Mar 25., 2018 / General, Soul Food, Updates and Activities
Making ‘heart-sense’ of Suffering
Have you ever had the experience of feeling that you were being prepared for something but did not understand what you were being prepared for? I remember that I was just a year into a major responsibility when I had a powerful yet unusual experience in prayer. In prayer I felt very strongly that God was saying to me, I will be with you through all these. I was puzzled what “all these” meant since there was really nothing earthshaking going on in my life. About four months later, I was diagnosed with the dreaded disease – I had cancer.
Initially, whenever I was asked how I was, I would bemusedly answer, “I think I’m shocked. I don’t feel anything.” For the next two days, I went about systematically cancelling my seminars, retreats, appointments, informing my family, our superiors in Rome – as though making arrangements for a stranger. Later, when the reality of the cancer sunk in, I cried out to God in fear asking, “Lord, how do we go through this together? Where will this bring me? Where will this bring us?”
We are once again in the season of Holy Week that we usually associate with the Lord’s intense suffering – that’s why it’s also called the week of the PASSION, a word to mean intense love. We come to times and places like these hoping to find some sense why there is so much pain and suffering in our lives, in the lives of those we love, in the world. We hope that we can find our own personal stories of suffering against the backdrop of the greatest story of love of Jesus. As we reflect on the reality of suffering, maybe we can ask ourselves:
What is God’s invitation to me with regards my experience of suffering?
How am I to be with it? How do I make ‘heart-sense’ of this?
How am I to bring this experience into my relationship with God?
I like to see this experience of suffering as an inner journey that can have “landmarks” to help me go through this passage. I call these the “landmarks in the landscape of suffering”.
(1st landmark) Suffering is a lonely experience
This hit me when the reality of what cancer could do to my life began to take hold of me. I felt very alone. Because of this, there were many moments when it was unbearably lonely. Although the whole Congregation, my family, my friends were praying for me and tried to be with me, there was still something about what was happening to me that I could not share with anyone even if I wanted to. There were times when I wanted to cry and no tears came. I wanted to talk about my fears, my inner turmoil, my questions but no words came. There were times when I felt like I was imprisoned within thick glass walls. I could see people, they could see me but I could not reach them. I seemed so isolated in their midst.
(2nd landmark) Suffering takes us on an emotional rollercoaster ride
Having worked through emotional problems – both my own and others’ – I know that we have a wide variety of feelings like the many colors of the rainbow, feelings that need articulation. I experienced the myriad of feelings and emotions in the short span of time as I agonized and waited for the surgery date, test results, doctors, healing to happen…just waiting. The most difficult part of the waiting was knowing that there was uncertainty ahead and the unknown before me. In the face of suffering there were two options possible – to fight the experience and take control of everything OR to let go of my control of how things should be and surrender to God’s healing process and the ministrations of the healers around me.
(3rd landmark) Suffering opens us to experience the silence of God
When we don’t understand things that happen to us, we ask questions. If we have tried to be a good person or “God-fearing”, we may ask why suffering visits us, like the title of a book: Why Do Bad Things Happen to Good People by a Jewish rabbi. Maybe that’s a good title for the questioning we go through. I hear people ask questions like:
Is God punishing me? Is God testing my faith? What did I do to deserve this?
In these times, we experience that God is so silent. Life seemed like one endless gloom in the valley of death. And yet, when I had moments of quiet within myself, I felt God’s presence in the silence. Even as I was hurting badly, I felt in some unexplainable way, that God was hurting with me. God understood my pain. God shared it. And that enabled me to move on and work through the pain and suffering. That consolation did not make the suffering less painful. It made it bearable.
(4th landmark) Suffering invites me to locate this experience in my on going love relationship with my God.
The song If I Could by Barbara Streisand speaks of what a mother goes through for the sake of her child. I would help you make it through the hungry years but I know I can never cry your tears. But I would, if I could .. I have tried to change the world I brought you to and there’s not much I would not do for you and I would if I could. What parent does not want the best for their child? They would even want to spare their child from pain, but that is not possible. So when the child suffers, the parents suffer with them. When the one I love is in pain, I too am in pain. I share in whatever pain or joy my loved one is experiencing. Sharing the other’s suffering is called compassion. The invitation to receive the grace of compassion is born out of the love I have for the other. To love is to suffer with the beloved.
In the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius there comes a point when one has fallen in love with the person of Jesus Christ, one is then invited to go deeper into the implications of this love. This is the experience of sharing the Passion of Jesus Christ. One begs for the grace particular to this phase of the relationship: I ask for the gift of being able to feel sorrow with Christ in sorrow, to be anguished with Christ’s anguish, even to experience tears and deep grief because of all the affliction Christ endures for me. To enter the sorrow of Jesus, I need to stay with Jesus precisely in his sorrow. It means that I will not close my eyes or distract myself from his pain and suffering. I am invited to stay — just to be with him there. It will only be love that will enable me to do so.
When we accompany a loved one who is in pain and suffering, we find ourselves trying to do something about the pain rather than to be with the person in his/her pain. Or perhaps our greatest temptation is to say to the suffering, “I know how you feel. Tibayan mo ang loob mo. Ganyan talaga iyan. Baka nanghihina ang pananampalataya mo sa Diyos.” Going through an experience of suffering is a process that must not be short-circuited nor spiritualized too easily. In our world-culture that worships activity and control, being with another’s suffering and not immediately do something about the suffering seem to be a heresy! The stance of being with will demand us to be in touch with our own helplessness and powerlessness and this is most difficult for us.
In this Holy Week, we are invited to a deeper level of intimacy in the relationship with Jesus and share in the Beloved’s vulnerabilities, pain, fears, and suffering. When Jesus went through his Passion in the garden, he asked his closest friends: Stay with me. Keep watch with me. Samahan n’yo lang ako. Sabayan n’yo lang ako. Jesus did not ask his friends to take away the suffering from him. Nor did he ask them to do the suffering for him. Instead “just be there with me. Share my helplessness, my powerlessness. Support me with the strength of your love which does not shy away from the ugly face of pain and evil.”
How do we fare with this invitation? Are we like his friends who fall asleep with the sleep of forgetfulness? With distraction? The “sleep” of fear? Or do we stay steadfast in begging Jesus to teach us to receive this grace of com-passion – of suffering with him?
We know that at the end that it is Jesus’s love that will enable us to stay.
Let this be my last word, that I trust in Your love. (Rabindranath Tagore)
A prayerful reflection for Holy Week
Contributed by Sr. Malen Java, rc
