Transforming Suffering

Given by James Covington on January 21st, 2007

I recently came across some interesting statistics:

  • In our lifetime (70 years or so), on average, we will spend six days and two hours blowing our noses.
  • We’ll spend four months and five days waiting in traffic.
  • We’ll spend eight months opening junk mail.
  • We’ll spend a year looking for lost stuff and three years in meetings. (And for some of us here at the church, I think that number is low.)
  • We’ll spend two years and seven months watching commercials.
  • We’ll spend five years waiting in line.
  • And we will spend five years, eight months and 15 days worrying.

Those are sobering statistics. Think about it. Five years waiting in line… and I wonder what that means for those of us who always seem to choose the slow line… How insufferable can life be?

Woody Allen would probably put himself near the top of a list as someone who has suffered a great deal—at least suffered in public. And I’m sure others would be quick to point out that Allen has also caused his share of suffering. Here’s what he has to say:

"To love is to suffer. To avoid suffering one must not love. But then one suffers from not loving. Therefore, to love is to suffer; not to love is to suffer; to suffer is to suffer. To be happy is to love. To be happy then, is to suffer but suffering makes one unhappy. Therefore, to be happy one must love or love to suffer or suffer from too much happiness."

Not the most optimistic assessment of life I’ve ever heard, but he makes a point. No matter where we go or what we do life will have its share of suffering. The dictionary definition of “suffer,” by the way, is to endure pain, distress and death.

Of course, sometimes there is nothing subtle at all about our suffering. Sometimes life just throws us for a loop. We are faced with an illness either in ourselves or within our family. We have lost someone we love. We are faced with the reality of hatred in the world as we witness in the Middle East and Darfur. Such horrendous suffering in those places should bring some perspective to our own, don’t you think? Yet, we may not all have the fate of Job, but we may find ourselves asking God or if not God, the universe, why this is happening or why life has to be this way. We may find ourselves feeling alone in the world. Sometimes angry. Or hopeless.

And even if we haven’t experienced very hard things in life, all of us have had the experience of not getting what we wanted. Or we have had to deal with something we got but didn’t ask for.

One of the lessons I have learned as a minister and psychotherapist is that people are carrying around all kinds of burdens. You may not know it to meet them, but as I get to know people’s stories, I’m aware of all that we bring with us. The truth is that suffering is the great equalizer. Nobody escapes it. Suffering, along with death, is probably the thing we all have in common. We can’t escape either one. So the question becomes: how do we respond to these inevitable realities of life?

The first, I think, is with a natural sense of empathy towards someone else. We see in them someone who is hurting and there is a strong impulse in us to reach out and help them. It is something that comes instantly and it is something we want to do. We see someone in pain and we want to reach out and do something. We hurt inside knowing that there may not be much we can do.

But because this can be hard, there are ways we learn to cope—ways that can keep us at a distance from our own suffering. We may sometimes deal with suffering by pushing it away as much as we can. We’ll try to build walls up around us. But we can only build walls so high. And as we put our effort into keeping those walls up, in the end we might suffer all the more because of it. Maybe what we need to do is to try to not push it away. Maybe what we need to do is simply try to stay there with it, and to see where it takes us.

Several years ago I learned a lesson that has been very important to me in the ministry.

I was serving as a chaplain at a hospital in Louisville, Ky where I attended seminary. On one of my first days there, I met an elderly woman named Frances. She was a tall, beautiful woman, and I remember how her red hair framed her long face. She liked to talk and I didn’t know her long before I was told of the importance of her Irish—make that Irish Catholic—roots.

The two of us hit it off. She was a bit skeptical of my ministry at first, because I looked so young, and I was. “My, my,” she said, “aren’t you a young whippersnapper? How did you become a minister so young?”

She became my favorite patient. We seemed to talk about all kinds of things, although not necessarily things that were all that profound. I really didn’t feel like I was doing a whole lot for her. It was just good to be together.

She was in the hospital because of some problem with her stomach. That led to one thing and then another. Her stay in the hospital went from what was originally a few days to a couple weeks and then a couple months. She became more and more ill and her case just seemed to get more and more complicated. As she encountered one thing after another, she was a real trooper. I knew that she was in a great deal of pain and the doctors were not sure if she would make it, but nothing seemed to get her down.

