The Incarnations

…”I have always found you beautiful, for it is the soul beneath I seek.”

I really wanted this book to be a happily-ever-after book. But Susan Barker didn’t, and thank goodness for that. Typically when I read a book I have seen enough reviews to have a sense of what I am getting myself into. I am often pleasantly surprised, intrigued and inspired. But in this book I encountered the completely unexpected.

Through the life of taxi driver Wang Jung, Barker brings us effortlessly into contemporary Beijing and a snapshot of citizens who are his fares. The stories she captures, the characters that inhabit them are rife with struggle and suffering,

Early in the story Wang receives letters describing the first of six past lives his soul has incarnated through. The writer of the letters, his presumed soul mate traveling through the incarnations with him, is a mystery which had me turning pages at a fast clip. I found myself astounded, really, at Barker’s ability to confront and describe incredible horrors in words. She takes the reader back through six periods in Chinese history, revealing suffering at the hands of barbaric despots and cruel family members.

As she moves forward from the Tang Dynasty of AD632, Barker chronicles a history of man vs man in the struggle for survival and the search for love. The authenticity of the story made me cringe repeatedly at the consistency of cruelty throughout time and currently playing out in the families of contemporary society. Where I want to believe we are beyond that, Barker’s story makes me think otherwise.

But the larger question she brought to the page for me was the lasting impact of abuse and trauma. The story suggests our wounds travel with us through time and incarnations of life. It’s an interesting consideration from my Christian armchair where I believe in reunion with Divine love after death. I don’t know whether that is true, but I do know the wisdom tradition I follow, Christianity, tells us that the sins of the fathers are visited in the sons. The truth, whether through incarnation or in the here and now is that trauma, left unhealed, inevitably gets passed on. In relationships, families, institutions and cultures.

Says Barker of her story, “…the idea of reincarnation and recurring souls also links to one of the themes of the book, which is the cyclical nature of history. The taxi driver Wang Jun keeps repeating the same destructive mistakes in each of his past lives, due to the innate flaws in his nature (wrath, self-interest, possessiveness, jealousy) that recur life after life. I also hoped to capture how the history of civilization is repetitive too, with the same vastly destructive power struggles playing out across the generations, arising from the same innate human flaws.”

And I admit, it does challenge my own fierce belief in spiritual healing. I think about it. And then I hold fast to my theory that we can break through these cycles, historically and in our individual lives, to bring healing which reaches through time. Because if suffering can take hold and infuse generations, even past iives, then why not healing? Why couldn’t love have a far greater and more lasting tenacity? As the quote above suggests, when it is the soul we seek, there is the potential for beauty.