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 his
has been a topic of interest for me for a long time. I should start by
saying I have nothing original to say on this topic. Everyone in
the room is an expert on suffering. There has been no shortage of
it in this congregation alone in the past year. Among the things we have
experienced are the death of a beloved wife, the suicide of a father,
the long illness and impending death of a sister, a mother’s Alzheimer’s
disease, the minister’s bout with cancer, and my own painful 2004, which
dealt me a car accident that has produced chronic pain, the death of a
48 year old sweetheart, and my mother’s ovarian cancer. I am now parent
to my parent, a situation that has required putting away long-held
resentments to take on the care of another person’s life, at a time when
my own life feels overwhelming enough. Even the children in this
congregation have lit candles to mark the death of a grandparent, the
loss of a pet, or the sorrow of having a friend move away. To stand here
and give a talk on meaning in suffering is a neck-up experience. Actual
suffering is not an abstract concept, but a gut-wrenching,
heart-breaking, mind-numbing, sometimes seemingly-endless process.
Although real suffering is not an intellectual exercise, I will be
exploring it in that way to some degree as I share my reactions to
various reading with you.
READING:
From the book How Can I Help? By Ram Dass and Paul Gorman:
“Suffering
seems to be a fact of life. How do we face it? Clearly it is a
stranger to none of us. Perhaps we have not experienced the corrosive
pain of illness, persecution, starvation or violence. We may not have
lived with the deterioration and loss of a loved one. Few of us have
seen the charred face of a burned child. But each of us has
experienced our fair share of not getting what we want or having to
deal with what we don’t want. In this we all know suffering.
"The way in
which we deal with suffering has much to do with the way in which we
are able to be of service to others. Of course, not all helping
revolves around suffering. Much of what we offer may be in the way of
simple support or guidance: moving a friend’s new furniture, teaching
a child to read. But it is the affliction of others that most directly
awakens in us the desire to be of care and comfort.
"The impulse
to do all we can to relieve one another’s pain is the automatic
response of our native compassion. But the experience of suffering –
in ourselves and in others – triggers off complicated reactions. To
investigate these is itself an act of compassion, an essential step
toward becoming more effective instruments of mutual support and
healing. How then do we respond to the pain we see around us? And,
once we have investigated this response, how do we respond to our own
afflictions?
"At one level
we seem to have an attraction-aversion relationship to suffering.
Sometimes our attraction seems to take a neurotic form. It seems to
trigger off an almost morbid fascination. We continually feed
ourselves, through newspapers, soap operas, tragedies and gossip with
images of suffering. It’s as if our vicarious involvement with the
trials and tribulations of others engages us in the life process in a
way that we seem to need but also want to be able to control. We want
to watch it but be able to turn it off at will.
"At another
and deeper level, however, the suffering of others spontaneously
awakens a response of instant empathy.
"You’re right
behind a man on the unemployment line. His eyes are red, you can tell
he’s been drinking. He finally gets his turn after waiting three
hours, only to be told he’s got to come back with the right papers.
He’s confused, but he nods; he doesn’t want to make trouble. But as he
leaves the line, you can tell he didn’t get it quite right, and he
probably won’t make it back next week. He’s heading for a bar, and
it’s ten-thirty in the morning.
"Your closest
friends, married for twenty years, are fighting bitterly, right there
in the restaurant, right there in front of you and their kids. You’ve
never seen them act that way before. The marriage is falling apart.
One daughter is staring at her soup. The other flashes you a look of
panic.
"Your heart
goes out to them, goes out to them all. The pain of others gives rise
to a desire to help, to comfort, to touch, to say, ‘I’m here, I’m with
you, I understand.’
"But it’s one
thing to have one’s heart engaged, quite another to have it
overwhelmed or broken. Here lies our aversion to suffering. For when
it gets too close and too strong – the terrible suffering of a lover,
child, parent, best friend – we may experience a pain so excruciating
that it may threaten the very fabric of our being, shatter our
tenuously held faith, and cast us into deepest despair.
