Sister Sharon
Personal
Suffering
This
past December I had the experience of having my right knee replaced. I
suggested to Richard that we take on the topic of “Suffering.” The topic came
to my mind very quickly and I wasn’t quite sure why, but if I had to summarize
my year (2014) in one word, most likely I would choose the word “suffering.” My
suffering was partly physical, as my knee was barely working, and I was denying
the pain I was experiencing. In addition to the physical pain, I began the year
with personal loss as a result of the passing of a very close friend of
thirteen years, who happened to also be my boss at the time of her passing. In
April I then lost my feline friend, who was my constant companion for the past
24 years. In short, it was a very tough
beginning of the year. Then I left my position, which lead to the tedious job
searching process, so, the year was riddled with multiple job applications,
interviews, and rejections. I tried to remain faithful to prayer, and taking
care of myself, but my personal life continued to kind of crumble around me. I
found out that a few individuals who I thought were my friends had a hard time
allowing me to emote, and distanced themselves. Suffering seems to be a good word to summarize
my experience of the year, and yet, I am uncertain what I truly mean on a
spiritual level by this phenomenon.
On
the personal level (meaning for my self-care and for my spiritual life) I still
have a bit more praying and reflecting to attend to, but right now, at this
moment, I simply need to feel… I don’t know what makes suffering stop… but I
know shutting down my feelings doesn’t help. I also don’t know when suffering
ends, and the words that use to help don’t any more. But I have found an “older” practice, that I
never understood, now has some meaning for me. I used to hear older Catholics
say, “Offer it up,” and they were referring to suffering. I really never
understood what it meant to “offer it up.”
During my days at rehab, I was praying, not for myself, but for my BFF,
who was once again diagnosed with cancer (her 5th re-occurrence in
20 years), and for her stomach, the location of her most recent tumor. On this particular
day I was suffering with a good deal of pain, and all I could think about was
my friend who was going again for chemo and her first treatment. We had spent
the day before together, each trying to care for one another. So, as I was
trying to bend my new knee, and the pain meds were not working, I prayed for my
friend JB. I offered up my suffering so hers would be less. I really had no
idea what I was doing, but I was praying for her suffering as I managed through
mine. I called her later that day and found out after her chemo she went out
with her husband and was feeling just fine. So, I did this again for her next
treatment, and it was the same result… so I shared with her what I was doing.
In her beautiful way, she said, “Keep it up, its working!”
What
I know from this personal experience is that someone else’s suffering is always
worse. At least I think cancer is worse than a bum knee. If I enter into prayer
and still feel my own suffering but think or “offer it” for another, and take
the focus off of myself, both of us seem the better for it. The suffering
doesn’t end. My friend still has cancer, and I am still suffering with my knee
pain, etc… but it lessens the burden, and helps the process.
I do
think of suffering as a burden. It is individual. Each person suffers, and most
of the time individuals cannot change their suffering. Each of us suffers with
different things and with or for different reasons. Some suffering is
self-inflicted; other suffering is inflicted upon us. I do believe it is a part
of the human condition. The healing or the mending from suffering is part of the
process of living. The process transforms us, if we let it. If I am able to befriend
or embrace my suffering, I am then able to reach out (or offer it up) and in
the process I not only help others, but I in turn help myself. I come to know
the truth that I am connected, that I am not alone… that I cannot handle things
on my own, or by my own ability… that I need others. By befriending suffering,
I believe I am or can be transformed… to acceptance, to know that I am loved
and am loving a loving person…. transformed into being a better person, a
person more gentle and kind, or transformed into the likeness of the being that
God intended me to be. So maybe, just maybe… does suffering, or can suffering,
be the vehicle to transform our world?
