6 Surviving When The World Around You Is Falling Apart

There have been moments in history when the world seemed to fall to pieces. There may be moments in the future which may be equally as bad. In this chapter, we’ll examine how some famous historical figures managed to find a way to cope with dire circumstances when facing danger and the risk of death.

Mother Teresa 1910–1997

Mother Teresa, an Albanian, was born in Skopia, capital of present-day Macedonia. She became a nun and taught at St. Mary’s school in Calcutta, India. Mother Teresa became aware of the terrible poverty around her in India and longed to help. She obtained permission to leave the order so she could found the Missionaries of Charity, dedicated to serving the poorest of the poor. These nuns vow to live in extreme poverty and work with unremitting hard labor for the most destitute. She began by picking up one sick person from the street, then another and another. Some of these people had leprosy or were dying. She rescued orphans, caring for both their material and spiritual needs.

She based her mission on the words of Christ in the gospels, “Whatever you do for one of these, the least of my little ones, you do for me.”^[1] So, she was not just seeing the poor person she was helping, but she believed she was seeing Christ as well. The nuns’ meditations and prayers at the beginning of the day were an inspiration for their difficult lives. As a result, they reported being very joyful. In her book, In the Heart of the World: Thoughts, Stories, and Prayers, she wrote:

A joyful heart is the normal result of a heart burning with love. Joy is not simply a matter of temperament; it is always hard to remain joyful—which is all the more reason why we should acquire it and make it grow in our hearts.^[2]

I have seen some of the Missionaries of Charity in places like airports, and they do seem to glow with happiness. Mother Teresa was awarded a Nobel peace prize for her humanitarian work in 1979. Within impoverished areas of Calcutta and then globally, the order she founded brought help to hundreds of people.

Noor Inayat Khan 1914–1944

A lesson on one way to face danger and death is to be found in the short life of Noor Inayat Khan. She was born in Moscow, the child of a Moslem Sufi spiritual leader and an American mother. They moved to Paris and lived a peaceful, happy life among her father’s religious community. She loved music and wrote children’s books, including one based on the Buddhist Jataka Tales (stories about the previous lives of the Buddha). After her father’s sudden death and her mother’s subsequent depression, she took charge of bringing up her younger brothers and sisters.

When the Germans invaded France, the family fled to England. Noor joined the war effort and became a radio operator, skilled in decoding and sending secret messages to the British underground in France. She volunteered for the most dangerous mission, to do this work secretly in France. None of the radio operators doing this task lived for more than six weeks. She survived for three months, risking captivity every day. She was finally caught, and revealed nothing to the Germans, even under torture. She was finally shot to death in the Dachau concentration camp.

In an interview with the New York Times, her cousin Mahmood attributed her inner strength in the face of German aggression, to her Sufi upbringing.^[3] When asked how she could face death every day, she said she believed all beings were part of a divine, benevolent reality.^[4]

Mahatma Gandhi 1869–1948

Mahatma Gandhi was born in India to Hindu parents. His mother was a follower of the Vedanta tradition which understood God to be inseparable from the universe. Gandhi endorsed this view later in life.

Gandhi’s views were not without contradictions. Although an avowed pacifist, he supported the British in World War I. But in India, he always promoted the concept of ahimsa (non-harming). When his followers defied oppressive British colonial laws by attempting to get salt from the British-run salt works (Indians were not allowed to make their own salt), he insisted on non-violence. Thousands of marchers were beaten by police. No one fought back. This dramatic incident, published in the press, so influenced the British that they released their relinquished colonial control over India.^[5]

In 1931 Gandhi was arrested. In prison, he suffered from malaria and was completely isolated. He often wrote about Satyagraha, or holding on to the truth.^[6] Civil disobedience and non-co-operation as practiced under Satyagraha are based on the “law of suffering,” a doctrine that the endurance of suffering is a means to an end.^[7] Gandhi used satyagraha politically, in order to make peace with and purify an oppressor.

Satyagraha did not represent inaction for Gandhi but rather determined passive resistance and non-co-operation where, in the words of the historian Arthur Herman, “love conquers hate.”^[8] It is also termed a “universal force,” as it essentially “makes no distinction between kinsmen and strangers, young and old, man and woman, friend and foe.”^[9] Gandhi wrote, “There must be no impatience, no barbarity, no insolence, no undue pressure. If we want to cultivate a true spirit of democracy, we cannot afford to be intolerant. Intolerance betrays want of faith in one’s cause.”^[10]

He attempted to reconcile the political and religious needs of Muslims in India with those of Hindus, but failed. He was assassinated in 1948 by a Hindu radical who resented his attempts to bring peace between the two religions. The failure of Gandhi’s peace-making efforts led to the division of India into Hindu-majority India and a Muslim-majority Pakistan.

