-Giovanni Paolo II
Suffering is an idea I mentioned in a post quite a while ago and it is a subject that continues to haunt my mind. It seems to be an essential part of our lives despite any hedonistic desires to remove it entirely.
It is interesting to me how many things have been created to alleviate suffering and yet these very inventions turn back upon us in some way, creating another form of suffering. We try to escape, but never can. No matter how many doctors and medicines we have, we still lose our health. Although we surround ourselves with friends, at least on social media, we are still lonely. Despite believing that we have advanced far beyond nations of previous centuries, we still cannot solve the daily problems that face us.
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As I return to these words I wrote some time ago, I cannot recall precisely the direction I intended to go, but that is no matter. There are many paths I might follow and one lies clearly open before me...
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I still grapple with this idea of suffering—with the fear of the Cross—but I am beginning to understand its fruit. In many ways, this last year and more has been a time of loss—the loss of things and people very dear to me. Yet at the same time there have been so many good things that I feel buoyed up to face these losses, and through the inner growth of the seed of faith within, I find little nubs of fruit beginning to form.
So many times I have sought to handle loneliness (as an example of suffering) by fleeing it or filling that emptiness with goods of varying sorts. Yet the void remains. There is nothing that can fill that void fully in this life and that aches. It feels wrong.
My reading lately has been reminding me, however, that we were in a sense created so—created with a vastness capable of embracing only the Infinite—and that we do not need to flee that pain nor cover it up. In the end those efforts are only like trying to use bandaids to staunch the blood from a cut-off limb anyway. They are at least as futile as that analogy...
Yet what if we simply accepted the pain? There is a way to turn yourself upside-down: to turn your whole world upside-down.
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As an artist, I find that the pain often impels me to create. When I miss my Nonna or hate my inability to deal with people as perfectly as I expect, I find myself driven to weave words into poetry. When this world fails to live up to my expectations, I want to create theatre to move people's hearts.
Joy can provide a similar drive, but somehow it is less communicable. It does not impel creation in the same way.
This experience of pain does not hold true only for myself. Those writers I love—Dostoevsky for example—write out of suffering and thus touch the depths of the human condition. Where I experience beauty in art and literature, where these speak to my soul, one can find the source in some sort of suffering. We know that truth even when we cannot bear pain in our own lives.
There is left only one thing to do.
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When faced with the vastness of the sea, we marvel. We see there the amazing power of something beyond ourselves and we are moved by the beauty. When we gaze at the inner sea that laps against the sands of our self-wrought shores, we might do the same. We might throw out our arms and laugh with joy in the face of the winds that come.
Surrender gives us that power.
Rather than flee the suffering or hide the pain, we can embrace it and surrender to its higher purpose. We can realize that we are not god unto ourselves, that we cannot control the winds that blow against our seas. We can know our place before the starry universe.
That realization has lead some to despair. Those who cannot surrender to a power beyond themselves must despair when they lose their grip on the shifting sands on which they built their homes. Yet what freedom there is in surrender! I taste more and more of that true and glorious freedom as I take each step along this path of surrender. And as I step farther, I begin to see the weaving of threads together into a great rope that pulls me ever higher.
Verso l'alto!
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