"Between the
event to which we feel no personal connection and a tragedy that
breaks our hearts, there is a vast range of affliction. In this domain
we make our choices: Shall I become involved or not, and if so, how
deeply? How much human pain to let in, and whose? Because the
suffering around us is endless, the choices before us seem limitless.
We must weigh them carefully, lest once we have opened Pandora’s box,
pain overwhelm us and jeopardize our fragile control of the universe
around.
"This range of
choices is recent and perhaps unique to our present culture. Where
people live their whole lives in close proximity, there’s very little
choice. Suffering involves all. The village’s orphans are everybody’s
children.
"But affluence
has bought us privacy, and the apparent power to guard it against the
encroachments of other people’s adversity. As individuals and as a
society we set up lines of defense. We isolate poverty, old age and
death so that we need not confront them in our daily lives. The poor
are off in ghettos, the elderly in retirement homes, the dying in
terminal care wards. We pay to push suffering away.
"But privacy
exacts its costs. How quickly, for example, it turns to loneliness and
alienation. Our defenses against one kind of suffering, ironically,
turns out to have invited in another. We may somehow feel safe from
the troubles of the world, but we also begin to feel dry, empty and
alone in our insulated havens. Gone is the mutuality and spontaneous
support that arises naturally when lives are led in common. With doors
closed to the pain of others, we banish that which would release our
compassion and engagement with life. We need heart-to-heart
resuscitation.”
While writing
this speech, I considered the titles “Finding Meaning in Suffering” and
“Making Meaning of Suffering”, but chose not to use either. They are not
the same, although both do occur. Finding meaning seems to be something
that happens to a person, perhaps in retrospect, or coincidentally while
an event is happening. Meaning seems to be an active, intentional
process. The desire to make meaning of one’s experience is an essential
existential concept, as is the belief that all people suffer. I’d like
to explore suffering from that perspective.
In 1990, shortly
after taking a class in existential therapy, I was working in a
psychiatric hospital. Existentialism, as applied to therapy, endorses
the concept that behind any individual’s emotional problems lie such
spiritual problems as alienation, isolation, disconnection, and absence
of meaning or purpose. In the hospital it occurred to me that the
patients lived behind bars called “stupid,” “worthless,” “not good
enough,” “fat,” “ugly,” “never amount to anything,” “can’t ever do it
right,” “should not have been born,” etc. The existential dilemma here
is that the patients acted simultaneously as prisoners of their
illnesses, but their own jailors as well. Ironically, although I was
there to help them, I discovered that in many ways the patients were
little different than I, and I am little different than you. Despite our
individual differences, so many of us inflict this same suffering upon
ourselves. No matter who set up those emotional and psychological bars
years ago, no matter how we came to believe that we were somehow less
than adequate, we are now the ones who hold those bars of
self-castigation firmly in place; our own prisoners, our own jailors.
Whether we speak of mentally ill patients, drug addicts, the poor or the
homeless, it is not the “us-them” society that we like to pretend it is.
Them is us, us is them.
In the 1950s
Rollo May wrote “Man’s Search for Himself,” and he proposed that the
move from an agrarian society to a technological society was responsible
for much of the sense of isolation and alienation faced by contemporary
man. In the move from farm land and small towns to the city, man
separated himself from the land, and by leaving home to go to an office
each day, he separated himself from his family. (Generic “he” used
here.) May postulated that to our detriment, we have separated ourselves
from our true nature, and from our interdependence upon the land and one
another, seeking an independence that can never make us happy. (This
sentiment was echoed by Ram Dass in the reading on suffering.)
Harville
Hendricks is a noted marriage therapist and author of “Getting the Love
You Want” and “Keeping the Love You Find.” Hendricks notes that modern
life has provided “exits” or ways for us to hide from each other that
didn’t exist 100 years ago. Television, video games, hours spent at the
computer, obsession with professional sports or other forms of
entertainment, even life revolving around the children’s activities, act
as distractions from the time couples need to develop or maintain
intimacy with one another, producing dissatisfaction, loneliness within
marriage, and a sky-rocketing divorce rate.
