When Suffering Breaks Open the Beauty Within
Throb
You cut me
into pieces and
put them in separate corners
of the room
each part
placed under pillows
or into water
I grow from this darkness
like starfish
my fingers know the shape to take again
I am always moved into an acute sense of extreme sorrow when a friend calls or writes and shares the injustice of this journey. Spiritual people would eschew the idea of the luck of the draw and I personally hate the word luck. But I am taken aback at whom, in this life, suffers. When that suffering and injustice is at such profound levels I am inclined to want to step in and take upon myself some of the shear magnitude of its weightiness.
But in most cases, these brief moments of carrying “the other’s” brokenness only prolongs the inevitable, especially when it comes to sickness, painful relationships, and financial weariness. A prolonged episode of illness, emotional disruption, financial woes and relational estrangement either takes you out or takes you in.
I have carried wounds for years and be they the metaphorical “thorn in the flesh” or my inability or unwillingness to “let go” I am not sure. But I am inclined to begin to see suffering from an entirely different perspective. When suffering takes me out I am a victim and constantly recite the litany of wrongs done to me. When I am taken in, suffering becomes a liminal space that offers me an entrance to another way of naming and living into the pain and limitation that suffering brings.
I am beginning to regard suffering as nature’s hidden informant as to who and what is really in control. So much of my retelling of the cause and origins of my broken estate are indeed reflections of something that is true, did happen, and did bring with it great suffering. But in truth, I have little control over the next moment in life thus suffering is a constant reminder as to my ultimate unprotectedness. I am not in control.
Thus, when control is no longer possible, the ego discovers how fragile and ill formed it really is. I believed I was invincible until of course I discovered how wafer thin my heart really is. I so want this life to pour out its bounty, its unconditional love, its riches, its abundance, but alas, much of my experience relates to its lack, its smallness, and its limitations.
When this need to control is drawn into an open area of the soul and seen from a new perspective, it is clear that the very thing I counted dangerous, dark, and unjust may very well be an informant of a mysteriously provocative nature. I am being informed (against my will mind you) of the deepest reality, one my soul has known but only now, as I give up this need to control, do I see, hear, and know.
Now the very depression that took me out brings me in. The very illness I counted a curse begins to bless. Not in some inverted sick manner in which the reality of suffering is seen as God’s gift. No, it is in the truth I am bigger than my body, bigger than my inability to see and hear. I am being held, sustained, and regarded with love by something deep within me that has been there since the foundations of the earth. As a Christ follower I believe it to be His very presence, His nature reflected in me.
Now this cancer can announce a new kingdom being birthed. Now this relationship once held together with fear and presumption is seen through the eyes of the heart with intentions and plans that are deeper and truer than before. Now this suffering announces to the soul the very nature of all life. While we are whole in our minds, truthfully we are being thrown into the universe with a mysterious love that gives us eternal worth. Do I merely imagine this? Of course. making it all the more real to those who see the imaginal as a gift.
I have a place in this world. Suffering can root me in that place and tell me of my limited time in this current state. I may be eternal but this permutation, this sojourn has its due date if you will. Much like fruit at a marketplace, I am meant to live this life into its fullness while the ripeness is available.
Ironically, for many “religious people” the very impediments to a renewal or regeneration of soul (deep awareness) is when my own spiritual practices now induce blindness, lethargy, and joyless repetition. This is of course one of the spaces of the dark night of the soul Saint John of the Cross talked about. He tells us that there will come a time when even our “faith” stands in the way of real surrender, real healing, and real restoration.
Recently I have had to allow many ways of engaging the “holy” die away and give up the control in a sacramental act of surrender. I am beginning to see the emptying as vital as the filling. There are no practices that manipulate the heavens, move the forces of nature, call upon the angelic hosts to hop to it as if they listened to my every whim. God is not conjured, life is not manipulated, suffering is not punishment, and I am not what happens to me. So my demands cast upon the backdrop of the universe as rants or mantras move nothing but my lips. This is not prayer. It is controlling presumption. There is no surrender here. In this state of mind and heart or even prayer, I am still in control, only naming it with religious terms.
Surrender then, deep and profound, is an emptying never done by the ego. In fact, the well-defined and protected state of self we regard as “our real self” is actually a composite held together with metaphysical scotch tape. David Benner said it well. “The spiritual journey is not intended to make us into angels.” We are all flimsy beings ready at a moment’s notice to fall a part in a heap of self-pity and disillusionment. Not many spiritual giants in this realm.
So today I start from where I am. If that is in sickness then that is the very place I need to make sacred. If cancer or divorce or betrayal or financial disasters are in view than let them inform the moment and allow the soul to speak into the real. This makes this calamity redemptive by the shear force of the pain. I must surrender.
Oddly enough, now new companions, fellow sojourners, begin to pop up along the route. Fellow sufferers they are, unimpressed with the control so many religious people display. Theirs’ is a beautiful fragility born of sorrow and prayer. The kind of prayer that seldom is heard or made articulate through the spoken word. Listen to the stillness of suffering within your own heart. You are truly at home here. And…there is love behind the doors.
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