SUFFERING: PART 2

Anne Morrow Lindbergh: "I do not believe that sheer suffering teaches. If suffering alone taught, all the world would be wise, since everyone suffers. To suffering must be added mourning, understanding, patience, love, openness, and the willingness to remain vulnerable."

And Parker Palmer: "Distancing ourselves from each other's pain is the hidden agenda behind most of our efforts to 'fix' each other with advice. If you take my advice, and do it right, you will get well and I will be off the hook. But if you do not follow my advice, or do not follow it properly, I am off the hook nonetheless: I have done the best I could, and your continued suffering is clearly your fault. By trying to fix you with advice, rather than simply suffering with you, I hold myself away from your pain."

We neither like to suffer ourselves nor see another suffer. Even less do we want to become involved in another's suffering. Perhaps that is the reason why so many suffer in silence and suffer needlessly. Yes, suffering teaches us. It reminds us of our own vulnerability, our own finiteness. It also reminds us that for suffering to be of any value, others must become part of our pain.

It seems to me that to suffer alone is the greatest pain of all. To allow another to suffer alone may be the greatest sin of all. As Palmer suggests, we seem to understand this and so we often, maybe all too often, end up giving advice instead of giving of ourselves. Then we are off the hook, so we would like to think.

But what the sufferer needs is not our words of wisdom but our willingness to be present in his suffering, to mourn with her, to help understand the situation. The sufferer needs not our advice but our love and our willingness to remain vulnerable with him and to suffer with her as well.

We know this to be true because when we are the one who is suffering, who is feeling lost and alone, what we desperately want, even though we are reluctant to voice it, is for someone to be there with us -- to mourn with us, to understand how we feel, to be patient with our impatience, to love us as we are, to be open to the sometimes craziness that suffering causes, to be just as vulnerable as we are.

What we will also discover when we join another in his suffering is that we are not alone. God is with us. For it is in opening ourselves to share the suffering of another that we at the same time open ourselves to the love of God and the strength that comes from that love, but we only learn that truth from first opening ourself to the other.

No one wants to suffer and no one of us wants to see another suffer. Yet we all do. There is no escape. As long as we live, suffering will be part and parcel of this life. What we are called to do is not so much work to eliminate suffering as to be present with those who are suffering. We may never come to understand the whys and wherefores of suffering; but in our being present with one who suffers, we will come to understand ourselves.

SUCCESS OR FAILURE?

I have never placed much stock in fate. Most of what happens to us is the result of free will. Yes, we are all born with genes and chromosomes that have a profound effect on who we are, what we look like, even our moods and dispositions. Children of alcoholics are prone to alcoholism: it is in the genes. Homosexuality is genetic. Heterosexuality is too. Depression, it seems, can be passed on from parent to child.

We are not in control of everything. We are not under the control of everything either. The tendency of human nature is to blame our failings and shortcomings on someone or something else: our parents, our genes, even the devil. On the other hand, when we accomplish something that is laudable, we want to accept total credit rather than to be thankful for our parents, our genetic makeup or even our God. Fate was the root cause of the bad; free will was the root cause of the good.

Michael Ignatieff: "We would rather believe that it could not have happened otherwise than to entertain the still more agonizing thought that it need not have happened at all. It is false comfort to believe that cruelty [for instance] is human destiny, when in truth it is human failure."

No one of us likes to fail. We take failure personally. If we can pass off the blame for our failure on fate ("it could not have happened otherwise"), then, perhaps, we can sleep better at night. But if we have to accept the fact that failure is often the result of our free will ("human failure"), we tend to toss and turn in our sleep – and well we should.

The acceptance of human failure, human frailty, the acknowledgement that we are not all powerful, almighty, is at least the first step on the road to recovering some sense of responsibility of the messes we make in our lives and the messes we help create in this world. It is not a pleasant thought to realize that we have no one else to blame – like society; and nothing else to blame – like our genes; not a very pleasant thought indeed!

The second step is to acknowledge that just because we are somewhat less than perfect, we are still not allowed to settle for imperfection. My children, and I as a child, use and used that as an excuse to lessen responsibility. It does not, but we give it a good try. And if the truth be known, I still find myself, at times, settling for less than the best from myself.

Jesus's expectations of us and we of ourselves is a striving for perfection. For that to begin to happen, we first have to accept responsibility for our own actions and not blame them on someone or something else. The second step is to realize that we need help in becoming better/perfect. We need Someone and other someones to help us. We cannot do it alone.

The irony of life, I think, is that while we often fail all on our own, we never succeed all on our own. We don't need anyone's help to fail. We need all kinds of help to succeed, to be the person God wants us to be. We probably should spend less time looking for someone to blame when we fail and more time looking for someone to help us so that we don’t fail in the first place. That help is all around.

