I got a message tonight from a long time reader of my books and my blog, she said she was sorry to disturb me, but she didn’t know what to feel about Paris, it was her favorite place on the earth and the news was so heartbreaking to her. I was surprised to get this message.

I am wary of being any kind of guru. Why was she writing to me? I started to write back and tell her gently what I wasn’t – a shrink, a seer, a counselor, a holy man with answers. I couldn’t imagine how to be of help to her.

There are some who are inured to tragedy, to shootings, catastrophe, violence and suffering, there are some who are almost too sensitive to bear it. I did write her to say I could not tell her what to feel or how to feel it, I could only tell her how I feel about it. If that helped her, it is worth doing, worth trying.

Some tragedies seem an inevitable part of life, some – like 9/11 or this one – stab at the very heart of us and who we are in so many different ways.

Perspective is my salvation, it grounds and comforts me. It is the only gift I can offer, to her, to anyone.

It is not a simple or easy thing to be a human being, suffering has always been a part of our history.  We are capable of boundless generosity and unimaginable evil, unique in our schizophrenia and savagery.

So many people have suffered horror and tragedy since the beginning of time – wars,  floods, earthquakes and tsunamis, enslavement, massacres and genocide, pestilence and famine. People were burned alive, crucified, butchered and conquered. The plague took much of Europe in just a few years. How many men have perished in their endless wars?  I try to think often of the women enslaved in Syria, kidnapped in Africa. Think what we have survived and endured, good always seems to survive, so does evil.

In our time, we see the images of horror in a new way, instantly and continuously.  They are almost injected into our bodies, our ears, our minds, faster than ever before in history, more frequently, vividly, loudly. Our souls are pounded with anger and brutality.

And we experience it in real time,  and in color, not day later in a newspaper or magazine, when it all over. Suffering is not distant from us. It engulfs our consciousness and strikes us with fear and sorrow. If we are morally alive, it challenges our sense of humanity, our hope for the future, our wishes for our children. We are bombarded mercilessly with awful imagery, flashing lies, bloodies bodies, broken dreams,  the lost lives of innocents, even children.

They are upsetting and destabilizing to see. Who could really be prepared to see them? I wouldn’t wish to be that grounded.

But it is no good living in fear, really, it does no good, fear and vengeance simply stifles more life and gives the hollow men another victory.

When I am tempted to say these are horrible times, I remember what it meant to be a human being in Europe less than a lifetime ago. Or to be one of the hundreds of thousands of women burned alive as witches over hundreds of years. Or the innocent people pulled form their homes and lives and stolen away in the holds of ships to be slaves. Suffering is not something new, alas, it is something very old and timeless.

It is a good thing that we are not prepared for it, that speaks well of us.

But these are not the worst of times, as hard as they can be. History is our friend, and our comforter if we keep it close. After darkness, light.

When I heard the news from Paris, I do what I have learned to do. I remind myself to step back and absorb this news in small doses, every once in a while, not for hours on end, and for all night. I lit some candles, I meditate, I take a walk, hold my wife.  I said some private prayers for the people who died, are injured, or are scarred. It will not envelope me, define me, even tonight, fill my consciousness with blood and rage.

The dogs, sensitive to us as always, are curious, they smell sadness, they circle and try to comfort.

I will not let it define me, not even for one night. This is a part of our world, it is not the whole reality of it.

I create something if I can. I am gentle with people, gentle with me. I am opened up. I never love my fellow human beings more than when they suffer.

I bring myself back to my own sense of humanity, my own love of life. I will not submit to getting lost in it, permitting it to jar my senses a thousand times, for hours or days on end. I always hope that people remember to be free, and not give their lives away in fear and vengeance. It will not be my whole life, it is not the story of the earth.

And I turn back to Thomas Merton’s writing on suffering, which I read up on my mountain 15 years ago, when I came to my mountain and moved out of my life. He has helped me so many times.

Indeed, he wrote, the truth is that many people never understand, until it is too late, that the more you try to avoid suffering, the more you suffer, because smaller and more insignificant things begin to torture you, in proportion to your fear of being hurt. The one who does the most to avoid suffering is, in the end, the one who suffers most: and his suffering comes to him from things so little and trivial that one can say that it is no longer objective at all…This is another of the great perversions by which the devil uses our philosophies to turn out whole nature inside out, and eviscerate all our capacities for good, turning them against ourselves.

And there is a gift to everything of course. I let it come, I accept it and embrace it, and then I get on with life. Suffering connects us, forces us to decide who we wish to be, helps us love life, teaches us what it means to be a human. If life sometimes brings out the worst in us, tragedy can bring out the best.

At our convenience store down the road, the cashier and the customers were hugging each other, one by one, watching the TV monitors above spew their awful stories,  putting down their milk and cigarettes and milk and candy bars to reach out and touch each other offer goodness and  understanding.

There is good, they say, there is good.

Suffering does that too.