This went on and then one day I walked into her room and she didn’t respond to my greeting. She just looked up at me with a blank expression and said she didn’t know what to do. She said she had lost hope and that she was just sick and tired of sitting there and suffering, waiting for the next health problem to come up. She looked up at me and the usual spark that I was used to seeing was not there.

I was terrified. This woman was the Rock of Gibraltar. I had never seen her like this. I didn’t know what to do.

I sat by her bed. I took her hands and asked if she would like to pray. I spoke some words, but then we just sat there together in silence. That just seemed like what needed to happen, even though I was afraid that I should be doing something different. But soon the fear left and we were just there together. I’m not sure how long it was, probably half an hour, maybe longer. Time seemed to stop. Finally, I left the room not knowing what to expect.

The next day I went in and I was worried about what I would find. But there she was, sitting up in a chair for the first time in several days. She had a big smile across her face. It seemed that she had taken a turn for the better. And she really had. After some ten weeks in the hospital, within a couple days she was ready to go home. She would later credit the time that I was with her, holding her hand, being silent. She said that something happened for her in that time and that she had made a decision that she was going to move through the suffering and get out of there.

I don’t know what happened between us, but it taught me a lot about ministry. I came to realize that most of the time when I was going into someone’s room, I really didn’t want to be there. I was afraid. I was afraid of the suffering I might encounter. I was afraid that I wouldn’t know what to do. I was afraid I might not remain in control of the situation.

But that day I learned that it was okay to not have the right thing to say, and that it was okay to just be with someone in their suffering. I didn’t have to try to take care of it; I simply had to try to be there.

Being with suffering—our own or someone else’s—is not always easy, I know. Too often we will go to great lengths to avoid it. But suffering is part of life and if we can stay with it, it is through the suffering that we will find our way.

When the Buddhists say that all of life is dukkah, the most literal translation is suffering. All of life is suffering. But the better translation might be the word impermanence. It is that we cannot count on things staying the same. In fact, the one thing we can count on is that, no matter what else happens, things will change. Even in seeing a child grow up there are those moments when we realize that another chapter is over and we will not have that chapter again.

All things are in flux and we are constantly asked to give and receive. It is when we get attached to things the way they are that we will get into trouble. Our job is to try to see them for what they are in the present and remain open to the future and be ready to let go as the stream of life carries us on to the next bend.

In this we are asked to let go of our fears and simply to stay with what is. We are asked to let go of what we want to have happen and simply to be with what is happening.

In Ram Dass’ book How Can I Help, a caregiver tells her story of working in a neonatal intensive care unit. She tells about how at first she wanted to keep herself at a distance, how she did not want to get too close.

These are her words: "But it was the children themselves who began to open me up. Once it started, it began to pull me in gradually but steadily. It was very powerful, but you have to take it at your own pace. Because here, in a neonatal intensive care unit, you see incredible beauty and unbearable pain. And you have to figure out how to be with both.

"The children are beautiful because you just get to know them. You can’t nurse them, really nurse them, without knowing them. And you can’t know them, really know them, without seeing their beauty. What can be more beautiful than innocence? And that affects all their features: their tininess, the eyes, the fingers, the sound of their heart—just their breath can move you with its beauty. Part of it seems to come from how fragile they are, how uncertain it is how long they’ll be here—the cliché metaphor of the flower that blooms for a day. It’s like a garden of that in here.

"The picture on the surface, though, is also terribly grim. A room full of these little ones, many of whom are right on the edge of life and death, and some of whose faces and movements are pretty distressing. And then their parents: there on the other side of the window, with the most desperate and stricken faces looking in, so helplessly, in such pain. It’s something to be inside a picture that’s being looked at with such expressions. But you look back, just to let them know someone’s in here.

"It was the use of machines and extraordinary medical measures that moved several of us to see how much distance we were putting between ourselves and the infants. Even if the machines weren’t there, though, there was that tendency to keep it impersonal, to keep your distance, and you knew that wasn’t any good for the children—for the children most of all.

"So a group of us began to talk about it, to open up to our feelings, to decide to be with the children more, and when it got too hard and we’d break down, we’d support each other and talk it over. The more we opened up, it just became natural that we began this new practice of holding infants when the time would come for them to die. It wasn’t a decision as much as something we’d become ready to do. So at the end we’d take them off the monitors and into our arms in a rocker. And we’d sit with them in their final moments.

