To Help Carry the Suffering of an Other
The loneliness of suffering targets each person individually. When you suffer, no one can really experience what it is like for you. Beneath this isolation of the individual, is there some way in which suffering contributes to the light and creativity of creation? The poet and theologian Charles Williams had a theory of “co-inherence.” He understood creation as a web of order and dependency between all of us and God: “the web of diagrammatised glory.” Within this belonging a secret exchange of Spirit continually flows between us. A person has, then, the choice to take on the sufferings of another and carry them.
In modern times, this courageous kindness is exemplified in the action of Maximilian Kolbe, a Polish priest who was a prisoner in Auschwitz. A prisoner had escaped from Block 14. The Lagerkommandant said that ten would die for the one who had escaped. He chose ten men. One of them cried as he was chosen; he knew he would never see his wife and children again. Maximilian Kolbe stepped up and asked the commandant if he could take the man’s place. He was allowed. They were thrown in a death cell where he was tortured and eventually starved to death. This is a powerful story of the courage and kindness of taking the cross from the shoulder of another.
The Celtic tradition had similar beliefs. For instance, when a woman was in the throes and torture of childbirth, she might offer a waistcoat or some other item of her clothing to her man in the belief that she could transfer her pains to him. Or alternatively, the man might go out onto the farm and do some excruciatingly hard work in order to take some of the pain from his woman. Creation seems to have a secret symmetry in which we all participate without being aware of it. Suffering seems to awaken this and break our belonging. Yet, perhaps ironically, we are nearest then to the heart of intimacy.
Out of the Winter a New Spring
Parenthood is an ever-changing mystery. One of its most neglected regions is the time when the parents are old. Perhaps, in the last years of their lives, parents do actually carry some of the pain their children are now enduring in their own lives. There is a tendency in us to underestimate parents when we have outgrown them; they are old now and do not understand us. We tend to lock them inside the images they present externally. They circle around the same old stories, habits, and complaints. Perhaps there is something deeper going on behind the façade of ageing and helplessness. They hold our images in their hearts, and maybe they carry us in a tender way through certain difficulties and pain without our ever suspecting it.
In the land of suffering there is no certainty. We cannot understand suffering, because its darkness makes the light of our minds so feeble and thin. Yet we trust that there is great tenderness at the root of pain, that our suffering refines us, that its fire cleanses the false accretions from the temple of the soul. Out of the winter ground a new springtime of fresh possibility slowly arises. In its real presence suffering transfigures and enlarges the human being. We must be careful to distinguish it from the fabricated, self-imposed burdens we create out of our own falsity. Such burdens bring us nothing. They keep us circling in the same empty rooms of dead fact. They never open us to the fecundity of possibility. Real suffering calls us home in the end to where our hearts will be happy, our energy clear, and our minds open and alive. Furthermore, the experience of suffering calls our hearts to prayer; it becomes the only shelter. In this sense, suffering can purify our longing and call us forward into a new rhythm of belonging which will be flexible and free enough to embrace our growth. Real suffering is where the contradictions within us harmonize, where they give way to new streams of life and beauty. As a Zen monk said, “When one flower blooms, it is spring everywhere.”
A BLESSING
May you be blessed in the Holy Names of those who carry our pain up the mountain of transfiguration.
May you know tender shelter and healing blessing when you are called to stand in the place of pain.
May the places of darkness within you be turned towards the light.
May you be granted the wisdom to avoid false resistance and when suffering knocks on the door of your life, may you be able to glimpse its hidden gift.
May you be able to see the fruits of suffering.
May memory bless and shelter you with the hard-earned light of past travail, may this give you confidence and trust.
May a window of light always surprise you.
May the grace of transfiguration heal your wounds.
May you know that even though the storm might rage yet not a hair of your head will be harmed.
5 Prayer:
A Bridge Between Longing and Belonging
The Human Body Gathered in Prayer Configures Our Need
One of the most tender images is the human person at prayer. When the body gathers itself before the Divine, a stillness deepens. The blaring din of distraction ceases, and the deeper tranquillity within the heart envelops the body. To see people at prayer is a touching sight. For a while, they have become unmoored from the grip of society, work, and role. It is as if they have chosen to enter into a secret belonging carried within the soul; they rest in that inner temple impervious to outer control or claiming. A person at prayer also evokes the sense of vulnerability and fragility. Their prayer reminds us that we are mere guests on the earth, pilgrims who always walk on unsteady ground, carrying in earthen vessels multitudes of longing.
We look up to what is above. We look up in wonder and praise at the sun. At night our eyes long to decipher the face of the moon. Cathedral spires reach to the heavens and call our eyes towards the silent immensity of the Divine. Mountains and horizons lure our longing. We seem to believe that true reality could not be here among us; it has to be either above us or beyond us. In human society, we adopt the same perspective. We place our heroes and heroines on pedestals. They have power, charisma, beauty, and status. They are the ones we “look up to.” Yet pedestals are usually constructed with the most fragile psychological materials. Once we have elevated someone, we begin to chip away at the pedestal until we find the fissures that will eventually topple the hero. The popular press perfectly illustrates this point; it unmakes the idols it has made. Despite the desire to look up and to elevate people, one of the most touching and truthful configurations of human presence is the individual gathered in prayer.
To sit or kneel in prayer is visually our most appropriate physical presence. There is something right about this. It coheres with the secret structure of existence and reality, namely that we have a right to nothing. Everything that we are, think, feel, and have is a gift. We have received everything, even the opportunity to come to the earth and walk awake in this wondrous universe. There are many people who have worked harder than we, people who have done more kind and holy things than we, and yet they have been given such sorrow. The human body gathered in prayer mirrors our fragility and inner poverty, and it makes a statement of recognition of the divine generosity that is always blessing us. To be gathered in prayer is appropriate. It is a gracious, reverential, and receptive gesture. It states that at the threshold of each moment the gifts of breath and blessing come across to embrace us.