The Mud We Need
Two Ways of Approaching These Painful Days
A common summer activity here along Rhode Island’s coast is venturing out into the Salt Ponds to clam. People wade in wearing boots or old sneakers, bent over like human question marks, prying quahogs from the muck. At the end of the day, you are sure to come home smelling of low tide and, against all reason, feeling strangely happy. There is something mud teaches you.
Mud has been on my mind lately. It started when I read a slim book by Vietnamese Zen teacher Thich Nhat Hanh, titled No Mud, No Lotus. If you’re unfamiliar, Thich Nhat Hanh was one of the most influential Buddhist teachers of the 20th century. He was a Buddhist monk exiled from Vietnam during the war, the founder of Plum Village in France, and an advocate for engaged Buddhism—an approach that actively addresses real-world suffering rather than remaining detached. His central metaphor in this book is simple: the lotus flower, celebrated in Buddhist art for its beauty and purity, doesn’t grow in clean water. It requires mud, decay, and darkness pressing around it before it seeks the light. His underlying message is that we can’t eliminate suffering and expect happiness to follow in the empty space. Suffering, he suggests, is the very soil in which growth occurs.
I made a short 6-minute video introducing the idea. Here it is.
Then, over dinner one night, as I described the No Mud No Lotus video I had been producing, my wife reminded me of a piece she had written on Kazoh Kitamori’s Theology of the Pain of God. Kitamori is a name you have probably never heard. He was a Japanese Lutheran theologian who, writing in 1946 in a country reduced to ash and grief after World War II and the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, built an entire theology around a single verse in Jeremiah, in which God’s heart is described as being in pain over the ancient Hebrew people.
“Oh! Ephraim is my dear, dear son,
my child in whom I take pleasure!
Every time I mention his name,
my heart bursts with longing for him!
Everything in me cries out for him.
Softly and tenderly I wait for him.” Jeremiah 31:20
From that verse, Kitamori spins out a bold claim. The heart of the gospel, he says, is not that God swoops in to make our pain disappear. It’s that God himself suffers. The cross is not a magic trick that erases suffering from a distance. It is the place where God’s love and God’s wrath collide, producing something we can only call pain, God’s own pain, given for us.
As we look around our world and across the landscape of these times of war, economic dislocation, and attempts to undermine democracy, I confess that at times I feel the angst of it all. I wonder where this will lead. Clearly, we live in a time of pain, or at the very least a time of murky mud. I’m wondering how Kitamori and Nhat Hanh might help us. Both authors focus on the aftermath of war. Neither offers an easy solution nor a quick escape from suffering. Instead, both emphasize, in their own ways, that suffering isn’t an obstacle to healing; rather, it is the foundation from which healing arises.
Where they differ, I think, is where things get genuinely interesting. Thich Nhat Hanh needs no God to make his case. Suffering transforms through mindful attention, practice, and learning to sit with the mud without drowning in it or pretending it isn’t there. Kitamori, on the other hand, locates pain within God’s own heart. For him, redemption isn’t something we practice our way into. It’s something given to us by a deeply compassionate God who hurts. One tradition asks us to become skillful gardeners of our own suffering. The other tells us we have a gardener who suffers alongside us.
I don’t have this all figured out yet, not by a long shot. I’ll admit that some mornings I’ve sat and can’t decide whether I am a Buddhist, a Lutheran, or simply confused. But I have a hunch that somewhere between the mud that makes the lotus and the pain that lives in the heart of God, there is something true about how healing works.
So, this is an invitation, as much as anything.
Let’s go digging in the mud for clams or lotus flowers. Those are the gems where the interesting things are buried. I’m interested in your ideas, stories, and perspectives. You can reply to this email or post in the Substack app.
More to Come
I’ve considered myself a Buddhist and a Lutheran for a long, long time ….
Do I write "This was helpful."? A true statement but woefully weak. I find myself grasping for ANY hopeful words these days.
A question in my mind over these past months is how much of my depression (and current antidepressant medication) is due to my quadruple bypass in March (apparently 70% of such patients end up in depression) and how much is the current state of our country and world.
This morning Rebecca and I read that the DOJ will be barred from investigating the ICE shooting in Biddeford. That only ICE will investigate ICE. I think I would be even more appalled by this if the DOJ hadn't already been fully weaponized by Trump. I have given up questioning how any rational human being (including everyone in the Republican party) can see even any ATTEMPT at justice anymore.
On the other hand, I also note that, whether there is any actual investigation or not, David Brouillette's life is essentially over. He has been outed by his ex-wife. Nationally and internationally identified as a troubled, abusive, damaged individual. Wherever he goes and whatever he seeks to do from this point forward he will be dogged by this. He will carry the weight of this for however long he remains on earth and, once he reaches the other side, he will find an eternity of consequences there, too. Can there be forgiveness for him? Assuredly, but as I find it difficult to believe that God practices mindwiping, he will carry the knowledge of this for eternity.
In short, ICE's activities continue to bring massive disruption, suffering, and abuse with no clear end in sight.
I have been watching my older son this past year now for suicidal ideation. He was working with the TRIO program for several years, feeling deeply called to this work. Coaching and guiding high school students from disadvantaged families into college. Ah, but TRIO is (was) government funded. A phenomenally successful program but . . . no, we need to slash government spending. Except, of course, for what we need to spend on the reflecting pool, and ballrooms. And golfing. He was told he could remain in the position at 2/5's time, since ONE of the two government grants were approved. (Help me to understand the logic of THAT governmental decision?) He still has college debt, so that option wasn't feasible.
He and his wife have also been trying to buy a house for three years. His brother, my younger son, would rent from them.
They can't do it. Three incomes, together, can't provide enough for the purchase of a house in Maine. Thirty-five years ago when I was first ordained Rebecca and I purchased a house, albeit a small row house. Just on my income, as Rebecca worked from home. A brand-new pastor's income and we purchased a house. Now THREE incomes cannot afford a house. My son has told me, "I just want to serve the community and have our own home to enjoy. I really don't see that as remotely possible anymore."
Throughout my life I have known that life is not as it should be. Economic justice, racism, gender inequity, the environment, on and on and on. Yet I also believed we were making progress. We were reducing pollution. We were making strides with employment practices. We were enacting laws that, however clumsy or unequally enforced, were still attempts to make things better.
Microplastics? Forever chemicals? Good thing global warming isn't real and we'd be in danger. Last year as the congregation prepared for Creation Care Sunday I learned that 60% of young people across the world believe that the world will become uninhabitable in their lifetime. My son is among them.
How could so much progress be destroyed so very quickly and cavalierly? Okay, yes, whether at the midterms or some other point in the future the Democrats will return to power. At some point Christ will come again and set all things right. But, until that happens, the pain and destruction will continue and will grow. It will be years if not decades for much of the destruction to be repaired. And, when the Democrats DO return to power, will that pendulum swing just as hard in the opposite direction? Revenge and retribution attained, but at the yet further destruction of the nation? I see little human evidence it will be otherwise.
Many years ago it became clear to Rebecca and I that we will not have grandchildren. For a time that grieved us, not that we even pressured the kids.
Now, now I . . . am thankful that there will not be another generation of our family growing up in this nation. And my saying that makes me terribly sad.