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Books
Sitting Strong: Wrestling with the Ornery God Introduction “I am convinced that the way we deal with pain On a breathtakingly beautiful summer morning, I rushed from the parking lot into the retreat center of St. Benedict’s Monastery in Snowmass, Colorado. I was rushing because I had wavered between going for the early morning “sit” in the meditation room and staying in my room. Afraid of being flooded with grief in that holy stillness, I had held back, but at the last minute I thought that, perhaps, the power of opening my mind and heart to God in the presence of other seekers might be healing. Across the parking lot, I saw Brother Charlie, one of the monks who had been such a gracious presence in my previous retreats at the monastery. Clothed in jeans and a work shirt, he was hauling trash to the dumpster at the retreat center. I hadn’t seen him since I had arrived, so I eagerly started toward him, forgetting the rule of silence and spontaneously calling out his name. “Don’t come near me,” he said. “I’ve been hauling trash and I’m a mess.” And then his whole expression changed, as if he could sense my turmoil. “How are you?” he asked quietly. My eyes filled with tears, and I said, “Not so good, Charlie. I almost didn’t come for the sit this morning.” “Sit strong, Jeanie. Sit strong!” he said, and I sucked in my breath. I could remember my father’s saying to me any time I was in a hard spot, “Sit steady in the boat, Jeanie. Sit steady in the boat.” You just never know when a trash heap is going to become holy ground. Charlie’s words that morning echoed in my heart during every one of the prayer periods of that retreat. I knew I could not be strong, but the intention to sit strong—to endure the pain I was experiencing and not run away from it, to accept it as part of my process, to go into it instead of running away from it—was precisely what I needed to do. Indeed, sitting strong was, for me, about letting myself be weak and tired and scared. It was about allowing myself to feel all the feelings I’d not allowed myself to feel in my busy life. Sitting strong was holding that intention of being with God, even in my suffering and especially with my suffering, allowing the Divine Therapist to comfort and console me. Sitting strong and consenting to the inner work of that Divine Therapist was my assignment in the gritty, grueling process that Thomas Keating calls “the unloading of the unconscious” and the challenge to the emotional programming of a lifetime. For eleven days, I took my many selves, those flawed and fragmented parts of myself, to the meditation hall for each “sit.” Each time, I expressed my intention to sit strong in the presence of God, holding my hopes and my hurts before that Presence. Within a few weeks, I was back in Houston, Texas, teaching my Thursday morning Bible study. For that year, the study was the book of Job. How could I have known when we chose the book of Job that our first class would be in the same week as the horrific events of September 11? How could we have known that this would be the last year of Sherry Holmes’ life, the year that she would suffer through the final days of cancer? Sherry had been one of the most faithful members of my Thursday morning Bible study at River Oaks Baptist Church, but in the year that I taught Job her presence was a silent and beautiful reminder of what it means to sit strong. Every week, as I gathered my commentaries and my Bible and prepared the lecture and the questions for the week’s study, it was as if Sherry came and sat with me at my desk. Every thought that I had, every question I formulated, every word that I would speak was filtered through the questions, “How will Sherry hear this?” and “How will this sound to Sherry’s young daughters and her husband as they stand with their mother and wife through this suffering?” Looking back on that year, I now know that Sherry was silently giving me more than I ever gave to her, and I will forever be grateful for the gift of her presence, her friendship, and her silent witness to the power of sitting strong in the midst of the unthinkable and the unbearable. Indeed, Sherry modeled grace in incomparable ways; she suffered her fate with such dignity that all of us who were touched by her were transformed by her life to one degree or another. Sherry sat strong that year. She carried her suffering with a beauty, dignity, and uncommon composure, showing us all how to face the unthinkable. In the presence of her friends and family, and those who barely knew her, Sherry lived out what would become, for me, the theme of this book. This book isn’t about the meaning of suffering. It isn’t about the process of grief or the way to get through the difficulties of life, and it makes no promises about what you will gain by reading it. There are no easy steps through suffering. Instead, Sitting Strong suggests that when life knocks the props out from under you and you are stunned with the pain of it all, it is possible to gather up your agony and sit with it in the presence of God, who may, admittedly, feel either absent or like the enemy at the moment. This book is not about being strong; instead, it is about that terrible time when all you can do is stumble onto the ash heap of suffering, as Job did, and simply sit with your suffering, wrestling with it, arguing with God, and