How Is the Hard-Earned Harvest Divided?
One of the most haunting questions is, How are the fruits of suffering divided? This question touches on the old question of the one and the many. Though there are billions of people in the world, we are all part of the one individuality. We are all one. Each of us is intimately linked with every other person. Though most of the others are strangers to us, who knows the secret effect that we have on each other? “No one lives for himself alone,” the Bible says. The pathways of causality and continuity are hidden in the world of soul. Perhaps the visitation of suffering in your life is bringing healing and light to the heart of someone far away, whom you will never know or meet. When lonely suffering is courageously embraced and integrated, it brings new light and shelter to our world and to the human family. This is the invisible work of the Great Spirit, who divides and distributes the precious harvest of suffering. Gifts and possibilities unexpectedly arrive on the tables of those in despair and torment. This perspective brings some consoling meaning to the isolation of pain. When the flames of suffering sear you, you are not suffering for yourself alone. Though you feel like a nobody and you are locked into a grey nowhere, you were perhaps ironically never nearer to the heart of human intimacy. When we receive the courage to stand gracefully in the place of pain, we mediate for others the gifts that help heal their torment. Through the fog of forsakenness, a new shoreline of belonging becomes clear.
A haunting poem by Fernando Pessoa captures the searing uncertainty of pain.
I KNOW, I ALONE
I know, I alone
How much it hurts, this heart
With no faith nor law
Nor melody nor thought.
Only I, only I,
And none of this can I say
Because feeling is like the sky—
Seen, nothing in it to see.
The Mystery of Transfiguration
Part of the beauty of Christianity is the utter realism with which it engages suffering. At the heart of Christianity is suffering embraced and transfigured. There is a depth of meaning to the term “transfiguration.” It means so much more than mere change. When a thing “changes,” there is the suggestion that it is no longer itself. A thing “transfigured” is more fully itself than ever, and more: it is irradiated with beauty, whether it is a vase painted by Cézanne or a turn of phrase that comes to new life in a great poem. Often you see this in a simple gesture—a great actor can utterly transfigure such a gesture. Often in the films of Kieslowski the camera moves from the biography of the drama to focus on an old person, possibly a beggar, shuffling laboriously along a street. In the context, the moment becomes a deft window into an unknown and unrecognized world. At its most sublime intensity, transfiguration is utter vision; no one can stay long on the Mountain of Transfiguration, but if you have ever been there, you cannot suppress this seeing without damaging yourself. For thousands of years, the Cross has been a symbol of the transfiguration of pain. It is a powerful, touching, and sacred symbol. In ancient times, the cross was a sign of shame. People were crucified as criminals. The glory, light, and healing of Christianity earn their way through the fire-path of great suffering. This is the profound tension; here light and dark, suffering and healing are sistered. The fire-path of suffering is the final gathering-place of all the ideas and intentions of Jesus.
Jesus is a fascinating man. The book I would give anything to read has never been written; it would be the autobiography of Jesus. What was his life really like? What did he dream of? What happened on the day when it finally dawned on him that he was from the heart of the Divine? What did he do for the rest of that afternoon? Jesus had a beautiful mind and a wonderful imagination. He was deeply creative; he was a carpenter and a poet. His practice of compassion was subversive. He never judged anyone. I always imagine that Jesus had beautiful eyes. All upon whom he gazed must have felt the infinite gentleness of the Divine suffusing their hearts. T. S. Eliot speaks of some “infinitely gentle…infinitely suffering thing.” Something about Jesus’ presence offered people a new life. Religion has often forgotten this and fashioned an image of God which only brings fear and guilt on us. Given the defensive and self-perpetuating tendency of all institutions, it is doubtful that any system could ever embody Jesus’ infinite gentleness and subversive perception.
There is hardly any other figure in the Western tradition who has been so thoroughly domesticated as Jesus. He was a free spirit who had a lovely wildness in him. Every time religious institutions of the time tried to box him in, he danced away from their threats and trick questions effortlessly. It is enthralling that there are twenty-six or twenty-seven years of his life about which we know nothing. Only in the last few years of his life did he begin to present himself as God. It would be fascinating to have the possibility of excavating the inner landscapes of his solitude to see what was dawning on him. How such tender and wild light was brightening in the clay of his heart. There must have been great disturbance and excitement in his mind in those days of such inner quickening. His decision to take it on, to let his life and individuality be driven by this, must have had the inevitability of destiny. Could he glimpse the lonely consequences this choice would have? He would take upon his young body, gentle face, and unique mind the pain, loneliness, and suffering of the world. He would become a thing with no beauty—a thing that would bring sadness to every eye that looked upon it. He would become the suffering servant of life’s most merciless negativity—and thus achieve a beauty beyond conventional understanding to which poets, artists, and mystics have responded for two millennia.
He would come into this destiny not as a victim or accidental martyr. No. Through choice he gathered into the circle of his heart the pain of the world. This is horribly evident in his inner torture and fear in Gethsemane. Something awful happened in that garden. He sweated blood there. He was overcome with doubt. Everything was taken from him. Here the anguished scream of human desolation reached out for divine consolation. And from the severe silence of the heavens, no sheltering echo returned. This is what the Cross is: that bleak, empty place where no certainty can ever settle. His friends betrayed and abandoned him. Christ explores the endless heart of loss with such gentle and vulnerable courage.
Behind the Dark a Subtle Brightening
The Stations of the Cross are poignant places of pathos. They are a series of icons which show how pain focuses in human life. The Cross is a unique axis in time. It is where time and timelessness intersect. All past, present, and future pain were physically carried up the Hill of Calvary in this Cross. This darkness is carried up the hill so that it could face the new dawn of Resurrection and become transfigured. In essence, the Cross and the Resurrection are one thing. They are not subsequent to each other. The Resurrection is the inner light hidden at the heart of darkness in the Cross. On Easter morning, this light explodes onto the world. This is the mystery of the Eucharist. The Eucharist is a fascinating place; it embraces Calvary and Resurrection within the one circle. In Christian terms, there is no way to light or glory except through the sore ground under the dark weight of the Cross.
The Cross is a lonely forsaken symbol. Good Friday is always deeply lonesome. There is an eerie and disturbing sadness at the heart of this day. On Good Friday, the pain of the world is returning to the Cross, awaiting transfiguration again. The Cross is an ancient symbol. Expressed lyrically, there is cruciform structure to every pain, difficulty, and sadness. In this sense, the Cross is not an external object that belongs far away on a hill in Jerusalem. Rather, the shape of the Cross is internal to the human heart. Every heart has a cruciform shape. When you look at the different conflicts in your life, you find that they are placed where the contradictions cross each other. At the nerve of contradiction, you have the centre of the Cross, the nail of pain where two intimate but conflicting realities criss-cross. To view the standing Cross is to see how it embraces all directions. The vertical beam reaches from the lowest depth of clay to the highest zenith of divinity, the horizontal beam stretches the breadth of the world. The promise to each of us is that we will never be called to walk the lonely path of suffering without seeing the footprints ahead of us which lead eventually over the brow of the hill where Resurrection awaits us.