Suffering

Last Sunday a gun man entered a Gay night club in Orlando, FA and killed almost 50 people and wounded many, many more.   US drones are flying over the middle East killing people, and climate change is causing the daily extinction of many species.   I have been thinking about suffering.

Clients often ask me why there is suffering.   We struggle against what we see as the unfairness and randomness of suffering.  It is unfair.  We feel if we could understand why suffering took place this would change it.  Each great religion offers explanations for suffering.  It does not change it for it is still part of our world.  We secretly hope that if we could understand suffering that we could escape it, and yet there is no escaping it.  Have you ever known anyone who did not suffer at some point in their life?  I certainly have not.  The question of why there is suffering is the wrong question.  The real question is how do we respond to suffering?   Perhaps if we could stop struggling against suffering like an animal in a trap we could learn to turn towards in and learn to respond with compassion.  Suffering is indeed with us like air, water and breath.

Christianity says that because God gave us all free will that this includes the freedom to do the wrong thing - to "sin" or to do evil.  But Christianity also says that God incarnate in the form of Jesus Christ stood looking down from a hill upon humanity and wept in response to our suffering (and way of treating each other.)  Christians are directed to identify the ways they sin or separate from God and bring themselves back to God and to pray for others to also have redemption.

Buddhism says that suffering is the nature of human experience.  But it also teaches that mindfulness is the way to reach detachment from the illusion of our experience being reality.  the Maras are the several forms of suffering that we are said to experience and believers are taught prayers of loving kindness designed to hold both people close to us and even total strangers in compassion and healing energy.

Judaism says that God contracted the divine self to make room for creation. Divine light was held in special vessels, or kelim, some of which shattered and scattered. While most of the light returned to its divine source, some light attached itself to the broken shards. These shards constitute evil and their trapped sparks of light give them power.

The first man, Adam, was intended to restore the divine sparks through mystical exercises, but his sin interfered. As a result, good and evil remained thoroughly mixed in the created world, and human souls also became imprisoned within the shards.  The “repair,” referred to in Judaism as Tikkun Olam that is needed, therefore, is two-fold: the gathering of light and of souls, to be achieved by human beings through the contemplative performance of religious acts.

It is noteworthy that all three of these great religions identify suffering - two of them describing it as separation from God, and all three see the way out of suffering as a spiritual path, that it is our intentional striving for good that is believed to be the cure.  All three call their followers to compassion in the face of suffering.  Buddhism says we cannot stop or end suffering we can only learn a way to be with us that releases us.

Living with our own Darkness

Recently my daughter did something and she was embarrassed by and she feared the judgment of others. So she kept it secret.  Not really unusual behavior.  All of us have done this at some point in time.  My reaction was mainly that I was sad that she had struggled with it alone and that she has felt so self-judgmental.  It was not the best choice she has ever made, but it was not the worst either.  She was primarily the victim of some bad luck in an arena in which our society is harshly judgmental.

When we talked about it later I told her I did not want her to ever live her life with the feeling that she had to keep secrets or be ashamed of anything because then she would become separated from a part of herself.  "What do you mean she asked?  This was hard to articulate.  I think of her father, my ex-husband, who literally committed a horrible crime.  This was something that he rightfully felt horrible about and carries much guilt about.  Some who read this will say that is a feeling of self-loathing that should never be laid down.  Do we contribute to the Good of the All by keeping ourselves small and in shame?

However, if we believe that all humans are children of a Divine Parent and an Unending Source of Love, then it follows that God has the capacity to forgive us all our diversions from the path of the Holy One. It follows that more good will be done by overcoming our own personal patch of darkness.  I believe that in the journey of the soul that everything we do holds the capacity for learning and growth in the Spirit. When I met her father he was in an Alternatives to Violence Project workshop, a program he participated in for eight years.  I also met Dan in AVP, a friend to this day, who two years ago was released from prison after serving everyday of a 30 year term for committing multiple rapes.

What these two men did represents extremes that most of us do not go to. However, the basic problem is the same; after we do something bad, something regrettable, or something embarrassing there is no taking it back.  Sometimes there are big consequences.  How do we integrate our own darkness into the tapestry of our own life?  How do we make peace with that which we regret and cannot undo?  Trite as the saying is: "How do we make lemonade out of lemons?"

I thought when I met both of them and all the men who came through the AVP workshops that they were doing the only thing we can do with darkness....redeem it. I have quoted the late Rev. Jon Nelson saying: (see 7/11/11 post) "Lean into the pain, that is where the redemptive possibilities lie." If one has come to this life to learn about violence in its most decisive way then to engage in violence and learn first-hand its horrible cost, and to renounce it, and to live without it, is as complete a learning as I imagine one life could achieve. (I believe my own walk as pacifist reflects the learning of many lifetimes, of being both the victim and the perpetrator of violence.)  