Richard Lederman
Western religious tradition is filled with notions of
the redemptive quality of suffering. Our master narratives consistently move
from suffering to redemption, from bondage to freedom, from passion to
resurrection. The power of this paradigm can be seen in the way it resonated
within the African-American tradition, which, from the period of enslavement in
the New World and through the Civil Rights Movement, relied on images of the
Exodus from Egypt to overcome the horrors of slavery and Jim Crow. As a Jew, I
am often reminded how the redemptive quality of the rebirth of Israel was a
sequel to the tortures of the Holocaust.
Yet, I understand this binary image—suffering and
redemption—to be one aspect of a broader binary paradigm that seems to be built
into the human psyche. The suffering/redemption pattern seems related to the
good/evil bifurcation, which itself seems related to the chaos/order dichotomy.
In the Bible, the primordial cosmos is said to consist of water characterized
in Hebrew as tohu va-vohu, usually
translated something like “unformed and void.” These words are in fact,
nonsense words, perhaps onomatopoetic, which I like to translate as
“gobbledygook.” In the beginning, the earth was a chaotic, watery gobbledygook.
God had to apply structure, order to this chaotic gobbledygook, and this order
is consistent characterized as good.
Ancient mythology is filled with images of a watery
chaos, filled with evil broodings, that has to be overcome and defeated before
cosmic order can emerge. In the Babylonian account of creation, Enuma Elish, the goddess Tiamat, the
common Babylonian word for “sea,” seeks to destroy the second generation of
gods, and must be defeated by the storm-god Marduk, the chief god of the city
of Babylon, before cosmic and world order can be achieved.
Yet, it is noteworthy how this image of the battle of
storm and sea crops up in the Bible in the so-called “Song of the Sea” in
Exodus 15, the victory hymn sung by the Israelites after crossing the Red Sea.
The images of storm and sea in this ancient Hebrew poem could have been
virtually lifted from Enuma Elish. By
using the image of storm and sea, this song attaches the idea of redemption
from the suffering of bondage to a movement from chaos to order. This is more
than freedom from bondage. It is a cosmic struggle between good and evil, order
and chaos.
If we consider some of our great literature and even
our popular movies and TV dramas, we see this same dichotomy. It seems that we
need a crisis of some kind—chaos, conflict, despair, suffering—that must be
resolved in the course of the narrative. If there is no crisis, there is no
resolution of the crisis, and there’s virtually no story, no narrative. We
crave the bliss of narrative redemption, but it seems that if there is no suffering,
there can be no redemption. Redemption cannot exist without suffering.
This paradigm continues to hold sway in western
religious tradition through biblical apocalyptic images that seem to have
become extremely popular over the last 40 or 50 years. These biblical images
arise from passages like the war of Gog and Magog in Ezekiel 38-39, in addition
to numerous passages such as Daniel 7-12, Matthew 24 and its parallels, and the
Book of Revelation. These passages insist that the final redemption must be preceded
by what have come to be called “the tribulations,” in other words, horrendous
death, destruction and suffering. In order to achieve absolute cosmic goodness
and order, we must first undergo a return to absolute chaos and evil.
I actually find this quite worrisome. While we may
look at the events like the Holocaust, the Passion of Christ, the bondage in
Egypt as redemptive, it seems to me that this is a sort of retrospective view.
The redemptive quality of suffering is understood from the perspective of the
redeemed. When we begin to anticipate suffering as a prerequisite to redemption
in any real sense apart from its dramatic depiction in art and literature, I
fear that we run the risk of facilitating suffering, or excusing and justifying
suffering in order to expedite the anticipated redemption. It seems that this
model is what is now driving the conflicts in the Middle Ease, with all parties
convinced that cataclysmic war is a good thing, since they will emerge
victorious—redeemed.
Suffering
can be redemptive so long as we understand that our duty as members of a sacred
community committed to bringing the influence of a loving and merciful God to
bear in our world is primarily to alleviate suffering. We may, in the final
analysis, be able to see our suffering in the light of a subsequent redemption,
or we may be provided with hope for redemption from within our suffering, but I
would insist that suffering is not a good thing. We should be able to bring
goodness, order and well-being into the world without requiring suffering. At
least we should try!
