Courage Grows Strong At the Wound

By Robert C. Koehler

“Koehler’s mind is amazing and he has the literary skills to match. Simply reading this book, both your mind and your heart will be expanded. You won’t see the world quite the same after reading it, so in a very real way the world won’t be the same. Koehler is one of those extraordinary souls who makes you think a bit differently about the world — and thus he changes it, one essay at a time.”
— Marianne Williamson, author of Tears to Triumph: The Spiritual Journey from Suffering to Enlightenment

Koehler is “someone who has fought through unthinkable adversity and made a mission out of offering the world a view of peace, cooperation, benevolence and self-education taken on for the common good. I don’t know many people in the world, if any, who are putting their shoulder to so noble a task. … He empowers his readers to find the highest levels of personal philosophy in the most innocuous of places.”
— Jason Stoneking, author of Audience of None

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu Publishing Services
• Release date: Nov 1, 2016
• ISBN: 9781483459073

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KOEHLER

Copyright © 2016 Robert C. Koehler.

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ISBN: 978-1-4834-5908-0 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4834-5907-3 (e)

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Lulu Publishing Services rev. date: 10/21/2016

CONTENTS

Foreword By Marianne Williamson

Introduction

Organization of the Book

Part One: Love and Grief

Part Two: Wonder and Genius

Part Three: 9/11 Revisited

Part Four: A Hole in God’s Grace

Part Five: Einstein’s Door

Part Six: Common Wonders

Part Seven: Courage Grows Strong at the Wound

To my late wife, Barbara

To my daughter, Alison

To Huntsey (Barbara H.)

With undying love

FOREWORD

By Marianne Williamson

In his legendary poem The Second Coming, poet William Butler Yeats describes a time that feels eerily like our own.

Turning and turning in the widening gyre

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

I think of that stanza whenever I’m reading an essay by Bob Koehler; at a time when so many of the best lack conviction and many of the worst are full of passionate intensity, Bob is one of the best and he’s full of passionate intensity. When an issue arises on our contemporary horizon, I often ask myself, I wonder what Koehler thinks. When his essays arrive in my inbox, I always make sure to read them. I look to him for a mix of things: his searing intelligence, his brilliant insight and his passionate heart.

Koehler makes you look at things you’d rather not look at; he refuses to pussyfoot around painful facts, yet he always articulates the moral point to which they lead. And that’s what makes Koehler important. He doesn’t shy away from the stark realities of our time, yet neither does he shy away from putting them in a spiritual context. And it is just such a voice that the world needs now. The current trend of anesthetizing ourselves in one way or another so as not to have to look at what too often is happening around us is a potentially tragic shirking of our responsibility as citizens of the world. But when facts are just thrown at us, harsh and with no context for either compassion or understanding, then of course the mind shuts down. That is the role of the public thinker: to help us put all the pieces together. And no one does that better than Bob Koehler.

Koehler’s points are made with a combination of journalistic acumen and spiritual precision. He takes you by the brain and will not let you go to sleep, will not let you shut down, will not let you look away – and yet, in the same essay – will not let you lose hope, and will not let you stop believing in the spirit of goodness that lies within us. Koehler has his finger on something more important than the pulse of this moment; he has his finger on the pulse of love. He looks with searing clarity at what’s happening, and with equally searing clarity at what’s still possible despite what is happening. He sees through the veils of institutional, political and ideological obfuscation, while tenderly invoking our most beautiful potential. I don’t know how he does it, but I deeply admire his skill.

Koehler’s mind is amazing and he has the literary skills to match. Simply reading this book, both your mind and your heart will be expanded. You won’t see the world quite the same after reading it, so in a very real way the world won’t be the same. Koehler is one of those extraordinary souls who makes you think a bit differently about the world — and thus he changes it, one essay at a time.

— Marianne Williamson

INTRODUCTION

Do You Believe In Them Yet?

I started writing a column called Common Wonders in the fall of 1999, a year and a half after my wife died. I’ve barely missed a week since, with the number of columns recently surpassing 500.

