There is a belief nowadays that true growth can only happen when all the optimum conditions prevail. If a person has had a difficult childhood or has been hurt, there is a presumption that his life is eternally shadowed and his growth severely limited. Someone once asked a wonderful actress from which well she drew her creativity and how it was that she never got lost in the Hollywood glitter. She said, “All my life I have had the blessing of an extremely hard childhood behind me.” This is not to wish difficulty on anyone or naïvely to praise it, yet if we can embrace difficulty, great fruits can grow from it. The lovely things that happen bless us and confirm us in who we are. It is through difficulty and opposition that we define ourselves. The mind needs something against which it can profile and discover itself. Opposition forces our abilities to awaken; it tests the temper and substance of who we are. Difficulty is a severe looking-glass; yet in it we often glimpse sterling aspects of our soul that we would otherwise never have seen or even have known we possessed. Not that what happens to us is in the end decisive, but rather how we embrace and integrate it. Often, the most wonderful gifts arrive in shabby packaging.
In terms of history, every people goes through terrible times of suffering. Irish history carries a great weight of pain. It is difficult to come to terms with such lonely cultural memory. The theologian J. B. Metz speaks of the “dangerous memory” of suffering. There is a tendency now in revisionist history to explain the past in terms of movements and trends of the contemporary time. This is inevitably reductionist. The suffering of the people is forgotten; they become faceless, mere ciphers of a trend or dynamic of history. To sanitize history is to blaspheme against memory. Equally, to become obsessed with the past is to paralyse the future.
The Sense of Meaning Vanishes
The devastation of suffering eclipses the sense of meaning. As Cordelia says at the end of King Lear, “We are not the first who with best meaning have incurred the worst.” People who are sent on to the dark ground of suffering know how all the normal certainties collapse. Painstakingly, you have to begin again to reconstruct some minimal shelter for your burdened heart and your cleft soul. Pain breaks your innocence. It shatters your trust in the world you knew. Now you know how destructive and lonesome life can become. No one shouts for joy when she feels the ground of pain opening beneath her and exclaims, “God, I know exactly why this came now. Is it not wonderful that I am totally miserable? I will carry this for a few weeks. Afterwards, I will be happier than I have ever been.” If you can do that, then it is not suffering at all, or else you have actually broken through to sainthood!
Suffering seems to be a frightening totality. When it comes, it puts you in the place of unknowing. All the old knowing of the conscious mind becomes redundant. The leave-taking of your surface knowing often allows the deeper knowing within you to emerge. The experience of suffering can free a person to be in the world in a completely fresh and vital way. The intention of suffering may be to break the shell of ego with which each of us deftly surrounds ourselves. That we spin a cocoon around ourselves is completely understandable. We are so small and fragile. The universe is too big for us. Our inner worlds are too immense. The possibilities are endless and the dangers too frightening. Even if you had kind parents and a magic childhood, there are still places in your heart that have grown hard in the rough and tumble of experience. There are few people walking through the world without the shell of ego. Suffering makes an incision in that shell and breaks it open, so that a new hidden life within can actually emerge.
Farm life often shows how shells give way to reveal new life. We had hens at home. They would hatch every year. As a child, I always found it fascinating to see the eggs when the little chicks were ready to come out of the shell. At that time, you would hear the tiniest twitter of knocking against the wall of the shell from within. Then ever so slowly, the new little wet chick would force its way out and gradually break the shell that was its womb until then, so that it could come out into the new world which awaited it. Similarly, suffering helps us break the shell of ego from within, enabling us to release a new dimension of ourselves which is now too large and too bright for the small darkness in which it has been growing; it could no longer breathe and live. Real suffering breaks open the smallness within you and liberates you into larger and more hospitable places in life. It enlarges your belonging.
“When Sorrows Come, They Come Not Single Spies, but in Battalions.”
Suffering always brings a myriad of questions we cannot answer: Why me? What did I do to deserve this? Why was what was so precious in my life so abruptly taken from me? Will I be able to survive this at all? How will I live from now on? When you are standing in the place of pain, none of these questions can be answered. Suffering often resembles fire. The flames of pain sear and burn you. The metaphor of the flame is illuminating because suffering often exhibits the exponential rapidity of flames; the pain can suddenly multiply within you. Like fire, suffering is a swift and powerful force. There is no distance between the spark and the flame. There is a hunger and passion in fire which totally take over, transforming something that was solid and stable into powdered ashes. Often the flame of pain can have a cleansing effect and burn away the dross that has accumulated around your life. It is difficult to accept that what you are losing is what is used, what you no longer need. The Daoist tradition has a wonderful understanding that in the human body and Spirit there is always a wintertime, when something is dying and falling away. There is always simultaneously a springtime, when something new is coming to life. When you allow your soul to work on that threshold where the old can fall away and the new arrive, you come into rhythm with your destiny.
The New Window Is Open
Suffering is the sister of your future possibility. Suffering can open a window in the closed wall of your life and allow you to glimpse the new pastures of creativity on which you are called to walk and wander. But this window often opens only when the suffering begins to recede. While you are going through the dark valley, it is almost impossible to understand what is happening to you. The light that suffering brings is always a gift that it leaves as it departs. While you are in pain, you can see and understand nothing. The flame of suffering burns away our certainties; it also burns out the falsity within us. Each of us lives with a certain set of illusions that are very dear to us. We use these illusions as consoling lenses through which we view the world. An illusion is always a false lens; it can never show us the truth or reality of a situation. Suffering cleanses us of the falsities that have accumulated in our hearts. So often our minds are like magpies. We pick up and take on everything that glitters, even though it may have no substance. In a magpie’s nest, one finds random collections of colourful but useless debris. The fire of suffering cleanses completely the falsities to which our longing has attached itself. This liberates us from the emptiness of false belonging and allows us to belong in a real and truthful way in our lives again. Truth is difficult to reach and endure, but it is always the doorway to new freedom and life. As Shakespeare says in Othello, “This sorrow’s heavenly / It strikes where it doth love.”