The two of them exemplified the two paths people can take in attempting to reconcile with ones own darkness.  My ex-husband could never internally reconcile what he did, so he hid it, and in so doing separated from himself. He could not be at peace in this separated state.  Over time this went beyond not putting down an accurate job history, to actually making up a whole fictional life which he told to others, thus severing himself forever from the Truth.  

Dan on the other hand, chose to tell the truth in prison about why he was there, earning him the lowest place on the prison totem pole and yet allowing him to live with the Truth of who he was.  Thus when he got out he also told the truth on every resume and job application.  He was rejected over and over but was loved by his wife and friends and eventually hired by an acquaintance who appreciated his integrity and his skill set.  He said he had expected to feel out of place when he got out of prison after such a long absence as he had before he went to prison; instead because he walks in his own skin and knows his own intentions towards others he feels deeply at home in the world.  

It has occurred to me that this indeed is the difference between leaning into the pain and not doing so.  When we are so afraid of pain, or of our own darkness that we avoid it, we never learn what it has to teach us.  We live separated from the Spirit whom we are afraid to approach and we live in constant fear of others and their judgment of us if they were to truly know us.  When we have the courage to go through the pain we come out the other side, not unlike a mother giving birth to a child.  The only way out is through, and we are "baptized" by our own struggle and its integrity—or lack of.

I'm not suggesting we just throw ourselves into darkness, or surrender to whatever evil impulse we may feel tugging at us, or lie in depression.  I'm saying that we recognize that darkness exists also on the spiritual path just as surely as night and day co-exist.  And that in whatever darkness we find ourselves we never stop looking for the Presence of the Light.  That we use as a lantern in the darkness the question, "What is my soul trying to learn from this experience?"  Redemption, if there is such a thing, must be in learning the lessons we came here to learn.

Note to reader:  My New Year's resolution was one post a month and I was doing very well until the end of May.  Then came the end of school and two church conferences in July and ...no June or July post.  Please read this as my July post!

Redemptive Possibilities

In May, I went to see the Rev. Jon Nelson.  Jon is a 78 year old retired Lutheran minister, and he also has a heart of gold and the deepest, most life embracing laugh I have ever heard in my life!  Jon is a fighter of the good fight:  he has had a prison ministry for 40 years, he helped create a black studies program in a small town in Missoula, MT and also low income housing, he rowed out in a boat into Puget Sound with his 80 year old mother to block the nuclear submarines and committed other acts of civil disobedience as led by God.  And with his loving wife they parented 14 children: 3 of their own, the rest foster children who they cared for and adopted (and all of whom he considers equally his own).

Jon and I were talking about an organization we started together several decades ago, and my own wonderment about whether it really made a difference or not.  He said:  "Ahh, but you planted 'the seed of the Redemptive Possibility'- the rest is in God's hands."  There is probably no better summery for Jon's life.  He did so much, but never with a concern for the outcome - just with a deep and abiding belief that God works through us for Redemption, and that the very possiblity of that is what it is all about.   Redemption of course is an idea at the very heart of Lutheranism.  I'm not a Lutheran, Jon and I are an odd pair in that regards.  Yet he testifys to me, by his life, what deep and true Christianity really looks like.

I comment to Jon that he has channelled father energy through out his life - that between his 14 kids and the myriad of prisoners who have loved him and were so underparented in their lives that he has held up for others what a father's love is.  Jon simply smiles and says:  "To those who much is given, much is required."  He explains how lucky he was to receive the deep love of both his parents and that he feels that simply filled and prepared him to give to others.  Jon is this sort of "pay it forward" kind of guy.  And again models what is possible when we live in the Redemptive possibilities.

I ask him for some parenting advise as I struggle with one of my teenagers and he has parented 14 kids - some of whom were in a whole lot of trouble.  His wife sagely says:  "Don't let them define you, and don't let them dictate your happiness."  But Jon laughs and says: We have always gone at this so differently, and then soberly says to me:  "Lean into the pain - yours and theirs - it is where the redemptive possibilities are."  Here are two people who have been married to each other for 53 years and it is not hard to see why- there love bounces off each other creating more love.

As I drive away I am a bit sad because Jon's health is failing in a variety of ways.  Ironically, this man who has the largest heart I have known is suffering slow heart failure. So I have this sense that I may have seen him for the last time.  I turn on some music and Carrie Newcomber is singing.
                       "Leaves do not fall, they just let go....
                        to make room for life to grow.
                       A seed contains a tree to be.
                       Death is Life's refrain."   (from the Song: Leaves do not fall)
Now I am at peace for I realize that even death carries those Redemptive Possibilities.

Post Note:  Jon died July 23, 2011