The Sunday before Labor Day, 2005, I called a physician friend who was organizing a medical team to go to Biloxi, Mississippi, just days after Hurricane Katrina. He told me he had called officials in Biloxi to ask how many medical teams were on-site. When they said none, he quickly called together a team of physicians and nurses to make the trip. When I offered him money to support the mission, he said, "I have another idea -- come with us, we can use a psychologist."

So I sat for an hour or so in meditation to see what guidance I might find there. As happens so often when I quiet my mind and spirit enough to listen to the voice of silence, I experienced a clarity not typical of my day-to-day consciousness. I heard a deep desire to go and be with the people of Biloxi, coupled with a curious addendum: Bring your butterfly book. During a personal hurricane, a dark night of the soul several years earlier, a woman who played a crucial role in my healing had given me a monarch butterfly refrigerator magnet as a reminder that my crisis could be a painful transformation to

a new and beautiful place. Though I couldn't see or believe it then, the image got through to me in a way that words could not. I didn't have any butterfly magnets -- I didn't even know if anyone in Biloxi would still have a refrigerator on which to put them. So I packed the book and some butterfly stickers I found at a crafts store.

Descending to a military airport north of Biloxi, I felt like a soldier coming to a war zone. Countless trees below us were snapped off like twigs; part of the roof of the airport was missing; military helicopters buzzed about on the runway. The head physician for our team had arrived a day before us and called back just as we boarded the plane: "It looks like a nuclear bomb went off down here. It looks even worse than the tsunami." He had been there, too.

I'd read the night before we left about first responders getting traumatized themselves. Was I strong enough to handle nine days trying to help people cope with such devastation?

That question -- Am I strong enough? -- had lodged itself like a nagging splinter in my soul several years earlier. During a time when I was experiencing chronic pain that left me struggling to sleep and work, my dad contracted scabies from his dog, applied the prescribed insecticide, and began a yearlong descent as his liver failed from the toxic effects of the medicine that was supposed to heal him. Dad's strange illness and my chronic pain were darkness layered upon darkness, an experience of profound powerlessness.

The day Dad told the physicians at University of Michigan Hospital that he did not want the five-times-daily dialysis they said was the only chance to prolong his life, I wept in the hall outside his room in the embrace of my oldest brother. "How can this suffering be?" I asked Bob. The startling depth of his response inspired me later that day to write the "nested meditation" How Can This Suffering Be a Gift: How can this suffering be?
How can this suffering be a gift?
How can this suffering be a gift?
Rip it open.
How can this suffering be a gift?
Rip it open,
and the heart floods with compassion.

Bob's "It's a gift" answer to my "How can this suffering be?" question broke open a new awareness. What felt to me like a singular tragedy -- losing my father -- in fact happens millions of times daily all over the world. Those who have suffered heartbreaking loss join the vast brotherhood and sisterhood of those who have been fired in the crucible of deep sorrow. We all get our chance to become intimately acquainted with grief. Suffering rips us open, and into that space flows compassion -- if we let it.

As our plane prepared to touch down, the "Am I strong enough?" question felt like a thousand migrating monarchs had chosen my stomach instead of a tree or bush for their gathering place. Can I handle being completely surrounded by human suffering? Will I return home in an existential funk about why such horrible things happen on this earth? Will I plunge back into that layer-upon-layer-of-darkness place I never care to visit again?

Early in the trip to Biloxi, I decided to view the physical destruction there as an outward manifestation of the devastated place I'd already visited in my own soul. This helped me feel that I was on familiar turf, even though I'd never before been in a disaster zone. Sitting and talking with hundreds of people who had lost so much proved to be exhausting yet uplifting. The vast majority of people spoke of their faith, their realization that people are more important than material things, their determination and hope. They were uniformly gracious to members of our team, thanking us repeatedly for simply being there with them.

Those suffering the most were the ones for whom the storm had layered a new experience of darkness upon a life that was already in crisis because of drug or alcohol addiction, mental illness, divorce, or the recent death of a loved one. I knew that turf too, and I remembered how the simple, compassionate presence of those willing to stand in the darkness with me had been so important to my healing.

When I left home for Biloxi, the butterfly book and stickers seemed the least professional thing I'd ever considered offering to someone in anguish. Would the stickers seem too childlike? Would people who had just been through something so harrowing find them trite? I didn't even take them out of the oversized pockets in my green military shorts for the first couple of days. Eventually I chanced them with a woman who had lost her home in the storm just weeks after suffering a shattering personal tragedy. She looked unsure whether she'd ever know simple contentment again on a planet that had shown itself to be so dangerous and unpredictable. We talked about how her pre-Katrina caterpillar life would eventually transform itself into a winged life, but not without some time spent in the confusing darkness of the chrysalis, the only place where metamorphosis occurs. To my surprise, she wrote to me several weeks after I returned to tell me she was hanging in, trying her best to be about the work of transformation.

Whenever I used them, the butterfly images felt like tiny pebbles to sling at a Goliath of need, and I had no illusions that I was going to slay anything in a few days in Biloxi. But when, a few days later, I saw people I had spent time with and I asked them if they remembered what we had talked about, many smiled softly and said, "Yes -- the butterfly."

My time in Biloxi helped me experience the truth of my brother's insight into the mystery of suffering. Because I had been ripped open by death and darkness and learned that suffering can be a chrysalis that precedes the gift of transformation, I was able to be serene and strong while being present to numerous human beings in acute hardship. As it turned out, then, I was strong enough to transform my own dark night into a drop of compassion for the ocean of suffering in Biloxi. What I did not expect was the gift I received: a vision of the world as it will be when humankind emerges wet-winged from its own chrysalis, from its eons of darkness spent in the illusion of separateness. In the nine days I was in Biloxi, I saw no consciousness of race or creed among residents or volunteers. African American Baptists, Caucasian Catholics, and Vietnamese Buddhists were all eager to support one another. One woman, Dorothy, had lost her home like everyone else, but was focused on helping people of all ages, races, and creeds who didn't have a cot to sleep on or just needed human presence and kindness. As she drove me around to make house calls one day, I asked her, "On a scale of 1 to 10, how's your spirit?" She said, without hesitation, "I'm a 12." Despite her own loss, Dorothy was flying on the wings of the only energy capable of transforming our world! Recently she wrote to me to tell me her spirit was feeling brighter than the time I had met her in Biloxi. Maybe she's a 20 by now.

Soaring above the rubble of Katrina, I caught a glimpse of world peace, nirvana, the kingdom, the promised land -- whatever you prefer to call it -- and it was exquisitely beautiful. I saw what Teilhard de Chardin, the French Jesuit paleontologist and theologian, envisioned in his writings about the spiritual evolution of our species. He wrote about growth toward an omega point -- the gradual movement of humankind toward a higher plane of being characterized by a oneness consciousness. It does not matter how many technological leaps we make or how much more sophisticated we become at waging war. It's scary to think of how many layers of darkness we might witness before we realize that metamorphosis to a oneness consciousness is the only hope for our species. Only when we evolve beyond "your group versus my group" thinking will the glorious vision I glimpsed above the rubble of Katrina become reality. In their darkest hour, the good people of Biloxi showed me that:

We are all one.

We are all one
step from the edge.

We are all one
step from the edge
of the annihilation.

We are all one
step from the edge
of the annihilation
of all hatred.

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