"It tears you apart, because holding them, sometimes you can feel them go. And the death itself is different. On the machines, it’s monitored as brain death. In your arms, it’s the heart and the breath.

"You feel ten dozen things at once. Terrible sadness, because you’d become attached to the child. But glad too, because their suffering is about to end. Maybe anger, at the world, at God, at whatever, for allowing this to happen. And such empathy for the parents. And something like awe and wonder: like there must be some kind of explanation for all this which you don’t yet understand. But patience too, that things become more clear in time and peace of mind, because you’re doing the best you can. All of the above, often at once.

"It’s unbearable and beautiful at the same time. How do you explain that? It’s just the part of you that’s with them is getting ripped up. But the part of you that’s like, trying to understand it all… well, that’s beautiful because you see that you can be, we all can be, in the presence of great pain, but still appreciate life, even in its last moments. Especially then."

Theologian Matthew Fox has said that if we are able to go into the suffering, what we will find is that we are able to move through it to find something new. It is almost like we are able to give birth to this something new. Just as in birth there is pain, but that pain is transcended by the new that comes from it. The two are not separate, but all of a whole.

Having the courage to stay with such pain is not easy to find sometimes. When I was growing up my mother used to say that God never presented you with anything you couldn’t handle. I’m not so sure that is true, but as I have reflected on that, perhaps that was an expression of faith, that things really would work out all right and that no matter what might happen, you would make it through.

But we know there are risks. We don’t know what will happen when we open ourselves up. We risk having more suffering. It is when we are in life fully that we get close to people and know that we will lose them someday. There is the paradox that we live with.

The challenge comes in letting our hearts be open to the world in all of its suffering and in all of its beauty. The answers in life are not always clear. But if we can put ourselves forward, they will become clear. It is not up to us to solve all the problems of the world. But it is our call to do our part to witness to suffering when we see it. It is our call to not close our hearts but to keep them open.

To witness to the suffering of the world may actually be seen as a privilege. It means that we are aware of our interconnection. It means that we are part of the world and that the world is part of us. It means the world needs each and every one of us and all that we bring.

And so the question for each of us is this: How do you view your relationship to the stream of events that make up your life? Are we mostly bystanders, capriciously rewarded or defeated by events over which we have little control? Or do we have some active role to play.

The neurologist, Viktor Frankl, a victim of the Holocaust and imprisoned for years in the concentration camp at Auschwitz speaks to this question in the most poignant way, in his book: Man’s Search for Meaning.

At a time when Jewish victims had indeed lost everything, Frankl asks: “What remains once you have lost everything there is to lose.” He realized that there was one freedom that can never be taken away:

We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a person but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstance, to choose one’s own way. The freedom that remained was the decision how to respond. Frankl survived by constantly analyzing what was happening to himself and others and helping them find a reason to continue to live. Frankl wrote:

In the last resort, man should not ask, “What is the meaning of my life?” but should realize that he himself is being questioned. Life is putting its problems to him, and it is up to him to respond to these questions by being responsible; he can only answer to life by answering for his life. Life is a task.

The mythical story in book of Genesis tells us that God’s first question to humankind was, Where are you? When God walked through the Garden of Eden, he asked, “Adam, where are you?” You might say that “faith” is a form of listening, and what we hear in the still silence of the soul is the question: “What have you done with the gift I gave you, of life? Have you lived for yourself alone or have you lived also for others? Is your primary question, ‘What can the world give me?’ Or is it, ‘what can I give to the world from what I have already received?”

The Israeli violinist Yitzhak Perlman contracted polio at the age of 4. Ever since, he has had to wear metal braces on his legs and walk with crutches, yet he became one of the great virtuosi of our time. On one occasion, the story is told, he came out onto the stage at a concert to play a violin concerto. Laying down his crutches, he placed the violin under his chin and began tuning the instrument when, with an audible crack, one of the strings broke. The audience was expecting him to send for another string, but instead he signaled the conductor to begin, and he proceeded to play the concerto entirely on three strings. At the end of the performance the audience gave him a standing ovation and called on him to speak. What he said, so the story goes, was this: Our task is to make music with what remains. That was a comment on more than a broken violin string. It was a comment on his paralysis, yes, and also a comment on all that is broken in life.