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Although it’s very difficult to write about this, many people have encouraged us to do so, as it may be helpful to others. With so many fires, floods, earthquakes, and violence destroying lives and homes everywhere in the world lately, and more predicted for the future, perhaps our story can be of help, since we’ve already been through a traumatic crisis ourselves and have emerged stronger than ever.

Crises and disasters often bring great spiritual blessings and purification, if we are open to change and willing to learn from them. In the Ageless Wisdom of the East, it is said that we must “cross the burning grounds three times” to purify our physical, emotional and mental bodies, and learn detachment and surrender to God. But we never expected to have to experience this literally!

The two of us had designed and built a house ourselves from the ground up--everything but the foundation, plumbing, and electrical work. It was a beautiful solar passive, energy efficient house in an ecological community that took us three years to build, working part-time on it. It was devastating, as it happened a week before we were to leave on a 30 city book tour. We lost all our records, including even our notes and the phone numbers of where we were to stay on our tour.

We discovered the fire after returning from a meeting. At first it was only a small fire, but when the door was opened, the flames shot across the floor. Clearly, there had been some accelerant like gasoline used to cause it to spread so rapidly. One of us ran next door to call the fire department, and less then five minutes later, the fire was already up to the second floor. By the time the fire trucks arrived fifteen minutes later, the house already was a lost cause. And to top it off, the water pumps on the fire truck did not work!

We were both in shock. It was as if we were watching a movie, or having a bad dream, and soon we’d wake up. We still don’t know who did it or what their motive was, although we have some possibilities. But we were determined to not let this stop us or our work. If anything, it strengthened our resolve, and most importantly, provided some major lessons and spiritual growth for both of us.

Here is what we’ve learned:

1. Allow yourself to grieve and feel the pain. We were both in such shock for the first 24 hours that we couldn’t even cry. We finally did cry for a brief time, after a sleepless night and great exhaustion frayed our nerves to the limit. But we had so much work to do to prepare for the book tour, and then we were so busy touring for months, that we just repressed our feelings, and focused on what we had to do. But each day as we tried to do our work, we remembered something else we lost and now needed. And everyday, some friend called, in shock about the news, and we had to tell the story over and over again, when we were trying to put the past behind us.

We finally realized that we couldn’t avoid our pain. We needed to truly feel our grief and to mourn for what we had lost. We learned that when we deny our feelings, they have a way of getting buried in our physical bodies and later causing real health problems, so we had to face our grief. We also experienced a lot of fear--fear that there might be some mentally deranged person out there who was targeting us and would strike again. We had to acknowledge this fear, but deal with it by taking practical precautions and refusing to let it become an obsession. Many change agents deal with this fear all the time. It comes with the territory.

2. The physical world is impermanent. Several pictures of saints and masters from various traditions in our living room made of wood or paper were instantly destroyed. But we had a stone statue of the Buddha, the type that people often have in their gardens, and he was sitting in the front window with flames going up all around him, serenely meditating. Even the firefighters remarked about it. The next day he was still there meditating, with everything in ashes all around him. The Buddha’s major teaching was about impermanence and the importance of not clinging to anything.

3. Learn detachment from material possessions. There’s something incredibly powerful in seeing all your possessions turn to ashes in fifteen minutes--everything that seemed so real and permanent--everything we collected or worked so hard to create, everything that took so much time and/or money to accumulate. All were gone. We were reminded of Jesus’ wisdom about putting your trust in God, and not storing treasures in the physical world where they will rot and decay.

4. Allow the crisis to bring you closer to people and open your heart. All across the country, people were generous and helpful, giving us money, clothes, equipment, etc. We were the type of people who always like to help others, but now we had to learn how to receive. Although we lived in a spiritual community, we found that people helped us everywhere we traveled, and we found that community is everywhere. Crisis draws out the best in people--their compassion and their generosity. In the book we had just written, we had quoted others who had a similar heart-opening experience in the California earthquakes and the Mississippi floods. But why does it take a crisis for us to remember our compassion and our common humanity?

