Quan Yin/Guan Yin
For me, she is the goddess of compassion, and we certainly need her now. For after all the present tumult stops, and it will stop, we will need to find a way, torturous perhaps, to forgive the bunch of white male fanatics who are trying so hard to destroy us. The nation will need to come together; healing is an overused word and I’m not even sure it is appropriate since we have no idea how deep and lasting the damage is. But for the sake of any forward movement, we must find a way to come together.
I’m reminded of the three brothers in my mother’s family, Virginians who managed to survive some of the worst battles of the Civil War as Confederate soldiers who would never have been able to imagine staying out of it—or fighting for the Union.
Robert Stiles, who wrote a memoir called Four Years Under Marse Robert, was captured toward the end of the war and spent some months in a Union prison on Lake Erie.
He wrote many letters to his large family, one of which describes in detail his struggle to decide to take the loyalty oath, in good faith, obligatory for pardon and acceptance into the Union as a loyal citizen.
In 1863, President Abraham Lincoln had offered a model for the reinstatement of the southern states called The Ten Percent Reconstruction Plan, decreeing that if ten percent of a state’s population pledged to abide by emancipation, the state would be re-admitted to the Union with a new constitution abolishing slavery forever. (So much for those who claim the Civil War was not about slavery.)
Robert and ten percent of his fellow Virginians finally took the oath and his state—along with Louisiana, Tennessee and Arkansas—were re-admitted. The other states came later, after the Radical Republicans in Congress had failed to pass a far more stringent requirement—Lincoln pocket-vetoed it. His aim was not punishment but reconciliation.
If passionate Confederates and slave owners like Robert Stiles could find a way to accept and even embrace emancipation, surely even those many of us who abhor what is happening now can find a way—once these forces of evil have been defeated—to reconciliation, if not acceptance, with and of the miserable men who have done so much harm.
Quan Yin, the yellow tulips, and the spirit of Easter demand nothing less.
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