LEAD US (NOT) INTO TEMPTATION

Whenever we say The Lord’s Prayer, we ask the Lord to “lead us not into temptation.” I wonder: does God actually lead us into temptation, so much so that we have to ask God not to do so? As a child of God does God deliberately place us in tempting situations where we will, perhaps more likely than not, give into those temptations and sin? That would be akin to a parent placing a box of candy in front of a diabetic child and then walking away. No loving parent would do that. Would God, does God, do that to us?

I don’ think so; and yet we ask God not to do something which we believe God doesn’t do in the first place. What gives here? What is given is that we are born into a world where the temptation to do what we know we should not do bombards us every day. We can’t escape it and, all too often, we given into those temptations and say and do something very foolish, selfish and sinful.

What we are asking God to do is, when the world around us leads us into those tempting situations, to keep us mindful of what is happening and what can be the consequences of doing so and then giving us the grace and strength to not give in. If you are like me, we are almost always aware of what we being tempted to say or do. What we are not so much aware of is what the consequences will be when we give in to those temptations.

Those are the times of trial from which we ask God to save us, as the newer version of the Prayer has it. And they are indeed trying times. Why? Simply because giving in to every temptation, whatever that temptation may be, will give us immediate pleasure. And just the thought of that pleasure can be so overwhelming that any reflection about the hurtful results of our action is obscured.

There is no escape from temptation, not in this world and in this life anyway. It comes from free will. We always have choices. It is what we do with those choices that really matters. We know that. We have learned from past experience, from having given into a temptation to say or do that which was very pleasurable at the moment but, in the end, caused more pain and suffering than we even imagined.

The problem is that, for the most part, most of the temptations we give in to are not earth-shattering or life-changing. They cause pain but not enough. It is only when we say the Lord’s Prayer, slowly, deliberately, thoughtfully, that we become aware of the pain and suffering giving into the temptation to be selfish can cause to us and to those we love. But, if you are like me, too often whenever I say that prayer, the words come out of my mouth but my head and heart are somewhere else.

I think Jesus deliberately taught us that prayer to remind us of how consequential our words and actions are and on how much we need God’s grace and strength to always say and do what is right even if it is a difficult time of trial, which it often is.

SUFFERING

If there is one word that perhaps best describes the events of Good Friday that word is “suffering”. Jesus suffered in an indescribable way as did those who loved and followed him. That suffering manifested itself in severe mental, physical, spiritual and emotional pain. It was deep seated and deeply felt. Jesus's cry to his Father about feeling forsaken is a verbal indication of how painful that suffering really was.

All of us have suffered. Some of us are presently doing so. We all will again. Suffering is part and parcel of our human existence. The question that arises amidst suffering is "Why?" Anne Morrow Lindberg once reflected: "I do not believe that sheer suffering teaches. If suffering also taught, all the world would be wise since everybody suffers. To suffering must be added mourning, understanding, patience, love, openness and the willingness to be vulnerable."

Suffering for suffering's sake is empty, even futile. Yet, even mournful suffering (as at the death of a loved one), understood suffering (knowing that it is the result of some foolishness on our part), patient suffering (while in the process of recovery), loving suffering (while taking care of an aged parent), open suffering (realizing that we are mortal), and vulnerable suffering (because we cannot escape it) – even all that, even altogether, is not enough.

For no matter how much we understand what suffering is all about, even understand why we are suffering in the first place, sometimes even then, to use a sport's metaphor, we blow the whistle before the game is over. We allow ourselves to be satisfied with suffering for suffering's sake because we suffer in honest grief, love, patience, understanding.

It is important to be fully present while in the throes of suffering and pain, as Jesus was. It helps us to focus on the cause of the suffering, which in and of itself is a learning and teaching experience. If we do not learn from our experience, if we do not understand even a little why we are suffering, and even if the cause of our suffering was outside our control, the pain will be even greater the next time around.

But suffering eventually comes to an end. And with the end comes resurrection, comes new life. Without that knowledge, without that understanding, the present pain can be and just might be unbearable. Jesus endured the tremendous physical suffering on the cross, with all the mental, emotional and spiritual pain that went with it because somehow in some way he knew the suffering would end in resurrection. That is why the suffering of Good Friday must be seen in the light of Easter Sunday.

That is why the sufferings we endure during our own – and many – Good Fridays must be seen and understood in the light of and knowledge that our Easter Sundays, our resurrections to new life, will follow, somehow in some way.

Happy Easter and Happy Easters!