to one’s own pain: we haven’t yet learned the skills needed to accept it when it’s present and release it when it passes. Pain occurs when something within us needs to be taken care of; but more often, we resist it, repressing it inward or deflecting it outward, until sooner or later the pressure erupts and harm is done--an angry word, a fistfight, a look of contempt, or a pistol-whipping and figurative crucifixion.
Most of the time, the aftereffects are mild and easily fixable, and we don’t have to see the pattern--and more importantly, don’t see anything wrong with the pattern, and the cycle continues. A death like Matthew Shepard’s makes us stop. We have a rare opportunity to see the tragedy of continuing to circulate our negativity, even in the little ways. It’s all harmful--just in some cases, it’s only a little harmful, where in others, it’s a lot.
The beauty of this view is that we all have pain; and so, we all have the opportunity to understand pain, to transform it and have compassion for those who are still trapped in it. We’ve been there, and are still there. In my own meditation practice, there were a few months recently in which a deep, implacable rage would arise several times a day. The intense flashes of anger don’t visit me nearly so often these days, but the memory is fresh--of the burning in the pit of my stomach, of the cries rising from my gut and filling my chest before they would pass, of the desperate feeling that I’d do almost anything for relief.
The anger was often not even “about” anything specific, which was more difficult to deal with, because I couldn’t reason with it. It would rage and storm and howl within me, and would turn away violently from any kindness I would try to give it. I could do nothing but hold it in gentle, compassionate awareness again and again, once, twice, a hundred or a thousand times, until it finally stopped fighting the compassion, and began to melt into the bittersweet peace that is a true taste of the sorrow of the world. And seeing it, and embracing it, led to a glimpse of transcendence: the sorrow may seem all-encompassing, but it is not me, and can be a gateway to wisdom.
The seeds of aggression are within me, as they are within all of us, and although I have a long way to go in working with them, I know how fortunate I am to have been shown a way to go about it productively. Those who killed Matthew Shepard have not been so lucky, and a young gay man who was just turning his life in the right direction died because of it. That’s the tragedy.
I know how acute my own struggle has been, and because of that, I wonder how much more intense must be the grief and pain within Matthew’s killers, and how frightening these feelings must be that they’d kill a man sooner than take the risk of seeing what they’re made of. And as I mourn for a fellow gay man, struck down before his time, I mourn also for a world that doesn’t know how to take care of people who hurt so much that violence seems the only answer.
And as I see in my mind’s eye the butt of the .357 crushing Matthew’s skull, I wonder who on this earth would have had enough compassion and love to have helped these men transform their suffering before they killed. And I mourn for the sheer size of this tragedy, for no one person can heal it all. We can only begin--we must, each one of us--at home, with the only person we can really change.
May victims of violence transform their suffering and learn to be happy, healthy, free from harm, and at peace.
May perpetrators of violence look deeply into the sources of their rage and transform it, so they may be happy, healthy, free from harm, and at peace.
May we all look deeply within ourselves, and stop the cycle of violence of any sort before it begins again, that all beings may be happy, healthy, free from harm, and at peace.
12-17 October 1998
H. James Harkins