I view them as prayers, though they impersonate op-eds.

My wife’s illness and death created the opening from which the column emerged. Amid the broken pieces and shattered narrative of my new life, an awareness throbbed. Grief is a deep emotion, deeper than anger, deeper than ego. The great slow swells of Lake Michigan in mid-December, the deep murmur of forgiveness, the fusion of certain words (When lilacs last in the dooryard bloom’d) — these things touched my grief. I would walk to the lake, feel the fire of my heart in the frigid pre-dawn, stand on an old broken pier and watch the waves.

I still had a life: a child, a job, the same bills to pay. Certainly these had not grown smaller or lesser in the face of Barbara’s death. Nothing was different, but everything had changed.

Maybe it was that I was no longer numb to the daily noise that insisted on continuing: morning radio, the newspaper on my doorstep, the crazy urgency of our consumer culture, the shouts in the street, the posturing of panhandlers and politicians. Life — humanity’s shards — cut into my psyche in a fresh, almost unbearable way. I saw us suddenly as a culture distracted by our own dazzling insanity. But in the noise I also heard the echo of a depthless longing. This was the birth of the column.

From the outset, my intention was to make the distinction between personal events and current events — the news — merely incidental: to write about both and to write about them in essentially the same way, that is, to render the former universal and the latter intensely personal. I was already doing that privately. For years my most reliable psychotherapist has been my own journal. When Barbara was first diagnosed with cancer, I debated whether or not to continue with it. Was it too self-indulgent now, in this urgent and harrowing time? I decided resolutely that it was not; that any hours put into it were hours well spent, because without this regular self-reflective discipline, I would grow emotionally vague and begin unconsciously stuffing down the hard stuff life was sure to give us. The journal, I decided, was my spiritual spine. I regarded it thus throughout Barbara’s cancer and death and for the dozen years, and counting, afterward.

What I wrote about in my journal, willy-nilly, several times a week — a widower’s pause in the presence of life’s pieces — became the stuff of my early columns. We called it life goes on. We called it the daily news. This was about the time of Columbine and the other school shooting tragedies. These stories, you might say, universalized my grieving. They magnetized me, pulled me into the empty place where a soul should be. This was true especially if they did not have national impact; if they were routine and quickly disappeared from the news cycle and the collective memory. I mourned them in my journal, groped for meaning in the waste, the spilled emotions, the blood.

Sept. 12, 1999

Suddenly, Daniels fired…

A 26-year-old woman is pointlessly dead. Doesn’t the world stop with each death? She was a passenger in a friend’s car. Just a passenger. Can I get a ride home? At one point the driver stops to talk out the window to someone in another car. Cruiser pulls up behind him. Get your punk ass off the street. Two blocks later, same cops — male and female — stop him again. They demand his license and insurance card even though no violation has been committed. When he only opens his window a crack, the male cop shouts, Put that window down before I break it out and beat your ass. Driver panics, hits the gas. Bad decision, of course. He’s in complete disarray. Calls his mother on the cell. What do I do? He’s in a preposterous high-speed chase. There’s gunfire from the police at the unarmed pair. No crime has been committed.

The chase finally ends at King Drive and 64th Street. By now, two cruisers are present. The driver is pulled out of the car.

"Meanwhile, (Serena) Daniels stood at the driver’s side near the rear door with her 9mm Smith and Wesson aimed at (la Tanya) Haggerty. The officers repeatedly ordered Haggerty to show her hands and step out of the car. …

Suddenly Daniels fired. Then, according to one witness, the officer muttered ‘Damn.’

And from a separate story: Moments after Chicago Police Officer Serena Daniels shot and killed an unarmed woman, she knelt next to her on the sidewalk, placed her head on a leather coat, stroked her bloody hair and said, ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to shoot you. I thought you had a gun.’

Damn.

This is our inverted prayer, the one that’s uttered too late. La Tanya Haggerty had a cell phone, not a gun. She was just the passenger, getting a ride home from work. Two years later, the city of Chicago settled a lawsuit with the family and awarded La Tanya’s parents and siblings $18 million for her wrongful death. The four police officers who had discharged their weapons in the incident were fired. Justice done, case closed. Next!