letting the old die so that the new can be born. Throughout years of studying and teaching the book of Job, I have come to identify certain experiences as “Job experiences.” Unlike daily annoyances or irritations, a Job experience throws you to the mat, leaving you stunned and disoriented, dismayed and grief-stricken, humiliated and stripped of your ordinary ways of dealing with life and your comfortable, protective, well-worn defenses. A Job experience can occur from out of the blue, like a sudden tragedy, or it can come to your consciousness slowly, over time. A Job experience is one in which all of the answers that have worked for you in the past no longer work and you are forced to face yourself and your life in a new way. It can be brought on by the choices of other people or by a chance or quirk of nature. Sometimes we make the choices that take us to the mat of our own failures, and there is a peculiar agony about falling from grace in your own eyes and by your own hand. Indeed, life is often most unfair. It is difficult, hard, messy, and sometimes almost intolerable, and no one escapes its ravages. Sitting Strong suggests that walking into your difficulty and sitting with it has the potential of transforming you. A Job experience leaves you changed, and the hard truth is that while some people are refined and made more compassionate and wise through their Job experience, others become bitter or vindictive. Some people are transformed by what happens to them, but others begin to die, cell by cell, by the tragedies that have struck them. Sitting Strong suggests that no matter how weak you feel or actually are, it is possible that the very pain that you think will destroy you can, if you will hold it in consciousness and work it, be an instrument of healing. Sitting Strong is an invitation to weaken into our losses and lean into our pain in such a way that we are changed. It is about the process of allowing the pain that we have experienced to wake us up to ourselves. It is about letting the pain be the teacher and the guide. It is about holding the pain in consciousness long enough to understand it. It is about the long, hard, tedious, perilous, and sometimes unbearable process of conversion, transformation, redemption, and salvation. It is, I trust, a book about authentic and radical hope. I believe that in the darkest suffering, God is present, attempting to heal, transform, liberate, and empower persons. In choosing not to waste our sorrows, God’s redemptive work is free to work. I believe and affirm that no matter how hard the challenge or excruciating the pain, there are golden threads of God’s redeeming love woven into our sorrows and our losses, our failures and our crises, our character defects and our agony. God, who is infinitely creative and resourceful, is at work in all things, attempting to bring about good. That is, I believe, the foundation of good theology. Our task is to find where it is that God is at work and then cooperate with that creative, redemptive energy of the One-Who-Makes-All-Things-New. Sitting Strong is a way to help God help us. I cannot guarantee that you will find the answers you want by reading this book. I do not know if you will find the reason for your own personal pain or the meaning or purpose in it. I cannot promise that you will “feel better” if you read it. I hope, however, that you will know yourself and God better and that you will experience the presence of God in the midst of your own suffering. My prayer is that you will come to know God as both Comforter and Disturber, the One who makes all things new. Oh, God—you are sometimes an ornery God— You travel me too fast into places I don’t know how to and then you ask me to trust you! Oh, God, you are a troublesome God . . . and sometimes Sometimes I keep getting the feeling that while I thought you were an orderly, dignified God, most at home in the temple you are, instead, most at home, hiding out in the broken places, You are right in the middle of my character defect. And you are there, Holy Presence, in what feels like absence. Grant me the grace to see you Grant me the grace to see and hear and
Chapter One: Life Happens It isn’t that bad things happen to good people that bothers me. I’ve pretty well made peace with that. It’s that good things happen to bad people! But, then, who are the good people and who are the bad ones? “So, what did you expect God to do for you?” The question, gently asked, came through the space between us and walloped me in the face of my well-polished defenses. The adult part of me gave some kind of sensible, theologically sound, grown-up answer, but the kid in me was kicking and screaming: I expected more of God than this!