Suffering

It is highly likely that you are suffering at the moment from some physical or emotional pain. If not, consider yourself lucky. But if you are here, are some thoughts to explore.

Take a look at the questions below and then the quotes by Richard Rohr and see what insight you may get into your own suffering and your response to the suffering of others.

What has the church traditionally taught us about suffering?

How have the teachings of the church served us (or not) in times of suffering?

What should be our response to suffering (ours and others’)?

Do you believe that suffering is inevitable and character building?

Do you see suffering as a result of some sin you have committed or some other shortcoming?

Do you believe suffering teaches us valuable lessons and we should search for the lesson in our suffering?

Does suffering bring about positive results for our life? Should we be more open to enduring suffering?

While we are suffering, what is it that we need from others?

Is our own suffering a reminder to seek out and offer help to others in their suffering?

Is suffering just a random occurrence visited upon us by the universe with no particular significance?

Do you believe it is our role as humans to help others in their own suffering?

How do you deal with your own suffering? To whom do you reach out?

These are just a few of the questions we wrestle with when we think of suffering. Richard Rohr has devoted a week of his devotions to suffering and here are some quotes from those devotions:

All healthy religion shows you what to do with your pain, with the absurd, the tragic, the nonsensical, the unjust and the undeserved—all of which eventually come into every lifetime. If only we could see these “wounds” as the way through, as Jesus did, then they would become sacred wounds rather than scars to deny, disguise, or project onto others. I am sorry to admit that I first see my wounds as an obstacle more than a gift. Healing is a long journey.

If we cannot find a way to make our wounds into sacred wounds, we invariably become cynical, negative, or bitter.

We shouldn’t try to get rid of our own pain until we’ve learned what it has to teach. When we can hold our pain consciously and trustfully (and not project it elsewhere), we find ourselves in a very special liminal space. Here we are open to learning and breaking through to a much deeper level of faith and consciousness.

Our natural instinct is to try to fix pain, to control it, or even, foolishly, to try to understand it. The ego insists on understanding. That’s why Jesus praises a certain quality even more than love, and he calls it faith. It is the ability to stand in liminal space, to stand on the threshold, to hold the contraries, until we are moved by grace to a much deeper level and a much larger frame, where our private pain is not center stage but a mystery shared with every act of bloodshed and every tear wept since the beginning of time. Our pain is not just our own.

Knowing and naming brokenness is essential in the journey toward wholeness. We will not be well by denying the wrongs that we carry within us as nations and religions and communities. Nor will we be well by downplaying them or projecting them onto others. The path to wholeness will take us not around such awareness but through it, confronting the depths of our brokenness.

In July 1942, the same month that the Nazis began their first big street roundups of Jews in Amsterdam, Etty Hillesum wrote in her diary, “I am with the hungry, with the ill-treated and the dying every day, but I am also with the jasmine and with that piece of sky beyond my window; . . . It is a question of living life from minute to minute and taking suffering into the bargain. And it is certainly no small bargain these days.” Etty was looking at suffering straight in the face. Her friends, her family, and she herself were under the sentence of extermination. It was now beginning to be carried out. And yet Etty held within herself the “handsome mixture” of pain at the plight of her people, and of what one people can do to another people, along with a continued delight in the gift of life and its ineffable wonder. “I have looked our destruction, our miserable end, which has already begun in so many small ways in our daily life, straight in the eye . . .”

After reading these quotes and the questions above, what comfort can you find in dealing with your own suffering? What can you offer others as a result of suffering you have endured?