Ten years later, I tear this inverted prayer, and the story that accompanies it, out of the suspended animation in which we store all our unhealed wounds and wrongful deaths. Damn! Let the word, and the fatal, inalterable mistake, reverberate. How can we stop learning our lessons too late? What will it take to disarm our impulses, fears and miscalculations? What we call justice is not a stopping point, not for anyone who grasps the value of a human life. There can be no resting place for this story — or the countless stories like it, before and since — until we, the scared and scattered grains of humanity, figure out how to advance, in the words of Einstein, to a level of awareness beyond the level that created it.

And this begins to get at the spirit in which I conceived and wrote Common Wonders: not to pass blame but to pass forgiveness, especially when it doesn’t seem possible, and in so trying, to contribute an infinitesimal swell to the collective awareness.

A column with this kind of yearning and ambition is a little hard to explain before it actually exists. It took me four years to make a case for it where I worked — I was a copy editor for the Chicago Tribune Co.’s syndicate, Tribune Media Services — and thus find a real-world sponsor for this all-consuming, shapeless inner force.

To revisit my difficulties in launching the column is to commune with my weekly difficulties writing it.

What finally gave the column some traction at work — this was in 1999 — was a new Human Resources directive requiring every Tribune employee to set goals for the coming year with his or her immediate supervisor during the annual review process. I disdained, as per my stubbornly egalitarian personality, bureaucratically mandated goal setting, bureaucratically mandated anything. My first thought was: Oh for God’s sake. But my second thought was inspired pragmatism. My editor, I realized, would be under the gun with this directive far more than I was, needing to demonstrate her prowess at orchestrating viable, smart-sounding goals for her employees. So when my annual review came around, I helped her out by suggesting that one of my goals for the year could be the development of a column for the small in-house publication, called QuikPublish, which the syndicate put together each week primarily for its low-end market of weekly newspapers and shoppers. QuikPublish consisted of clip art, puzzles and generic features — horoscopes, fitness and recipe columns, a weekly summary of soap opera plotlines — and one serious column with shifting authors. Claiming that column as my own had been an idea I’d nurtured ever since I started working there (and was the QuikPublish proofreader).

My editor was amenable to my suggested goal. It had a good ring: column development. It fit nicely within H.R. parameters. I say this with irony and wonder, with deep appreciation to all concerned, especially my managing editor at the time, who surely grasped how much the project meant to me even as I carefully minimized it for corporate consumption. Seldom have I been any good at playing the games that life makes of our enormous yearnings.

But so it began: longing and destiny set to boil. Column-development entailed a renegotiation of my employment status at the syndicate. I’d have to mutate into a hybrid oddity, half staff, half talent, both employee and outside contractor. I’d have to figure out what to write about, how to mold it into an op-ed-style format without stifling its heartbeat.

Yet this was not something new for me. I was a career journo. I’d written a weekly column for a decade at Lerner Newspapers, a chain of weeklies on Chicago’s North Side and throughout the northern suburbs. I knew what I was doing, or thought I did. But I had so much emotional buildup over my nonexistent column, I could scarcely endure the prerequisites for it to happen, resenting them every step of the way. The paradox I faced was having to come up with sample columns, which reasonable people could weigh on their merits. Doing so felt antithetical to the creative process. My writing was too urgent to be reduced to a sample. Only the column that knows it’s going live and must speak with a direct, raw urgency to the reader can come into being in the first place, I believed. To write something meant to be judged on its aesthetics — a pretend column, assuming a sample position on an issue — seemed beyond my ability to conjure up.

July 18, 1999

I could feel myself losing it and getting defensive as they asked me to explain my idea for a QuikPub column. There is no explain, there is no idea, it’d just be me coming up with something and that something would be potent and fabulous.