In “Ethics For
the New Millennium,” the Dalai Llama writes that in his travels through
the USA, he was frequently invited into the most luxurious mansions, and
those who resided within them wanted for nothing. Yet he felt loneliness
and sadness here in a way that he never feels it in poor little villages
of impoverished countries, including his native Nepal. He says members
of these tiny communities don’t feel the same psychological greed, envy
and deprivation the way we do, because everyone is in the same boat, and
keeping body and soul together is a common goal, whereas in Western
societies based on consumerism, we look to things to make us happy
instead of each other. We believe we need the latest IPod, the newest
fashions, and cable TV that will offer us five hundred channels. And we
suffer for it, because when the thrill of a new acquisition wears off,
and we again feel a vague, nagging sense of dissatisfaction, we look for
new products to buy, rather than examining the deficits in ourselves and
our intimate relationships. We ignore the relationships with the people
in our homes, to maintain our connection with the characters on our
favorite television shows.
The most
important reading I want to cite is a book that (for me) remains one of
the most powerful I’ve ever read. In Viktor Frankl’s “Man’s Search For
Meaning,” written after his years in the Nazi concentration camp of
Auschwitz, Frankl describes various responses to the suffering he
experienced and witnessed every day. The camp provided a situation of
the most severe deprivation imaginable; inadequate food, clothing,
shelter or warmth; no safety, no privacy, no wife or children, since
they were sent to separate parts of the camp. Every day, Frankl states,
someone threw himself against the electric fence to end a suffering and
hopelessness so profound that the sufferer chose not to go on. Every day
some camp member turned in another for a tiny infraction of an arbitrary
rule, in order to curry favor of a Nazi officer, and perhaps get an
extra ration of food. And yet, every day some prisoners gave what meager
food they had to a sick campmate in order to help that person get
stronger and survive another day. Every day some people resolved to hang
on in hopes of ultimately bearing witness and telling their story.
Even through
barbed wire, Frankl said, it was possible to witness a sunrise and
believe that God continued to exist. Even in a concentration camp, in
conditions of cruelty, inhumanity, suffering and deprivation beyond our
imagination, there was choice, and there was responsibility.
So I ask, what
does that mean for us? Those of us here, free to come and go as we
please, adequately fed and sheltered, closets and houses filled with
possessions? What are our choices? What are our responsibilities?
In all the readings I’ve mentioned, suffering is not simply the result
of the tragic consequences any individual may experience in a lifetime,
but rather by our reactions to these events. Do we reach out and try to
comfort one another, or do we decry our “victimhood”? Do we feel
alienated, isolated and alone, or do we see ourselves as part of a
community of both suffering and joy?
I’d like to end
by telling you of a study on suffering I recently read in a journal of
nursing in AIDS care. AIDS patients were asked to fill out a scale that
measured emotional/psychological suffering, and then divided in two
groups, those who would do volunteer work with other patients, and those
who would not. In every case, regardless of whether the volunteers did
direct one-to-one work, such as feeding or reading to a seriously ill
patient, or indirect work such as being involved in public advocacy for
HIV, in a post-test, the suffering of the volunteers was substantially
diminished and less than those who did not volunteer. The author
suspects the reasons may include the inevitability of finding someone
worse off than oneself, the feelings of usefulness and value that
accompany helping another, and having a sense of purpose, action and
control over one’s life, rather than feeling like a victim of one’s
circumstances.
And so my speech
does not end with exhorting you to volunteer, or to immediately run and
join the church’s Interfaith Community Services
group, although they would love to have you. I wish to tell
you that this is what I believe is the meaning of suffering: To connect
us to one another. To recognize and empathize with each other’s pain; to
offer compassion, aid, and outstretched hands in what is a normal part
of the human condition. To bind us together, and to find and offer hope
in our connection and our shared community.
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