Awakening to the Meaning of Suffering, by Rev. Mary McKinnon Ganz

Awakening to the Meaning of Suffering, By Rev. Mary McKinnon Ganz

Jan. 4, 2009

        A lot of people have been looking forward to 2009. I have a friend who for the last several years has been signing his emails 1-20-09! I thought maybe it was his birthday – his 60th or 70th or something – but then I began to see the same number on bumper stickers. It must be a pretty important date, because this church is having a big party that night.

        The economy notwithstanding, there’s a sense that this could be a good year, and partly that’s because we are letting go of some old baggage. The other night at our First Friday service, Rev. Linda led a ritual in which she asked us to write on a slip of paper those things we want to let go of in the new year, and then we burned them. It was satisfying!

        With a sense of new possibilities ahead, you might be wondering, why enter the first Sunday of the New Year with a sermon on the meaning of suffering?

        Actually I think it’s a perfect time, and not just because it happens to be the next topic that’s up on our “Awakening” series. We’ve just been through the winter holidays, and however joyful your time with family and friends, this season is also a time of heart piercing loss for some and tinged with sadness for most. If you are accustomed to decorate at Christmas, each ornament can remind you of a time in your life, and especially remind you of those who are no longer here to share holidays with you. Every ritual you perform for your winter holidays, year after year, can freshen the sadness.

        Maybe one of the things you are looking forward to this year is finding a way through your grief. This is OK but if you’re looking for closure, I don’t advise it. We live in a death-denying culture that too often rushes us through grief and sorrow to the other side, too fast. Although we tend to hope otherwise, sorrow and suffering are conditions to be acknowledged and accepted, not to be torn up and thrown in the bonfire.

        This was the heart of the Buddha’s great awakening, the first of the four noble truths: suffering is.

        Tomorrow I get on an airplane to fly to Managua. I know almost nothing about Nicaragua, beyond the stories of a ruthless dictatorship and unspeakable cruelty on both sides of a civil war. I do know something about poverty in this country, and I think I know enough about Nicaragua to guess that I will be deeply shocked by the suffering I will encounter. This is an annual pilgrimage for the Faithful Fools, a street ministry I’ve worked with in the Tenderloin of San Francisco, but this will be my first time to join them in Nicaragua.

        I will be housed with a family in a barrio pobre, a poor neighborhood, and that may mean no electricity, no indoor plumbing, running water for only one hour in the middle of the night. So I expect to do some suffering too, but it will be minor, because in less than two weeks I’ll be on the plane headed back to my blessed life here in the USA.

        Here, most of us don’t have to suffer poverty of these proportions, and sometimes we get the idea we shouldn’t have to suffer at all. Like the barber in our skit from the Sufi tradition, like Job in the Hebrew Bible, and as Dostoyevsky writes in The Brothers Karamozov, the presence in the world of unmerited suffering makes us question the existence of any sense to the Universe, any meaning to our lives. Any God, if that is language that works for you, for what kind of God would allow such suffering?

        And yet, is there anyone who has lived without suffering? Is there any sense to who gets cancer, who dies young, who is left alone?

        Was there any sense, for example, to the murder of Daniel Pearl, the journalist who was kidnapped and beheaded by Islamic militants in 2002?

        In a web symposium sponsored by New Criterion Magazine, Daniel’s father, Judea Pearl, searches for meaning in the killing of his son. He finds it in what is to me a most unlikely place: the story in the Hebrew Bible of the binding of Isaac.

        Perhaps you remember the story: God, in what seems like a bizarre and cruel test of Abraham’s loyalty, tells him to take his beloved son, Isaac, to the mountaintop, and kill him as a sacrifice. Abraham, blinded by his tears, nevertheless sets forth to obey, but at the last minute God stays his hand and provides a ram for the sacrifice instead.

        Judea Pearl says he has always seen this as a horrible story of an awful God that plays games with his created beings to see how much they love him. But Pearl now has come to understand it in a different way, a more secular way, if you will.

        Who is God, in Pearl’s version of the story? “Our ideals, values and principles. What does it mean sacrifice your son to God? It means: Educate your children by certain principles and to certain ideals. Why is death involved? Because living by principles is a dangerous enterprise.”

        Abraham’s answer to God – Here I am, I will do your will -- means, “I am perfectly aware of those dangers, and still I am committed to educate my children by these principles.”

        God’s reprieve of Isaac means that humanity lives on, in this story in the form of the nation of Israel. Justice prevails but on a collective, not an individual scale, which Judea Pearl ties to Daniel’s story when he remembers his son’s trust in humanity, his going out on a limb to befriend those who were suspicious of him, “living by his principles and drawing others to him.” In this way he finds meaning in his son’s horrible death.