—after all I’ve done for him! Sitting upright, like a lady, I wanted to double over in pain and protest against the plight I was in. Internally, I railed again my fate. My pain was almost unbearable, and I could not make it go away. Surely, I deserved better than this! I’ve been a good person. I was a good little girl. I followed the rules . . . and I expected God to take better care of me than this! Now, of course, I didn’t admit those childish responses aloud, and the truth is that they surprised even me. I would have died before I would have admitted them to anyone else, but I could not escape the fact that they were roaring in my head. I felt as if I were a two-year-old, stomping and kicking, flailing my arms, and pitching a fit. All the time, I was actually sitting calmly, as if I really were an adult. I was beyond the typical protest questions when life happens, such as “Why me? Why this? Why now?” I was facing God-as-I-used-to-know-him and myself, as I never wanted to be, demanding, Why didn’t you stop this! I was counting on you not to let this happen! Somehow, the child in me still believed that if I were good, God would protect me and bless me; if not, he would punish me. As much as I hate to admit it, I’d spent my life trying to be good enough to get the blessings and work hard enough to avoid the problems. That God will take care of his special children, those of us who follow the rules and do the right things, is the grand seduction of the religious world in which I grew up. I don’t know that anyone ever actually told me that if I obeyed God’s laws and performed good deeds, I would be exempt from the suffering that the bad guys brought upon themselves. Somehow, I expected some kind of special protection or perhaps a holy insulation from the ordinary vicissitudes of being human. I am embarrassed to admit it, and I can’t really imagine any Sunday school classes in which it was overtly said that the religious life was based on a reward and punishment system. Somehow, the great lies about life with God seeped into my mind, leading me to expect special favors from God, or at least protection from the horrors of life, if I would only believe right, follow the rules, be nice, and give my tithe to the church. In the midst of my adult crisis of faith, I would not have told anyone that I was still operating out of that childish misbelief about God and suffering, but the truth was that while I could spout a backpack full of platitudes about God, when I was slammed with four hard crises all at once, I was introduced in a hurry to that grand seduction that no less a man than the biblical giant Job faced in himself. * What was it that brought Job to the place where God could begin the tedious work of redemption in him? And why is it that, throughout the centuries, generations of people have turned to the book of Job to find their way through their own suffering? Why does Job’s story have such staying power? Job was, according to the sacred story, a “righteous man.” He followed all the rules. He offered sacrifices, even on behalf of his children, apparently hoping to build a hedge of protection high enough to prevent them from suffering. He was successful in the eyes of others, admired and respected, and then, in short order, Job lost everything that he had counted on to give him meaning and purpose in life. Shattered and stripped of everything, including, finally, his health, he could do nothing but take himself to the ash heap and sit in anguished silence with his agony as his companion. Job is, for us, not so much a model of patience, but a way-shower to wholeness, for in his suffering Job retreated to the ash heap and sat with his agony until he was transformed by the work of God, who took that very pain and agony that could have killed Job and used the raw materials of his grief to redeem Job. During that long sit on the ash heap, Job wrestled with himself and his own life’s story. Surely, Job must have gone back over his life and made a thorough examination of his choices in an attempt to understand how he had wound up where he was. Second, Job wrestled with his friends, and it is those “friends” who can represent for us either our own inner voices or particular people in our world who are stunned by what happens to us. Finally, Job wrestled with God, and neither of them let go until, out of the suffering, came the transformation. God worked in the midst of what was irreparable to restore and re-create Job, and for those of us who find ourselves forced to sit with that which we think we cannot bear, Job is a beacon of hope. The ash heap, then, stands as a metaphor for us. It is not necessarily a place where we go, although it could be, so much as it is the process of suffering consciously what has happened to us in order to find the meaning in it. It represents the time we spend integrating our sorrows, coming to terms with what has happened to us or what we have lost. In sitting strong, we take seriously our grieving, honoring it by going into our pain with awareness. It is Job who shows us that God is at work in all things, attempting to bring about good. It is Job who shows us that if we will wait on God, God will, finally, act, but sometimes God takes a very long time. God is, I’ve heard, never late, but God often misses opportunities to be early. What kinds of things bring us to the point of being open and available for God to move deeply into our agony and begin to heal us and transform us? What does it mean to suffer, and what does it mean to “sit with your pain”? This book intends to explore those questions, but first it is necessary to differentiate between Job experiences and other kinds of problems. *