Richard’s Response to Sister Sharon
Once again, Sr. Sharon and I seem to come to
much the same conclusion, though from very different directions. I’m far too
cerebral and have to look to the heart of a religious Sister to remind me about
an aspect of suffering that also
suffuses our religious traditions and that must not be ignored or devalued. Our
suffering is crucial to our ability to feel sympathy and empathy with any
suffering of our fellow creatures. The Torah teaches, “Do not oppress a
foreigner; you yourselves know how it feels to be foreigners, because you were
foreigners in Egypt” (Exodus 23:9). It says further,
“When an alien resides with you in your land, you shall not oppress
the alien. The alien who resides with you shall be to you as the citizen among
you; you shall love the alien as yourself, for you were aliens in the land of
Egypt: I am the Lord your God” (Leviticus 19:33-34).
The observance of Passover is meant to remind
us of the Exodus from Egypt, that quintessential experience of redemption from
the suffering of slavery. What do Jews do to prepare? We go into a form of
bondage. The Torah tells us to remove all vestiges of leavening from our homes
as a way to remind us that our ancestors only had time to bake unleavened
bread. Yet, the real upshot of this practice is to force us into a form of
servitude, engaging in a routine of house cleaning unlike any other.
We begin the Passover recital with the words,
“We were slaves to Pharaoh in Egypt,” and for anyone who has prepared a home
for Passover, it indeed feels like servitude. The recital also insists, “In
every generation, each person is to look upon him/herself as though he/she
personally left Egypt.”
Like every effective ritual, the Passover is
not simply a recitation, a memory of something that happened to our ancestors
long ago. It is a re-experiencing of that moment. The entire ritual is designed
to move us from depression to uplift. We end with songs of praise for God’s
redemptive power and activity, but we can only move to that moment from a sense
of humility and empathy, not only for the suffering slaves, but for the slain
Egyptians as well.
So Sr. Sharon is correct. Suffering is not
something to be sought, but it is also not something to be spiritually wasted.
It is, in a certain respect, also one of God’s gifts of grace that gives us the
power of empathy to emulate the divine as “the healer of shattered hearts.”
Sr.
Sharon’s Response to Richard
One
of my favorite images of the divine is water.
John Duns Scotus refers to God as “the eternal fountain of fullness.” I must
admit that I truly giggled when I read Richard’s description of the primordial
cosmos- “to consist of water characterized in Hebrew as tohu va-vohu, usually translated something like ‘unformed and
void.’” These words used to describe suffering are perfect!!
Suffering,
when you are in the midst of it does in fact feel like a bunch of
“gobbledygook,” as Richard stated. The
earth, much like our own selves, needs structure in order to get through the
state of chaos that one is thrown into with suffering. Don’t we often say to an
individual who just lost someone, “it will be good to go back to your routine.
It may be hard, but it will be good.” The problem with suffering from grief is
that the body may be willing but the soul is fully immersed in the
“gobbledygook,” and can get stuck. The soul seems to be involved in its own
battle of good and evil, so wonderfully described by Richard.
But
water as the divine, has movement and fluidity.
Water is often soothing; it is an element we typically go to for
cleansing, or refreshing one’s thirst.
Richard made me wonder if suffering, is a way back to the chaos of the
beginning…the void of form, the need for water, the need to drink in the
divine. If I can enter into the chaos, and allow God or the divine to take
hold, then I can move out of the suffering, and redemption is the waiting
grace. It becomes an internal action of trust and faith. For me it has been one
of waiting—waiting in faith, knowing my pain will pass with time, and I will
once again taste the sweet refreshing water of my God.
Thank
you Richard also for the reminder, I cannot do it alone. Moving from suffering
to redemption requires a faith community. I must reach out and allow my heart
to know that I am loved by others, and that a community of others, holds me in
the process of healing and redemption. The entire action requires an act of
faith for the individual and for the community.
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