Shall We Go by the River?

As a child, I used to sing with my friends:

We are going to cross a river

On which way shall we go?

We are going to cross a river

On which way shall we go?

Shall we go by the land?

Shall we go by the air?

Shall we go by the river?

On which way shall we go?

Meditating on this beautiful song, I come up with a powerful lesson about emotions and sacrifices. We all indeed are going to cross a river. It is a soulful river, the river of life. We all must cross; we cannot escape it. And we spend a great deal of our time and spiritual resources contemplating on which way we should go in crossing this spiritual river. Three obvious options are by the land, by the air, and by the river itself. I guess if a person wanted to cross a river by land, he or she could build a sturdy bridge across it and walk along the bridge from one end of the river to the other. Or, if the person were a powerful wizard and had the power to, he or she could command the water to divide and form walls of moisture on either side of a clear path through the water, like in the bible with Moses and the Israelites, when they were fleeing from Pharaoh and his army. All these concern crossing a river by land. Crossing a river by the air probably means flying over it, say in a plane or a helicopter; except of course like birds of the air a person could actually fly, and then he or she would simply glide across the body of water on wings. And the third option of course is to cross the river by the river. In such a case, someone could get a boat of some sort and sail across, or if a person were a powerful swimmer, could swim all the way from the start to the end of the river. All this is speaking physically. 

From a spiritual point of view, the river represents our emotions, our sensitivity to the hardship of life. The river flows through all the high and low points of our lives, its waves undulating and changing with the emotional tides of our existence. Charged with the responsibility of living virtues lives in spite of the existence of the river, we are obligated to cross it successfully, and please not drown in it. To drown in the river of our soul means that we become overwhelmed by our emotions; we succumb to depression or fear or anxiety or insecurity or loneliness, or any of the emotions we encounter in the course of our lives. But to swim powerfully across the river means that we do not allow any of the emotions we encounter in our daily lives to overwhelm, subdue or crush us. Living victorious, happy lives; living lives of wisdom and contemplation; of practical ethics and epistemology, means crossing the river of our life successfully. And there are at least three ways of doing so.

To begin with, crossing the river of life by the land means adopting strict rules and regulations to guide our lives. There are some people who are very legalistic in their daily approach to living. They guide themselves by developing strict rules and principles. I shall not do this; I shall not do that - they proffer as solution to all life's problems rules, rules, and more rules. In crossing the river of life, they always go by the land. The Pharisees in Jesus' time were like this. They had innumerable rules and regulations for everything: from the proper way to eat at meals to the way to wash the body, to the way to deal with corpses, and so forth. You probably have someone in your family or among your group of friends who is persnickety. Such a person needs everything to be done a certain way, and they get angry when they perceive that things aren't done the way they want; the "correct" way. Crossing the river by land has advantages: it allows for consequences for actions that go contrary to the rule. It also spells out what is acceptable behavior. Yet we all know that laws alone do not make a person happy. We also know that historically speaking some laws have been bad and have needed to be changed. Plus many of the legalistic people we know aren't necessarily happy. Keeping the law sometimes also means suppressing our feelings; keeping our emotions locked up and throwing the key away. We are not always completely free when overwhelmed with regulations.

In any case, we can cross the river of life by the air. What this means is that we can rationalize our emotions. We can handle the feelings we encounter daily by denying them and focusing on intellectual pursuits. Some people we've met seem to have an answer for everything. They intellectualize even the most ordinary of emotions. When you ask them how they feel, they promptly tell you how they think, or what they think. They read a lot of books (epistemology), and in those books they find intellectual, rational shortcuts to take in going about their daily lives. They think a lot, but do not always act virtuously (ethics); they seek escape rather than responsibility. They seek quick fix-its, rather than lasting solutions to the problems they face. They seek to avoid rather than tackle the everyday issues of life. They are the sorts of people who can throw themselves into their work to avoid dealing with issues at home; or busy themselves with trifles to avoid facing the enormity of truth. They pretty much explain life away. These people may look serene at times, or contemplative; but they are not necessarily happy. It's like smoking pot or doing crack to avoid confronting your problems. When the esoteric effect of the pot or the crack wears away, the problem still remains. We cannot be completely happy by denying our emotions. We cannot be completely happy if we go by the air in crossing the soul's river.

There's one more option. We can go by the river. We can proceed along our soul's journey by being in touch with our emotions. This is the path the Buddha recommends. When he desired Nirvana, all he did was sit still in his emotional river and soak it in. He really wanted to become conscious of his emotions, to realize they were there and why they were there. Becoming conscious of our emotions is the first step to happiness, according to Descartes. We have to "be still and know that God is God" (Psalm 46:10). We cannot seek to escape, not if we want to be happy. But we shouldn't let the water overwhelm us neither. We should not sink or drown; we should swim or sail across the river. Even though we become conscious of our emotions, we still should transition from merely feeling them to rationally processing them based on the truths we've acquired over a lifetime (practical epistemology), and responding rather than reacting in ways that are virtuous and prudent (ethics, phronensis). We should cross the river, by the river. In our quest for happiness, we must stay with our emotions long enough to become conscious of them; we should then reason with them, and choose our consequent behavior, making sure to always act ethically. Evaluating the quality and quantity of our emotions, we can choose ethical ways of acting owing to conscience and reason, and thus proceed along the road to happiness, victory and peace. 

One way to do this is through sacrifices. We do not take the river with us. We simply sail or swim across. We leave the river behind and come away free. What this means is that, even though we handle the emotions of life by staying in them and with them, we do not ultimately carry them along with us everywhere we go. When we have processed the emotions we are faced with in our lives, we come away feeling freer and safer and happier. When we have swam across the river successfully, we towel or sun ourselves dry. Naturally. We do not stay in the river, or even the boat for that matter, when we have sailed across adequately. We emerge, possibly with fish (the lessons we learn through our encounter with emotions in our daily lives), or simply with the satisfaction that we have crossed a life hurdle. We sigh with relief. We sometimes even laugh. We rejoice in the knowledge that we have overcome challenges in life and are stronger and happier for it. And all because of the sacrifices we made. We let go of the emotions after having processed them; we let go of our guilt, our worry, our insecurity, our pain, our anger, our hate, our biliousness - we let go of everything, having already come to terms with them and with what occasioned them in the first place, and proceed more freely along the life path God has marked out for us. 

And so, let us sing:

We are going to cross a river

On which way shall we go?

We are going to cross a river

On which way shall we go?

Shall we go by the land?

Shall we go by the air?

Shall we go by the river?

On which way shall we go?

Let's go by the river, people.