On a cold Valentine’s Day, I sat at one of Houston’s busiest intersections with my husband, facing north. It was rush hour, and a man in a large sedan, going west on San Felipe, began furiously honking his horn at the woman in front of him, who was waiting to turn south onto Willowick. Apparently, he didn’t realize that the restriction against turning left at that intersection had been lifted, and in his red-faced frustration, he increased his honking, lowered his car window, and began yelling and gesturing at the woman who was doing nothing but trying to turn left. I could imagine him telling his wife, “You won’t believe what happened to me today!” As angry as he was, he could have used that irritation as an excuse to drink all night. Maybe he took his anger out on his wife, which she could have then taken out on her neighbor or their children. Possibly his blood pressure shot up, and the woman in the car may have had an upset stomach. Sometimes people get mad enough over the smallest things and . . . well, they die! Now, the woman hadn’t set out to irritate the man. She wasn’t doing anything illegal, unethical, or wrong. She was probably simply going home from work, leaving her cleaning, or picking up her children from school, but she inadvertently put that man in the sedan into a red zone of rage. As we threaded our way through the dense traffic, I recalled the words on a baby bib I’d seen while shopping for my new granddaughter. In big, red letters the bib pronounced the universal truth, “Spit Happens!” Indeed, daily life is fraught with difficulty and inconvenience, disaster and danger, and it takes a degree of consciousness to tell the difference between what is an irritation and what is a real problem. Surely, maturity demands of us that we learn to differentiate between and among the serious and the trivial and not shoot cannons at mosquitoes. Later, as I was griping about the fact that my laptop was broken and my desktop computer was so outdated that I could not receive vital information from my editors, someone said to me, ”You must feel like Job!” Stunned, I responded quickly, “Oh, no. Computer problems do not qualify as a Job experience!” Prior to 9/11, we already lived in a thick soup of anxiety-producing stimuli in our daily lives, but given the changes in our culture since the tragedy of September 11, anxiety and stress have been amped up to excruciating decibels. As horrible as the tragedy of 9/11 was, however, an even greater tragedy could be the incapacitating effects of living in a constant state of “terror alert” and the annihilation of hope. Adults must learn to live in a world where bad things happen to good people not just now and then, but rather routinely. It is essential for mature and responsible people to be able to negotiate the shark-infested waters of everyday life where all of the best medical help in the world is sometimes not enough and all of the best financial strategies come to naught. We have to do more than just survive when our children don’t conform to our expectations, when our marriages fail, and when we don’t have what we want when we want it. We can and we must learn to be resilient people, people who are able to thrive, even in the midst of imperfection, incompletion, insufficiency, loss, and even suffering. “If you fall apart when the toast burns,” the old adage asks, “what will you do when your house burns?” The truth is that we must learn to distinguish between real difficulties and minor irritations. We can learn to conserve our energy so that we do not waste it on the small stuff and so that when we come to the big stuff we are not all used up. We need to learn the difference between an authentic tragedy and a bump in the road that you can get over. We must examine the difference between those things that we have brought on ourselves, either by neglect, ignorance, or willful disregard and defiance, and those things that others bring into our lives. We must come to terms with the fact that some things are random acts of nature, and other stuff is the baggage we have inherited. There is a difference in the way you respond to an acute or immediate crisis and the way you handle an ongoing, chronic condition, and we can learn the life skills necessary for responding to either. It really is possible to learn the difference between the things you cannot change and the things you can, and must, change. It takes time, sometimes, to discover the difference between those things you can change or solve and the things that will require you to let go and let someone else handle. And, sometimes, we must face that one thing that requires us to change our entire lifestyle for the rest of our lives. Working with the various things that happen in people’s lives, it is clear to me that a Job experience falls into one of two categories: “The Sudden Blitz” or “The Thorn in the Flesh.” (1) The Sudden Blitz: A sudden catastrophe or loss, one of life’s great tragedies that crashes into your life without warning, stripping from you something that is precious, qualifies as a Job experience. The loss of a child, the untimely death of a spouse or a significant other, the failure of a marriage or a lifelong dream, financial disaster, a catastrophic illness, a violent act of nature, or the violent act of one human being against himself or another person all qualify as Job experiences. (2) The Thorn in the Flesh: The thorn in the flesh is that condition which is longstanding. It could be a character defect, a health issue, an addiction, a chronic pain or wounding from childhood that you will deal with the rest of your life. It could be a troublesome relationship that has shaped your life, an abandonment or rejection by a parent, an ongoing family dynamic that sucks life and energy from you, or