con patienti

Without mud you cannot have lotus flowers. Without suffering, you have no way to learn how to be understanding and compassionate.

--Thich Nhat Hanh

Bear one another's burden's, and in this way fulfill the law of Christ.

--Galatians 6:2

The English word compassion comes from a Latin phrase which translates literally into "suffering together." It has less to do with virtuous condescension from one's place of comfort to show kindness to someone less fortunate than with profound and existential solidarity with suffering humanity. To show compassion requires a personal, nonresistant encounter with pain.


This, of course, calls immediately for a number of clarifications. The first is that there can be no general principle explaining the meaning of suffering or prescribing how one should respond to it. All pain is not the same. More often than we know, one person's misery is the result of another person's injustice--physical and mental abuse, imbalances of social and economic power, negligence on the part of wealthier nations toward the poverty and violence that their habits of consumptions create in other parts of the world. This kind of suffering must never be glossed over with platitudes about God's mysterious ways or the power of individuals to create their own realities. It must always be exposed for the evil that it is, fought against and vehemently protested.

On the same note, I do not believe that suffering comes from God or stems directly from some divine purpose. Pain is not good, even though it is redeemed. It is an aberration, one that, like sin itself, finally bends to the liberating work of Christ in the world, but an aberration all the same.

For this reason, I am all for using of whatever truthful means are available to alleviate it. There is, of course, no wisdom in pursuing or holding onto pain for its own sake. When my body suffers, you'd better believe I intend to do something about it.

Fourth, I do not mean to suggest that those who have suffered serious personal injury, illness, loss or hardship thereby possess some special virtue that others do not. These experiences can harden us as easily as they can soften us. Besides, those who are not hit with their own individuals tragedies can and often do step willingly into the experiences of others and bear their burdens alongside them, almost as if they were their own.

Having said this, I can't escape the fact that I and virtually everyone I know live in such privilege and comfort that the ease of our existence no longer strikes us as exceptional. Such lives are breeding grounds for self-absorption. Keeping one's own good fortune undisturbed tends to become too high a priority, and this, frankly, makes us bad citizens of the world. The distance between shutting out awful experiences and shutting out the people and realities that make us vulnerable to such experiences is short.

In this morning's sermon, George mentioned that when Michelangelo produced his David, he is reported to have seen the sculpting already in a raw slab of marble, and then chiseled away whatever wasn't David. I have no idea whether there is any basis for the story, but it applies well to the question of suffering. Sometimes affliction chips away at complacency so that one's truest self can come to the surface.

I keep hitting up against this paradox, that joy and sorrow exist inside each other. They are not parallel to each other; at least according to the Christian faith we are moving toward a day when the one will finally swallow up the other. But for now, truthful engagement with the world produces both. The Man of Sorrows and the Prince of Peace--the Crucified and the Risen One--are one and the same. I know a number of people who understand this, and it is a source immeasurable comfort to be able to talk openly with them--sometimes with overwhelming fear, and sometimes with no fear at all--about the awful reality that confronts us.

No, there is no value in obsessing over the pain in the world or in one's own life, but sometimes you can't ignore it without deceiving yourself. When that's the case, the best thing may simply be to lean into it.