No matter how reasonable this seems, anything, anything on the wrong side of we love ya, no matter how slightly on the wrong side, trips my button, sends me into a defensive tailspin where all-important brain functions such as free association are unable to occur

I can’t believe how sensitive I am on such points, but I am. Nobody understands this! It has to be live, it has to be wanted. It’s not as though TMS itself actually makes objective decisions about whom it syndicates — it makes objective decisions only about those it doesn’t syndicate!

Aug. 17, 1999

Their whole demeanor, especially at first, was two people (boss and over-boss) desperately applying the brakes to something. They wanted to reduce my expectations and potential illusions, shrink ’em to the size of a pinhead. They didn’t want me to get my hopes up that the column could grow or be successful or ever ever ever leap outa QuikPublish into general syndication, or that I would ever earn more than $25 a week from it.

I finally had to tell them, in essence, that, while I am a big boy and am prepared for the possibility of disappointment, I was not going to write a column with confined expectations. I could only write a column I believed in and such a column is not one that would be content to spend its life in QuikPublish.

Another worry they expressed was how I would handle working with an editor who is also a colleague, like I had to reassure them I wouldn’t … what? Talk back? Argue my case? Go postal? It was like they sensed in giving me this column, they’d be unleashing … Ego Man? Unreasonable-hope-exuding writer from hell?

I kept my cool. I said, Look, there’s a certain amount of gunpowder involved in the creative process … and proceeded to, oh, I dunno, state the truth, I guess. Make ’em see that the box they were trying to put me into was just a bit ridiculous. I gave myself a little breathing room.

Somehow the column survived my intense emotions and sense of bubbling destiny about it. I did manage to write the samples and get the seal of approval from my bosses to begin writing weekly commentary for QuikPublish. This would, of course, be on the side, in addition to my editing work, and compensated at the rate of other QP contributors. The final challenge was thinking up a name for the column. I devoted several days to the task.

Sept. 12, 1999

On Thursday, I just started writing down name after name after name on pages in a legal pad. Restless Angels, Wet Gloves, Sanity’s Muzzle, Breast Pocket, Amber Waves, Next of Kin … 129 in all before I found my winner … Drum Beat, Matter of Course, Vacant Lots, Subway Walls, Still at Large, Brake Lights, Motion Detector … Naked Bacon (!) …

On Friday morning I actually snapped awake sometime after 5 in a fever sweat of possible names, some of which were starting to feel so-o-o-o close: Center of Gravity, Grace Notes … oh yeah, I like, I like. There was also Vanishing Point, Sea Change, Trouble Sleeping, Grappling Hook. And then I was on the el reading Theodore Roszak and all his talk about shamans and mysteries and I scribbled down first Common Mysteries, then Common Awe and finally, No. 129, Common Wonders.

So Common Wonders it became, the name a challenge to left-brain journalism. My sources would be the tripwires of daily life, every last one of which was also an opening, a glimpse, as I stumbled, beyond the gated community of our collective certainties. I was inspired by the dancing plastic bag scene in the movie American Beauty, which came out shortly before the column launched. What could be more emblematic of our throwaway culture than plastic grocery bags, strewn across lawns, snagged in tree branches, slowly shredding but incapable of breaking down and returning to the earth? But here’s one of them caught in an urban mini-whirlwind, a free spirit, like a little kid begging me to play with it, as the young man in the movie put it. That’s the day I realized there was this entire life behind things, and this incredibly benevolent force that wanted me to know there was no reason to be afraid, ever.

I sat in solidarity with that idea every week as I wrote, summoning, as best I could, this benevolent force to animate my words as it had animated the plastic bag. This was the wonders half of my column. The common half, however, proved to be more complicated than dancing litter. Common also included politics, current events, the daily bread of trouble.

July 9

The latest issue of Extra (July-August) reports an amazing bit of dialogue from Howard Stern’s radio show of April 21. It begins with a young male caller who, the article said, described how he got off of watching Littleton girls run out of Columbine High with ‘their boobs bouncing … turning me on.’

To which Stern responded: There were some really good-looking girls running out with their hands over their heads. Did those kids try to have sex with any of the good-looking girls? They didn’t even do that? At least if you’re going to kill yourself and kill all the kids, why wouldn’t you have some sex? If I was going to kill some people, I’d take them out with sex.