a life script from your family of origin that has burdened you or broken you. Perhaps you made a choice in adolescence that you have had to “pay for” for all of your life; perhaps you are the carrier of your family’s secret or shame. Whatever it is, it finally comes roaring to the surface, demanding to be acknowledged, healed, or forgiven. Another Job experience with a uniquely difficult twist is the pain you have caused another person, whether by accident, carelessness, neglect, or outright defiance. Being able to recognize, admit, and accept what you have done that has injured someone else, and then doing whatever you can, as you can and when you can, to make amends or restitution is a way of cooperating with the redemptive mercy and grace of God. Living with the pain of harming another person can be unbearable, except for the grace of God, which allows us to experience that recognition and then to do something about it. One who can walk into the wounds that he has inflicted on another person, including himself, can experience radical healing. Whatever has happened to you, you can know that it is a Job experience when there is nothing you can do to change it or make it go away. You aren’t rich enough, well connected enough, smart or clever enough, powerful or well-educated enough to change the problem, and one way or another, this problem is going to be with you. It is yours, and you must face it. You will know it is a Job experience when you fel as if you cannot bear the pain, when you feel that you cannot go on, when you feel that the pain is going to devour you. You will know it is a Job experience when it feels that God is silent and all you can do is pray, “Help me!” * When I was a child, my father was pastor of First Baptist Church in Greenville, Texas, where he met every Monday morning with a group of fellow pastors, one of whom was uncommonly joyful and optimistic. “What is your secret?” the other ministers asked him on a dreary day when they were experiencing that letdown common to ministers after Sunday. “Ah, my secret?” he asked, smiling. “I believe the Good Book when it says that things have come to pass. My troubles, they don’t come to stay. They come to pass.” Well, yes, sometimes. Job teaches us how to behave when we are faced with the opposite of that truth. Some of our troubles come and take up residence in our lives, shaping us forever, and how we learn to live with those kinds of things determines everything about the quality of our lives. How we learn to survive with that thing we cannot change, that wound that will not heal, that blow that forever changes the landscape of our lives is all in learning how to sit with it long enough to integrate it into our lives in a healthy and creative way. And that’s not that easy when you’re hurting. * I’m pretty much an expert on what doesn’t work when life knocks you to your face. I can speak with fairly significant authority on the power of denial and refusing to see the problem and own the problem. I can describe multiple ways of pushing things under the carpet, avoiding conflict, and pretending that something doesn’t exist. I can even tell the truth, now, about how easy it is to massage the truth and manage the distortions to keep from telling the truth. It is possible to live for a very long time with “a secret” that you don’t want anyone to know, especially you. Now and then, the entire energy of a family or a person is committed to keeping the family secret; ultimately, however, those things you don’t want to know come out into the open. People often blame or attack others for the pain in their own lives; in fact, we humans do inflict pain on each other, and we often inflict it onto the people we say we love most or the ones who are closest to us. In truth, however, blame and attack only exacerbate the pain. Children blame, I’ve found, and adults take responsibility. Sometimes a big hurt of childhood lies festering for decades, and nearly everyone who has come into contact with the wounded person has had to pay for the pain of that person, until the person who owns the wound is willing to take responsibility for the wound and work it until it no longer controls her. It’s pretty easy to anesthetize ourselves in a myriad of ways, trying not to feel the agony in our souls. We drink and drug our pain away, causing ourselves even more pain, for the truth is that our addictions are anxiety-management techniques that ultimately not only don’t work, but create for us even more pain. We numb ourselves with food or being busy. We use shopping and television as drugs. We run from one event to another, from one relationship to another, seeking relief from that which has us all knotted up. Sometimes we hide our pain in religion or God-talk, hoping to escape the realities of our lives. Sometimes we throw money at the problem, and if there is a lot of money to be thrown, facing the problem head-on can be avoided for a long time. Admittedly, money helps ease much of the discomfort of hard times, and it is a lot easier to suffer when you don’t have to worry about how you will pay for it. Ultimately, however, there comes a time when we have to admit that there isn’t enough money to make the pain go away. Some people try to control or repair the problem, and when what they do doesn’t work, they do more of it. Some study the problem and form careers trying to gain some authority over that which hurt them, becoming doctors or ministers, therapists or legal experts. Some people work harder and longer, running faster and faster for as long as they can until, finally, if they are fortunate, they bottom out and come to the place of admitting that they are powerless over the thing they have spent a lifetime trying to avoid or change. We sing the blues, we whine and complain, we become victims and martyrs—or heroes!