Post-modern culture is deeply lonely. This loneliness derives in large part from the intense drive to avoid suffering and pain and the repudiation of commitment. People relentlessly attempt to calm their inner turbulence by all manner of therapy and spirituality. They seek refuge in each new programme or method as if it offered final resolution. Yet so many of these programmes have no earth beneath the seductive surface. They can offer no growth, nor enable a person to identify the pain at the root of identity. Such external tamperings never manage to reach or embrace the inner loss which is a natural part of being a human person. Every heart has to manage the emptiness of its own dark. Carl Jung suggested that neurosis was unmet suffering. This dialogue with your inner loss is slow and painful. Yet to avoid or sidestep this necessary pain only brings a slow, seeping sense of loneliness that continues to shadow and haunt your life. The Romanian philosopher E. M. Cioran said: “Suffering is the cause of consciousness. (Dostoyevsky) Men belong to two categories: those who have understood this, and the others.”
Why Are You So Vulnerable?
Why is the individual so easily a target of suffering and pain? Why are we so exposed and vulnerable? First, we are vulnerable because each of us is housed in a body. This little clay tent is a sacramental place. The body is in constant conversation with creation; it allows us through our senses to smell the roses, to see the waves and stars, and to read forever the hieroglyphics of the human countenance. The body is also very unsheltered. You are surrounded by infinite space without physical shelter. This is why from the very beginning humans have sought secure belonging in caves and then in houses. The desire for strong physical shelters mirrors and reveals how space is open, and anything can approach the temple of your life from any side. Home offers shelter from the threat of contingency. Yet home, too, is vulnerable. No walls are strong enough to keep the destructive visitations abroad. The human body is a fragile home.
Second, you are vulnerable because you are an individual. To be an individual is to be different. Each individual is separate. There is a dark logic to experience which often seems to target individuality. Suffering is suffering because it is an anonymous and destructive force. It has a darkness which vision cannot penetrate. Suffering happens when this bleak and opaque anonymity invades your individuality. A dark force of pain surrounds the unique signature of your presence. Suffering would be more manageable if its pain were restricted merely to the surface of one’s life or at least to some one corner of one’s individuality. Some religious theories suggest that suffering belongs only to the area of the non-self. If this were true, it would lessen the fever of pain that suffering brings. Alas, one’s individuality is not constructed in such convenient compartments. Your heart, mind, and body are a unity, each place within you intimately one with every other. Pain in one part of the body affects every other. Your nervous system is the miracle that makes of all the different parts one living and feeling presence. There is something about pain and suffering that is pervasive. It suffuses your full presence.
Third, we are vulnerable because we live in time. We cannot control time. The tides of time can throw absolutely anything up on the shore of your life. It is amazing how successfully we repress the recognition of our total vulnerability. We have learned to forget that any moment can bring an abrupt and irreversible change of destiny. As you are reading this, there are people who woke up happy this morning and are now receiving news that will utterly change their lives. Suddenly, death is a gathering presence. Others are coming under the blade of disappointment. Forever more, they will remember this day as the day that divided their life in two. The time before will be looked back on as a time of unrealized contentment, the time after as the time of carrying a new loss that turned meadows of possibility into a desert.
Fourth, we are vulnerable because of the destiny that is given to each of us. Each person who walks through this world is called at some time to carry some of the weight of pain that assails the world. To help carry some of this pain a little farther for others is a precious calling, though it is a lonely, sad, and isolating time in one’s life. Yet often, when the suffering has lightened, you may glimpse some of the good that it brought. We are all deeply connected with each other. In some strange way, we all belong with each other in the unfolding and articulation of the one human story. Each of us is secretly active in weaving the tapestry of Spirit. When you see a Persian tapestry, it looks beautiful. Yet underneath, the tapestry is a mesh of various rough threads. Perhaps this is part of our difficulty in understanding the sore weave of pain that often sears our life. In terms of understanding, we remain at the back and see only the raw weave. Perhaps there is something beautiful being woven, but we are unable in this life to see much of the hidden aesthetic of pain.
The Pain of Exposure
Vulnerability is an infinitely precious thing. There is nothing as lonely as that which has become hardened. When your heart hardens, your life has become numb. Yeats says, “Too long a sacrifice can make a stone of the heart.” Though vulnerability leaves one open to pain, one should somehow still be ultimately glad of vulnerability. Part of our origin lies in the Darwinian kingdom of species competition and adaptation. Some instinct within us knows that we must be careful about exposure. We cannot let the heart be too easily seen, or we will get hurt. Everyone gets hurt. The extreme response to hurt is to close the heart. Yet to make yourself invulnerable is to lose something very precious. You put yourself outside the arena of risk where possibility and growth are alive. Vulnerability risks hurt, disappointment, and failure. Yet it remains a vital opening to change and to truth. We should not see our vulnerability as something we need to hide or get over. The slow and difficult work of living out your vulnerability holds you in the flow of life. It is great when we can learn to behold our vulnerability as one of the most important gates of blessing into the inner world. In giving love we are most human and most vulnerable.
The Loss of Spontaneity
In the Bible practically all the real points of novelty, change, and growth are related to points of vulnerability. When you are vulnerable, you are exposed externally; what comes towards you can really hurt you. When you are in harmony, you can take untold pressure. You can carry many burdens with grace. When you suffer, your sense of rhythm deserts you. Perhaps it is only then that you become aware of how deeply your life is normally blessed by unnoticed spontaneity. A natural spontaneity always holds you in the dance of your soul. When that spontaneity dries up, you fall out of the embrace and onto the rough gravel of deliberateness. You can no longer depend on your natural presence. When you really suffer, you learn the awful necessity of deliberateness. Even the smallest act must be willed, and it costs you disproportionate energy. It is the last straw that breaks the camel’s back. I heard this as a child, and it always struck me as quite incredible that one more straw could have such a destructive effect on the strong back of the camel. The last straw was surely no heavier than all the prior straws. It was the fact of the camel’s vulnerability and the cumulative weight of all the prior straws that were so destructive. When you carry a great weight of pain, you can be knocked over by a feather. Cut off from your spontaneity, it is extremely difficult to stand at all on your own ground. It takes a constant renewal of energy to hold yourself to your own routine. After a day of suffering, you are totally exhausted and empty, and most probably you cannot look forward to the ease of sleep either. The serpents of anxiety never sleep; they poison the innocence of the night.