The article’s author, Jennifer L. Pozner, goes on to note that the criticisms Stern received in the mainstream media amounted to praising him with faint damnation — calling his commentary hurtful, out of bounds and insensitive — rather than calling it pro-rape.

Our world faces a crisis as yet unperceived by those possessing the power to make great decisions for good and evil. The unleashed power of the atom has changed everything save our modes of thinking, and thus we drift toward unparalleled catastrophe. — Albert Einstein

Common Wonders, then. Common Outrage. Common Despair. I wanted to get back into the column-writing game in order to be part of the national conversation, to push at our modes of thinking, to push at the void, to push at the disconnect permeating this conversation. But how? What could I say? The damage that resulted from the coarse national exaltation of the immature ego was ongoing and lasting, yet begged for something more than censure.

I had to write, somehow, about what had happened in my life — my wife’s death — yet move beyond that to a world at war with itself (and this was two years before the war on terror officially launched in the wake of 9/11). So that became the unstated goal of the new column: nothing less than to resacralize the national discourse on life and death. And where a single column might fall short or contain only a hint of the wholeness and complexity this discourse deserved, the larger goal begins to emerge in this collection, as the columns regroup and combine forces.

None of this is special. This is the life we all live, full of love and brokenness and miracles.

May 3, 1998

Do you believe in them yet?

That was Barbara’s mystical question to me at 6:45 a.m. … oh Lord — I’m down in the quiet dining room at 11 p.m. Just kissed Alison goodnight — she’s upstairs in the bed with Barbara. Should I put my arm around her? Sure, go ahead, I said. … Child, looking for instructions. Slowly the knowledge is coming to her that her mom doesn’t have much longer to live.

Oh Lord … What do I want to do with another journal entry? I felt the need to make it just to write those words at the top. DO YOU BELIEVE IN THEM YET? I’m trying to find some time to be alone and quiet with myself to see if I do believe in them yet.

My heart is breaking but I’m still holding it together.

I don’t know if I can make this entry flow anymore than I could yesterday’s.

My heart is breaking.

Conversation with the hospice nurse, Denise, today. At some point perhaps I will need to give Barbara permission to go, to say, it’s OK, Barbara, you can let go now.

Liver failure. General system shutdown.

She’ll die as she lived, Denise said. If she’s protective of you, she’ll probably die in private. That’s how Dad died … off by himself, waving Mom away. Mom died with all of us around her. Denise made me realize there’s no right way or preferable way for it to happen. Sometimes they wait till the loved one who has kept vigil all night gets up to go to the bathroom. They die as they lived. And it is, amazingly, their decision.

Oh yeah, the MS Contin … another amazing thing Denise explained to me. Last night and this morning the barely coherent Barbara was adamant about not wanting to take this pill, which I couldn’t understand, since it was part …

Dad, Mom needs oxygen!

Alison’s cry from upstairs. I turn on the machine and rush up there.

Oh, the testing of Alison’s mettle. I think she’s pleased to be playing a role, even without Barbara necessarily responding to her in a motherly way right now.

In fact, I am so glad Alison’s getting involved at this level — at the level of unselfish caring.

Earlier tonight she brushed her mom’s hair.

… to finish the MS Contin story — what Denise explained was that Barbara had told her she was trying to reduce her MS Contin intake — this was three or four days ago, when she was still articulate. So she saw this refusal as Barbara’s continued determination to exert control over her situation, exert her will … the miracle of Barbara’s will …

These are the levels at which I am finding miracles now. Shaking her head in adamant no at a little purple pill at 6:45 a.m. (She still takes the Roxenol and Lorazepam.)

Miracles.

Barbara’s extraordinary alertness yesterday afternoon when the women from her office were over — Tory, Helen, Rachel and Amy. She was totally engaged in the conversation for several wondrous hours.