—trying to manage the pain that won’t go away. We try to explain it and understand it; we make pronouncements about our own particular kind of pain, and sometimes we start movements or nonprofits or write books to try to get on top of the thing that keeps pushing us down into the depths of suffering. If we are fortunate, however, there comes a time when all of our ways and means of avoiding ourselves and our agony fail, and we are brought to the mat of our own ash heap and must make a hard decision about that pain that will not go away. If we will, we can choose to suffer the thing we cannot change. “Why do you keep on doing that over and over?” It was a clear, perfect spring morning, and the sun danced on the walls of the sacred space where I had landed, hoping to find the answer. I was sick and tired of repeating the same mistake, but I couldn’t seem to stop myself. I sat for a long time, reflecting on the fact that, indeed, my current behavior was not solving my problem, no matter how many times I repeated it or how much I had perfected that thing that wasn’t working. It didn’t matter how good I was at explaining things or how fervently I worked on my self-devised treatment plan—the pain I was carrying would not go away, and I could not solve my own problems. “I thought that it would finally . . . work,” I stammered, and my questioner burst out laughing. “Don’t you know that that is the definition of insanity? Doing something over and over and expecting a different result is insanity.” I could feel myself blushing. I thought I was smarter than this! Indeed, I knew that I was going to have to change my ways, and I was scared to death. Little did I know that I was going to have to face my earliest emotional programming, my lifelong life script and all of the decisions I had made out of an early, deep wounding. I had always known, at some level, that I was going to take the journey that lay ahead of me. Indeed, I had even yearned for that journey, for the truth is that God-who-works-within is always pushing us toward wholeness and confronting us with all of those things that prevent the work of redemption within us. I knew that I was going to have to face that one thing that had shaped my life, but, faced with the journey that lay ahead, I was both terrified and ecstatic. I had recently been introduced to a new understanding of the word “suffering,” and I knew that I was going to have to “suffer” this wound and that it was mine and only mine to suffer. Examining the etymology of the word “suffer,” you see that it comes from the Latin and carries the meaning of “bearing” something or “carrying it” and holding it from the bottom or from below. To suffer something, then, means that you “stand under it,” holding it from below, until you understand it. The process of suffering, then, is a process of coming to understand; once you understand, there is great freedom. Face-to-face with my life, I realized that I was being invited to “suffer” my own childhood wound, to face it in a new way, to hold it and carry it from the bottom or the cause of it. I was being called into the process of “standing under” my own life’s burden by exploring and analyzing it, talking about it and examining it long enough to understand it. I left that sacred space to go home, but I could make it only to St. Anne’s Church. I parked beside the rose garden and made my way up to the large wooden door. Silently, I walked into that beautiful place where I loved to pray. This time, I barely made it to my favorite spot, where I pulled down the kneeling bench and fell to my knees, tears streaming down my face. And there, in that quiet place, I abandoned my troubled heart and my stubborn will one more time to the Source, the Comforter/Confronter, the Guide, the Mystery, the Ornery God who had pursued me to this point, pushing me from within by my pain and beckoning to me from without by the Mystery. God is truly ornery, I thought, there on that kneeling bench, because he will not let me go. God will not leave me alone until I fall onto this ash heap and suffer my life experience. It is radical love that makes God ornery, a love that is not satisfied until we face the truth and tell the truth and then, finally, have the courage to live the truth. With my prayer of surrender, I didn’t know where I was going or how I was going to survive the journey, but something—and Someone—within me began to stir, and I knew I had just enough faith to take the next step. The next morning, just as I was waking, an image of a flame being re-ignited somewhere deep within the center of my soul was the first thought of the day, and I knew that I would be guided through the darkness. Even then, for a fleeing moment, I knew that I was being guided home to my authentic self. If we will, we can choose to suffer the things we cannot change. Most of us think of the word “suffering” as a noun, thereby concretizing our sorrows. Suffering is something we “have,” something