My Apologetic For April To My Children And Their English-Speaking Friends
"Dear God: please grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can: and the wisdom to know the difference."
April has become a tantalizingly sensitive month for me: April 12nd is the date when my beloved gentle maternal Grandfather passed away; it is the month of my birth; it celerates my Ideal Lover Jesus' resurection of Easter; its hommage of Spring to be chosen as the month to celebrate Earth Day; and it marks also my Grandfather blessing me with life the second time when he took me and our extended family onto the exodus among the first wave of Vietnamese Boat People escaping from the Vietnamese communists in April 1975. This year, April 16th has become to the Virginia Tech community a grievious day as 9-11 is to the United States. On the morning of my 46th birthday, five car bomb explosions in Baghdad killed 170 people and wounded over 200 people, with the death-rate still climbing. It seems the only thing for me to dedicate myself to on the occasion of my birthday this year, and sets it for all the years to come, is to pray: for peace and faith and hope, no matter how frail my insignificant offering of myself is, it helps bring me a sense of peace and embracing purpose. And so, throughout the day, I closed my eyes, bowed my head in contemplation of Christ's pain in his ecstatic suffering in love for mankind...as he prayed on his cross: "Father! Please forgive them for they know not what they've done!"
In my youth, without knowing it, I was very arrogant to the point of being stubborn in my impossible expectation for the sufferings, until I become one of them! Though others that know me as a flashing hostess in my prosperious years cannot understand, I love my present materialistically strained life because I am grateful for the wisdom of my THOU/Bụt for leading me here: to gain the state of humility is very difficult. In such a precious sense of humbleness, I learn that it is not my lot to judge. I have also learned to appreciate the power of forgiveness transmuted in the passion of the Christ and myriad Buddhas and Boddhisattvas and ancient sages. King Solomon prayed to his God for wisdom, only to concluded in his book Ecclessiastic in the Old Testament that all is vainity except for the knowledge of and faith in God. I am a weak and meek woman who learns from her limitations on all aspects of worldly life the power and salvation in prayers.
And so I pray for peace and contentment and love for all: the killed and the killers: for their souls which last deeper than their conducts from confusion and alienation and loss are all precious in all matters from life to death and The Mystery of existence.
...And may we all be forgiven by each other: in the Force of Creation, called God by many, Its/His/Her embrace concerns not nor making any distinction between the victims and the perpetrators: when asleep, the force of life pumps the organs to sustain the presence of all living beings regardless of the concept in the black-and-white of good and evil. As the Jews' God forgave them their petty rebellions against him throughout the 40 years they had to wander in the wilderness, we should ponder the justice of the Christian God in marking Cain to avoid Cain being killed by those who knew that he was the murderer of his own blood brother Abel.
So I turned on the Death Metal band NILE, especially their albums "Annihilation Of The Wicked" and "In Their Darkened Shrines" and watched the films on nature on the National Geographic tivi channel: the human passionate dedication to film Nature at her most overwhelmingly powerful forces that belittle the human race, in earthquakes, tornados, hurricanes, desert sandstorms, iceberg avalanches; but also the caresses of Spring into Autumn of green fields and wildflowers, of birds and butterflies, of blue sky and lustful earth: To feel deeply the human situation on our green planet Earth amidst a boundless universe; and to be baffled by the mind of existence's Creating Force; and to feel love rich with life via my tiny heart beating insistently and loyally inside my human chest warm with nutritious blood. So I pray with the deep acceptance that though I don't understand the why of it all: "It is as it should be!" Then offering my praises for both God and mankind on Earth Day on April 22nd of this year: may Grace be abundant in all the living organisms that share together the bountifully lustful Source of Life!
...And forgiveness blooms into the blossoms of humility, understanding, and the love for pure compassion!
