AMFORTAS LAID TO REST

Often when faced with difficult situations in life many of us will recall scenes from stories we've read, watched or listened to in order to understand our present hardship or the suffering of others more clearly through a familar cultural frame of reference.

At Christmas how many have related their own sense of overwhelming existential fragility in their everyday lives to that of George Bailey in Frank Capra's "It's A Wonderful Life", or possibly even the Grinch and his curmudgeonly resentment sat atop Mount Crumpit looking down on the pepertually cheerful townsfolk of Whosville.

The story I found myself referring to earlier this year while my father was severely ill with heart complications and a vicious spinal infection was the mythic tale of The Fisher King and his seemingly eternal wound that never heals. Inside the Castle Corbenic, The Fisher King protects the grail whilst unable to rid himself of his accursed pain. Watching my father in terrible discomfort, I felt a desire, like Perceval or Galahad, to find some way to alleviate it for him with some miraculous balm or heroic sacrifice and yet frequently found myself daunted by the insurmountable task set before me.

Then remembering how in Richard Wagner's sacred festival opera 'Parsifal', Amfortas, The Fisher King, is finally laid to rest when Parsifal returns with the spear of Christ to heal the wound so that the guardian of the grail can be freed once and for all from his pain and die in peace, I wondered if such peace could be granted to my sick dad.

Similarly, in 'Indiana Jones And The Last Crusade' (one of the best Father/Son movies incidentally) Indiana has to choose the correct grail goblet that Christ drank from to heal his father's wound after he's been shot by a Nazi sympathising American.

It's not hard now to think of these variations on a theme and my own real life version of the Fisher King myth playing out with my father back then. I remember saying to him one morning, when he was really struggling with the illness that was ravaging him, that I was concerned that the pain would override his inner spiritual resources. My fear was that he would not have the clarity of mind to draw upon them when faced with such a tyrannous and perilous physical situation as he was now in.

He then looked at me and said with complete assurity, almost revived by the question, "That's because you haven't learnt the greatest lesson of them all."

"What is that?" I asked him, the eternal student once again.

Staring at me with complete connectedness through his remarkably clear eyes, he said.

"Pain is compassion."

Aside from 'I love you' I'm not sure I've ever been more moved by three words as much as those he chose so expertly that day, like a mason carefully choosing which stone to set.

I often think about his words now and reflect when listening to what may be the most sublime music written in the history of Western music that the key musical motif in Wagner's Parsifal translates as 'made wise through compassion'.

I hope through at least empathising with my father's pain back in the summer I have been made a little wiser through compassion.

As he was committed to Buddhism, which considers compassion to be the essential foundation of all good spiritual practice, I feel it would be the best way of honouring him.