we have caused, or something that someone has done to us. In Christian circles, the idea that our sufferings are our punishment often swarms around people who are hurting. “If only you would pray harder or have more faith,” we are told, adding shame for not being a good enough pray-er or a good enough person to the already unbearable problem. When we do use the word as a verb, we often use is as if suffering is an act of hopelessness. To suffer something, in the context of sitting strong, however, means to choose to carry your pain consciously, to go into it intentionally and purposefully, to “stand under it” until you understand it. In other words, instead of becoming the victim of life’s hurts so that you are hurt not only by the event but also by the way you “carry” what has happened to you, it is possible to move deeply into your pain, to feel that pain all the way to the fierce and ragged edges, to fully accept the hurt, and to integrate what has happened to you into your life story. Then, with the grace of God at work, you can be transformed by that which could have destroyed you. It is possible, with time and the tedious work of becoming conscious, to carry that very thing that you thought you could not bear in such a way that you do find meaning in that which seems the most absurd. It is possible to “work your wound,” to examine it, to approach it with a holy curiosity and reverence, to explore how it happened, to ask the hardest questions about it. It is possible to “suffer” your losses, to “suffer” your agony, to “suffer” your fate and your defects in such a way that, finally, you do find where God is at work. Whining and singing the blues are not authentic suffering. Regressing to a childish state, expecting others to take care of you and hiding out in some bunker of defensiveness are not authentic suffering. Resisting and being stoic are not authentic suffering, and neither do they reveal courage or bravery. Going bravely into your pain, trembling though you may be, is authentic suffering. Sitting strong—facing the truth, telling the truth, living the truth, and doing all of that with as much consciousness as you can is authentic suffering. Suffering something, carrying it until you find the meaning in it, allows you to expand your image of who God is. It allows you to expand your image of who you are and your image of the world and how you are to be in it. It requires you to grow up. Suffering something consciously will refine you and make you more compassionate and wise. It sets us free from inordinate attachments. It helps us to detach from our idols and to separate the important from the trivial. Authentic suffering rejects simplistic answers to complex issues. It recoils in the face of sentimental tripe, and it avoids premature and easy pronouncements about “why this happened.” Suffering certainly shudders in holy hesitation before announcing what the Almighty has in mind. Conscious suffering takes time, and it will not be rushed. It has its own process and its own timetable. Those who rush the process so that they or somebody else will feel better will discover that the wisdom in the wound will reveal itself when it is ready. The truth is that what is buried alive, stays alive, and so responsible and mature adults are called to deal with the pain in their lives in such a way that they will not inflict their pain onto others. Not dealing with those things that are huge in our lives, keeping them buried, exacts a price, and it is often our loved ones who pay the most severe price. Coming to consciousness about what it is that hurts is an act of kindness and a moral obligation. Over the years, on the ash heap, I have learned an important lesson: What you do not work out or talk out, you will project out or act out or take out on someone else. * There is an old story about a Chinese farmer whose horse ran away. The villagers made a trek to his farm to offer him sympathy, and he said to them, “How do you know this is bad luck?” The next day, the farmer’s horse came back, and with that horse, four others! The villagers returned to the farm to congratulate him, and he said, “How do you know this is good luck?” The next day, the farmer’s only son, trying to tame the new horses, fell and broke his leg, and sure enough, here came the villagers, to offer their condolences. Again, the farmer asked, “How do you know this is bad luck?” The next month, war broke out in the land, and the farmer’s son, because of his broken leg, was not able to go off to war! We could, obviously, take the farmer’s story on and on, but the point is made. We cannot know, in the middle of something, what is “bad” and what is “good.” We do know what hurts, if we allow ourselves to feel our own pain, and we know that being human contains both joy and sorrow and that it is, indeed, a sometimes painful venture, fraught with danger and disease, loss and suffering. When life hurts, we can “suffer” what hurts and be transformed by it, if we are willing to. It is also the Chinese who have taught us that there is in every crisis an opportunity, and much of what and who we become is based on how we respond to what happens to us. And much of what happens to us is shaped by whether or not we allow God to be with us in the suffering, and that willingness is based on how and who we believe God to be. |
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