Today she was mostly out of it, mostly slept … but sometime tonight, around 8:30 or 9, when Chris, Scott, Serena and Becky were over … whammo, suddenly she was up and awake, speaking very quietly, but she was part of the conversation (goofy conversation with Scott about the new anti-impotency drug Viagra … I had said, We always had sex under a doctor’s supervision. Barbara said, I didn’t know that.)

Do you believe in them yet?

Barbara’s heart is strong. She has decent blood pressure — 60/90. She could go for quite a while. But there is a sign of mottling on the bottoms of her feet … purplish color. The heart is weakening as circulation ceases to reach the extremities.

From a sheet Denise gave me: Signs of death include: No evidence of breathing or heartbeat, eyes slightly open, jaw relaxed and mouth slightly open.

You can see I’m in a somewhat crazed state. Overwhelmed … oh yeah, Michelle is pregnant. I learned that today when she and David stopped by. Life goes on.

My heart is breaking. I’m trying to believe.

I still have no idea what Barbara meant when she asked that question one morning, three days, it turns out, before she died. I’ve held the void it opens inside me for more than a decade, swaddled my anger, my politics and all my certainties within the not-knowing. Now that I am learned, wrote Ursula LeGuin in her novel Always Coming Home, it is my ignorance that is valuable.

This is grief, this is life.

She goes on: We have to learn what we can, but remain mindful that our knowledge not close the circle, closing out the void so that we forget what we do not know remains boundless, without limit or bottom.

And so this is the spirit in which I’ve written these columns, amid a backdrop of boundless not knowing. Each column is an audacious flicker across this backdrop, a brief cry of the heart at a moment in time, and also, I humbly hope, a glimpse beyond itself toward the unfathomable.

ORGANIZATION OF THE BOOK

This book is organized to reflect the realities and difficulties of creating peace. It fuses the inner nature of human reality — grief, genius, wonder — with the outer: politics, war and peace.

Courage Grows Strong at the Wound is about politics from the inside out: It’s about the peace that is personal as well as the peace that is collective and global. It’s about how the inner journey turns outward when it must.

My intention was to unite these 140 short essays into a larger whole, a single narrative that begins as the personal saga of my grief and culminates in the phenomenon of angry, grieving Iraq war vets crying out from the depths of their spiritual woundedness for peace.

Part One, Love and Grief, is a personal story, told over a period of five years, as I struggle with the loss of my wife and raise a teenager as a single dad. Along the way, I grope for wisdom. For instance, when my brother-in-law died, a year and a half after my wife passed away, I wrote, after his memorial service, about the huge opening in one’s heart that death carves out:

I do not complain to God about this process. I do not complain about birth or loss or even pain. I just wonder why living seems to require so little of us after it’s all over — why it seems to ask not for our best, not for our enlarged capacity to look into one another’s eyes without fear, but instead seems to require that we forget all that and go back to normal.

Part Two, Wonder and Genius, continues to lay the inner foundation for a culture of peace, explaining and extolling the genius of children and, indeed, all of us. It’s a joyous celebration of being human, intertwined with an emerging sense of human destiny. For instance, in an essay discussing Jill Bolte Taylor’s My Stroke of Insight, I wrote: This book is about the wonder of being human and as such is a plea and a prayer that we strive to be equal to how big we really are. What a piece of work is man — 5 trillion cells functioning in purposeful harmony. The two hemispheres of our brain are yoked opposites: limit-setting rationality (time, judgment, ego) in perpetual interplay with the eternal and unbounded now. Together, and only together, do these two halves of our awareness make our human destiny.

In Part Three, 9/11 Revisited, all is shattered. This section contains the essays I wrote in the wake of 9/11. They were written mostly in the first few months of the terrorist attacks — dispatches, you might say, from the nation’s emotional ground zero — and retain the immediacy of our collective shock. They also revive the now-forgotten pleas many people made at the time that this tragedy be seen as a global learning experience and lead to a rethinking of the geopolitics of war. My belief is that it is not too late to reclaim 9/11 as a day to commit to peace:

"Around the country, and particularly in New York City, the wakeup call is about to be sounded, as grieving Americans — grieving as