        “Deep within you, you know quite well there is only a single magic, a single power, a single salvation, and that is called loving.” These are the words of the German writer, Herman Hesse. “Well then,” Hesse said, “love your suffering. Do not resist it; do not flee from it. It is your aversion that hurts,” he says, “nothing else.”

        It seems to me that Judea Pearl has loved his son very well, in going back to the old stories and searching there, with great fearlessness, for meaning to build around this very deep pain. Although I struggle with Hesse’s idea that we should “love our suffering,” it seems to me that in a way, this is what Judea Pearl has done. I don’t know if Ron would agree, either, that he loved his suffering when he stood there on the precipice, but certainly he accepted that suffering, and used it to make meaning for his life.

        I’m saying that in the search for meaning, we have to accept that we will suffer. This is not at all the same, I want to be sure to say, as valorizing suffering – telling a person or group of persons that it is God’s will or some such nonsense. If you hear words like that – “your suffering is God’s will” -- look around for who is in a position to benefit from the continued suffering of another. In “Proverbs of Ashes,” Rebecca Parker, a Unitarian Universalist theologian, tells how she awakened to the danger of some Christian theologies. An abused wife came to her and said that her priest had urged her to stay in her marriage, stay with her abuser, because Jesus shows us that suffering is noble.

        Parker soundly rejects this theology of suffering as redemptive, and so should we. People should not be made to feel they should endure abusive relationships. People who are oppressed and dispossessed by unjust economic systems or the racism that is pervasive in America and many other countries should rise up against those systems, and we should stand beside them when they do. Accepting that suffering is does not mean accepting that suffering is right. Hesse’s statement encourages us not to resist the reality of our suffering, but accepting suffering is not the same thing as resisting abuse or working to eliminate injustice.

        We will be more likely to find meaning in the suffering we must endure, I believe, if we find our way to eliminating suffering that is needless. Eckhart Tolle suggests that we suffer needlessly when we hold others responsible for our pain. Just listen to talk radio or Fox news, and you can see that we live in a culture that practices outrage. Tolle says this habit of blaming and cultivating outrage, anger, resentment, and other negative emotions strengthens what he calls our “pathological ego,” which blocks us from knowing the truth about ourselves and the human condition.

        Tolle suggests that all the painful memories we have accumulated over a lifetime exist in an entity he calls the “pain body.” I find this a useful concept. It helps me know that though I may suffer, I am not my suffering; I am something else, a person of inherent worth and dignity, a child of God. Grounded in this knowledge I can step outside my pain-body and observe it from a little distance, at least in moments.

        One of the things I do every Christmas season with my daughter, who is now 23, is to watch the Muppet Christmas Carol. Any other fans out there? This version of the Charles Dickens classic, with Michael Caine as Scrooge and Kermit the Frog as Bob Cratchit, brings to life one of the story’s great messages: before Scrooge could learn to celebrate, he had to learn compassion. He had to be able to look back with tenderness on his own suffering life, and then he had to look into a window at the suffering of Bob Cratchit and Tiny Tim, and see them with his heart.

        Compassion is what we should be cultivating, not outrage. In this congregation, the Pastoral Care Guild offers compassionate listening to members who are in pain. “The capacity to give one's attention to a sufferer is a very rare and difficult thing; it is almost a miracle,” said Simone Weil.

        My trip to Nicaragua, to bear witness to poverty and the legacy of war and colonialism, is a stand against apathy – which we voted last year, you may remember, as the eighth deadly sin! Did you know that apathy means, in its Greek root, “without suffering,” or an inability to suffer? This congregation, in its wisdom, knows it’s a sin, in whatever way we understand that word, to not be able to suffer. We bear witness to one another and to injustice in the world to cultivate our capacity to “suffer with” – the root meaning of that other, related word, compassion. We accept that suffering is; we cultivate compassion for ourselves and for others; and from this, hope and yes, joy are awakened. We learn the art of celebration.

        So happy 1-20-09, when it comes, and happy new year! May we look forward to being there for one another through every bit of it – the pain, the hope, and the celebrations – oh yes, the celebrations! Amen.

• A Higher Power Soothes the Pain by Ron Willett

1. Herman Hesse said, “love your suffering; it is only your aversion to it that causes you pain.” How is this true or not true in your experience?

2. What have you learned from suffering, your own or someone else’s?

3. How has suffering, your own or someone else’s, informed your ideas about “God, the universe, and everything?”

4. How might you practice compassion and not outrage? Can you remember a time you have “practiced outrage?” How about compassion?

5. We live in a death-denying culture that encourages us to move too quickly through grief and suffering. Is this true or not true in your experience?

6. There is a Buddhist blessing: “May you joyfully participate in the sorrows of life.” What does this mean to you?