Stay
Lila says the universe is divine play. Not a test, not a punishment, not a machine running on cause and effect but consciousness delighting in becoming form, becoming multiplicity, becoming us. It's a beautiful theology until you ask it to hold a bombed hospital. Then you have to break it open further or it starts to look like something you only believe when it's easy.
I don't think the answer is that atrocity isn't really God. That's the easy exit. If God is what is, all of it, not the curated parts, then the child in the wreckage and the soldier who dropped the bomb and the leader who ordered it are all somehow inside the same play.
So what do you do with a theology that says everything is inside God without using it to excuse the things that should never be excused?
The first temptation is condemnation, and it has its own theology. Name the leader evil and something resolves. He becomes a category instead of a person, someone whose choices no longer need explaining because the label already explains them. Evil doesn't ask for consequence to be witnessed. It substitutes for witnessing. Once he's evil, you're finished looking.
The second is gentler and harder to catch. Rush toward compassion before you've fully witnessed consequence. A mentor said something to me the other day that's been following me around. He works within the Course in Miracles tradition, and he said, "Every act is either an expression of love or a call for it." Taken seriously, that means the leader ordering the strike is doing one of exactly two things. Loving, or asking to be loved. There's real wisdom in that. I haven't been able to dismiss it. I also haven't been able to stop wondering whether it can become another way of leaving. I agree with the diagnosis, but atrocity still has to be named for what it is. Compassion for the wound is not permission to tolerate what the wound does.
Lila stops being comfortable the moment you notice what it actually contains. Kali dances on corpses. Shiva's dance creates and destroys in the same movement. Divine play was never claimed to be gentle. It asks something harder than either condemnation or bypass.
If God is love and love is what's real underneath everything, violence isn't a second force competing with it. It's love that has forgotten itself. Contracted into fear, into scarcity, into the conviction that survival requires someone else's destruction. The leader ordering the strike hasn't stepped outside God to do it. He's become so identified with fear that he's forgotten he was ever inside. That doesn't make it smaller. Understanding the forgetting doesn't unmake what it produced. Forgetting, at that scale, is what atrocity is made of.
A Christian version of this isn't gentler. It just locates God differently. Not above the wreckage, arranging it from a safe distance. Inside it. Richard Rohr's idea of the Universal Christ argues that incarnation wasn't God making one visit to suffering. In his reading, it was the clearest revelation that God has always been inside creation, present to its joys and its wounds, not standing outside either. The crucifixion isn't God's exception to violence. It's God's address inside violence, refusing every exit available to power. That is not a metaphor for how to feel better about atrocity. It's an argument that God's location, when things are this bad, is with the body being broken, not with the machinery doing the breaking. The man in ICE custody, the family under the airstrike, are not symbols of Christ. In this theology, that is where Christ already is.
Ram Dass reaches for something with the same shape, from somewhere else entirely. He called it grist for the mill, outrage as material for practice rather than something to bypass by performing calm. His teaching on the witness gets misread as detachment, floating above the wreckage. That was never the point. Practice that produces passivity in the face of injustice isn't practice. It's an escape wearing the practice's clothes.
Pema Chödrön brings the whole thing into the body.
She calls it shenpa, the hook. The instant something painful lands and every part of you reaches for relief. Fix it. Explain it. Blame someone. Forgive too quickly. Build a story that makes the charge stop.
Her instruction is simple.
Stay.
Notice the hook before you obey it. Feel where it lands. Don't rush toward certainty. Don't rush toward resolution before grief has done its work.
Groundlessness is the word she uses for the place this leaves you: no story to stand on, no resolution to reach for, just the raw fact of what's happening before interpretation gives you permission to leave.
That's not a comfortable place to build a spiritual life around.
What strikes me isn't how much these traditions agree about reality. They don't. It's how easily the same temptation to leave keeps finding new disguises.
To leave through condemnation, where the label explains everything and I no longer have to keep looking. To leave through premature compassion, where forgiveness arrives before grief has finished speaking. To leave through oneness, where "it's all God" becomes permission not to feel any of it.
Those exits are always available. Staying is the practice.
Staying doesn't tell you what policy to support or how every war should end. It doesn't erase judgment or consequence. It refuses the relief of leaving too soon.
I am not a writer. I’m a wroter. AI helps me. All of this keeps circling back to Table Manor. Start there if you want the source.