5. Release the past and live more fully in the present—crises can be purifying and freeing. Losing everything helped lighten us up--we need a lot less to live than we thought. We could begin anew and do everything better than before. We could go in new directions, unbounded by the past. We could build on more solid foundations, whether literally or symbolically.

6. Place your faith in God or Spirit. We realized it was only a house and possessions we lost. We still had each other, our friends, and our faith in God. We were reminded of a story we had written about in our book, a woman who was interviewed on the news after her church was destroyed by floods in the Midwest. She said, “We only lost a building.” And pointing to her chest, she said, “The real church is in here, in our hearts.”

7. There is no “safe” place to hide from violence and injustice. Even living in a remote rural area, away from the “dangerous” cities didn’t protect us. A spiritual/ecological community with the support of like-minded people wasn’t a safe haven from the violence and pain of the world, and certainly not from some tormented arsonist. This is an inescapable reality. We’ve always known this, but many people came to our community naively try to hide from the problems of the world. But to us, this is the wrong motive for living in spiritual or social change communities. They are really on the front lines, and require hearty, not fearful, souls.

8. Forgiveness is essential. We’ve been working on forgiving the arsonist, whoever s/he may be, and learning compassion for his/her crime. There are many innovative programs now for victim/offender reconciliation, and we hope we’ll be able to be involved in this one day. In exploring the inner side of events in the book we wrote, we explored the spiritual lessons and karmic aspects of crises-- how we reap what we sow. So this fire gave us personally a lot of opportunity for reflection.


9. There is always a deeper meaning to disaster that we can discover if we meditate about it. We’ve learned that our soul or higher self is in charge of our lives and we can’t control everything. When disaster first strikes, it’s hard to accept this, but many people have told us that later they were grateful for the spiritual growth that a disaster catalyzed in their lives.

As we traveled around the U.S. on our tour, we talked about our personal experience of disaster. To many who had lost their homes in fires like ours, in the Midwest floods, the Florida hurricanes, the California earthquakes, or urban riots, our perspective helped give them hope and new ways to think their own experience. To the many who have never been through a disaster, but who fear devastating prophesies of earth changes and economic collapse, our experience provided a reminder that we are essentially spiritual, not material beings. We need to not be fooled by the shimmering illusion of security in our fragile, materialistic world. It seems to promise so much, but always leaves us dissatisfied, searching for more.

10. Good always comes from evil. As so many people have learned, adversity can be a blessing in disguise and strengthen us. We realized that we were relying on our house for economic security in a changing world. We saw how easily a beautiful home in a seemingly idyllic rural spiritual community may have fit many peoples’ fantasies of the good life. But it may have distracted us and others from the spiritual work that was the reason we created the community in the first place. Not that a beautiful house is a bad thing, but in some contexts, it can get in the way of something more important that is seeking to be expressed. We found it easy to get focused on building wonderful ecological buildings, and to forget that they are only forms. Conciousness and ideas are more causal and more potent.

After some months of meditation on the deeper meaning of our fire, we realized that our higher purpose had shifted from work in our spiritual community to work that was needed in Washington D.C. We’d been dividing our time between both places over the years, and had been resisting moving full time to Washington. We were clinging to our cozy community, which had become more and more comfortable over the years, and apparently it took a fire to overcome our stubbornness. Our inner guidance clearly indicated that we were needed in Washington to help bring spiritual values into politics. The fire helped us to release much of the past that was holding us back from taking a more major role in creating a better world.

What lessons has disaster played in your life, and what have you learned from it?
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Corinne McLaughlin and Gordon Davidson are co-authors of Spiritual Politics: Changing the World From the Inside Out (Ballantine Books 1994, Foreword by the Dalai Lama) and Builders of the Dawn. They are cofounders of The Center for Visionary Leadership in Washington D.C. and California and co-founders of Sirius, an ecological community in Massachusetts. Corinne coordinated a national task force for President Clinton’s Council on Sustainable Development and taught politics at American University, and Gordon was Executive Director of the Social Investment Forum. They can be reached at (415) 472-2540; corinnemc@visionarylead.org; www.visionarylead.org.

© 1996 Corinne McLaughlin and Gordon Davidson