Gandhi in turn, influenced Martin Luther King, who studied his ideas and adopted many of his views. This can be seen clearly in Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech:

But there is something that I must say to my people, who stand on the warm threshold which leads into the palace of justice: In the process of gaining our rightful place, we must not be guilty of wrongful deeds. Let us not seek to satisfy our thirst for freedom by drinking from the cup of bitterness and hatred. We must forever conduct our struggle on the high plane of dignity and discipline. We must not allow our creative protest to degenerate into physical violence. Again and again, we must rise to the majestic heights of meeting physical force with soul force.^[11], ^[12]

Nelson Mandela 1918–2013

Nelson Mandela was born in Umtata, South Africa, which was in the grip of Apartheid (where blacks lived in a state of oppression by whites). Mandela spent his life fighting apartheid and was imprisoned for 18 years. The prisoners had to spend their days breaking stones into gravel. It was blistering hot in summer and freezing in winter when they were given only a thin jacket. Despite these hardships, Mandela endured with patience and goodwill. He wrote from prison:

…[T]he cell is an ideal place to learn to know yourself, to search realistically and regularly the process of your own mind and feelings… Honesty*, sincerity, simplicity, humility, pure generosity absence of vanity, readiness to serve others—qualities which are within the reach of every soul—are the foundations of one’s spiritual life… Regular meditation, say about 15 minutes a day before you turn in, can be very fruitful in this regard. You may find it difficult at first to pinpoint the negative features in your life, but the 10th attempt may yield rich rewards. Never forget that a saint is a sinner that keeps trying.^[13]

The Dalai Lama 1935-Present

The Dalai Lama is the leader of Tibet, which was conquered by China in 1959. He lives in exile in India. Millions of Tibetans suffered under Chinese rule, but the Dalai Lama has always advocated loving kindness and forgiveness for all. In his book, The Wisdom of Forgiveness, he writes of a fellow monk who was imprisoned by the Chinese government for eighteen years:

He told me the Chinese forced him to denounce his religion. They tortured him many times in prison. I asked him whether he was ever afraid. Lopon-la then told me: ‘Yes, there was one thing I was afraid of. I was afraid I may lose compassion for the Chinese.’

I was very moved by this, and very inspired.^[14]

Victor Frankl 1905–1997

Victor Frankl, a Jewish psychiatrist living under the Nazis, was given an opportunity to flee Germany and thus avoid imprisonment and death, but he refused to leave his family. He was sent to Auschwitz concentration camp where he had to perform hard labor and was starved and beaten. Through all of this, he kept a positive mind.^[15] Sometimes he would plan what books he would write when he was released. As an analyst, he used the horrors he witnessed as raw material for understanding what the human mind will undergo under stress, and he took solace in the small amounts of acts of kindness he was able to perform.

He often concentrated his mind on loving thoughts of his wife whom he longed to see again. Sadly, when he was freed, he learned she had been murdered in the camps, along with his mother, father, and brother. He began to write with the intention that the experiences he endured and his understanding of them would be helpful to others. His most important discovery was that prisoners would stay alive as long as there was meaning in their lives. Those who lacked that soon died.

A friend of mine had an uncle who suffered terribly under the Nazis. Once they came into his home where he lived with his many children, The SS told him to pick out one of his children to be killed. If he did not, they threatened to kill all the children. He picked a child, and then the Nazis killed all the children. Finally, when this man was free he came to America, remarried, and had children. My friend asked his uncle how he had the strength to begin a new life. He replied, “I refuse to give Hitler another victim.”

My sister-in-law Carmel found a way to find meaning in life without religion, despite her own family tragedy. She and her husband Manny were very successful. She was a vice president of a large corporation and he was editor-in-chief of Collier’s Encyclopedia. They had a beautiful home and a brilliant daughter, April, who adored the Beatles and loved writing poetry. April became valedictorian of her high school and was headed to college.

At age 18, April suddenly developed brain cancer. She died two years later. Carmel knew that her daughter had never approved of her mother’s corporate career. So, Carmel quit her job and went back to school to become a teacher of gifted children. She did this in her daughter’s honor. At the age of 65, she became the oldest graduate of the Ph.D. program at Columbia University Teachers College. She went on to teach in college for twenty years. Like Victor Frankl, she was able to transform tragedy into something positive.