Suffering Brings Compassion
One of the great fruits of suffering is compassion. When you have felt and experienced pain, it refines the harshness that may be in you. Tolstoy said that our great duty as humans was to sow the seed of compassion in each other’s hearts. This happens in friendship. If you are in pain and your friend knows pain, you feel the kinship and understanding that can really shelter you. Understanding is one of the few shelters that are capable of standing in the suffering place.
I was in China once, and I visited many Buddhist temples. My favourite Buddha was one I discovered at the back of the altar in one of the temples. He was a Buddha with hundreds of hands, and in each hand there was an eye. I asked a young Buddhist monk who this Buddha was. The monk explained that this was a Buddha who had lived a wonderful life. He had reached such a level of soul-refinement that he was about to go into Nirvana; before crossing this threshold he took one look back and saw that there was still one person suffering in the world. He was then given the choice, either to go into Nirvana or go back to help the suffering one. He chose to come back. The very moment he made that choice, he was raised immediately into Nirvana. He was given a hand to help everyone who was suffering. And he was given an eye in each hand to see where the help and shelter were needed. This Buddha is a beautiful image of enlightened compassion which has strength, wisdom, and enlightenment within it.
Illness: The Land of Desolation
When suffering comes, the darkness has arrived. The light is out. Even your faith falls away. When you are at the heart of great pain, you enter a land of sheer desolation. A strange and strong poem by the Conamara poet Caitlīn Maude captures this desolation:
Between the rosary
And the thirty acres
The pearl of your belief fell
On a land without blessing.
Translated by the author
The land of suffering feels like a land that blessing has never touched. Illness is a form of suffering that quickly takes us into the land without blessing. Illness is a terrible visitor. We never value or even see some things in our lives until we are just about to lose them. This is particularly true of health. When we are in good health, we are so busy in the world that we never even notice how well we are. Illness comes and challenges everything about us. It unmasks all pretension. When you are really ill, you cannot mask it. Illness also tests the inner fibre and luminosity of your soul. It is very difficult to take illness well. Yet it seems that if we treat our illness as something external that has singled us out, and we battle and resist it, the illness will refuse to leave. On the other hand, we must not identify ourselves with our illness. A visit to a hospital often shows that very ill people are more alive to life’s possibilities than the medical verdict would ever allow or imagine.
When we learn to see our illness as a companion or friend, it really does change the way the illness is present. The illness changes from a horrible intruder to a companion who has something to teach us. When we see what we have to learn from an illness, then often the illness can gather itself and begin to depart. A friend of mine has been through an awful illness in the past three years. It was a strange viral illness. He lost his walk and his sight for a period. I was overwhelmed by the gentleness with which he was able to meet this hostile destroyer. Of course, he focused his mind firmly on the horizon of healing and tried to shelter in the luminosity of his soul. He did not constantly quarrel with the illness or turn it into an unworthy enemy. Sometimes, when you see a thing as the enemy, you only reinforce its presence and power over you. He befriended his illness; he travelled with it, remaining very mindful and holding on as far as he could to the shelter of blessing. Well, the illness took him on an amazing journey over mountains that he could never have anticipated. He has returned now and has entered health again. But he is a changed person. He has learned so much. His soul now enjoys a quiet depth; his gentleness has grown. His presence enriches you when you meet him.
To Befriend the Places of Pain
When different places within us are in pain, we should extend the care of deep friendship towards them. We should not leave them isolated under siege in pain. A friend of mine went to the hospital to have a hysterectomy. A priest friend came to visit her on the evening before her operation. She was anxious and vulnerable. He sat down, and they began to talk. He suggested to her that she have a conversation with her womb. To talk to her womb as a friend. She could thank her womb for making her a mother. To thank it for all her different children who had begun there. The body, mind, and Spirit of each child had been tenderly formed in that kind darkness. She could remember the different times in her life when she was acutely aware of her own presence, power, and vulnerability as a mother. To thank her womb for the gifts and the difficulties. To explain to it how it had become ill and having it removed was necessary to her continuing life as a mother. She was to undertake this intimate ritual of leave-taking before the surgeons came in the morning to take her womb away. She did this ritual with tenderness and warmth. The operation was a great success. Her conversation with her womb changed the whole experience. The power was not with the doctors or the hospital. The experience did not have the clinical, short-circuit edge of so much mechanical and anonymous hospital efficiency. The experience became totally her own, the leave-taking of her own womb. When a part of your body is ill, it must be a lonely experience for it. If we integrate its experience and embrace it in the circle of recognition and care, it alters the presence of the illness and pain. Externally, we should endeavour to remain alert to others and their distress at our condition. How often do we see sick people comfort their comforters?
The dark visitation of illness needs to be carefully encountered, otherwise the illness can become a permanent tenant. A friend of mine was involved in a terrible car accident and was seriously injured. One of her legs was badly damaged. She told me of being in hospital and thinking how her body and her life were terminally damaged. The darkness of this realization gripped her totally. She spent days locked into the prospect of her bleak future. She became addicted to the wounding of her body. She felt that she would never again be able to shake herself free of this burden. Then one day, it hit her, almost like a ray of light through a dark sky, that this was the wound that would make her a life prisoner. When she began to see the power it was assuming, she realized with desperation that she could not permit it permanent tenancy. So she began to distance herself from the wound. Gradually, over a period, she regained her confidence and poise and came back to healing.