Post-modern culture is deeply lonely. This loneliness derives in large part from the intense drive to avoid suffering and pain and the repudiation of commitment. People relentlessly attempt to calm their inner turbulence by all manner of therapy and spirituality. They seek refuge in each new programme or method as if it offered final resolution. Yet so many of these programmes have no earth beneath the seductive surface. They can offer no growth, nor enable a person to identify the pain at the root of identity. Such external tamperings never manage to reach or embrace the inner loss which is a natural part of being a human person. Every heart has to manage the emptiness of its own dark. Carl Jung suggested that neurosis was unmet suffering. This dialogue with your inner loss is slow and painful. Yet to avoid or sidestep this necessary pain only brings a slow, seeping sense of loneliness that continues to shadow and haunt your life. The Romanian philosopher E. M. Cioran said: “Suffering is the cause of consciousness. (Dostoyevsky) Men belong to two categories: those who have understood this, and the others.”
Why is the individual so easily a target of suffering and pain? Why are we so exposed and vulnerable? First, we are vulnerable because each of us is housed in a body. This little clay tent is a sacramental place. The body is in constant conversation with creation; it allows us through our senses to smell the roses, to see the waves and stars, and to read forever the hieroglyphics of the human countenance. The body is also very unsheltered. You are surrounded by infinite space without physical shelter. This is why from the very beginning humans have sought secure belonging in caves and then in houses. The desire for strong physical shelters mirrors and reveals how space is open, and anything can approach the temple of your life from any side. Home offers shelter from the threat of contingency. Yet home, too, is vulnerable. No walls are strong enough to keep the destructive visitations abroad. The human body is a fragile home.
Second, you are vulnerable because you are an individual. To be an individual is to be different. Each individual is separate. There is a dark logic to experience which often seems to target individuality. Suffering is suffering because it is an anonymous and destructive force. It has a darkness which vision cannot penetrate. Suffering happens when this bleak and opaque anonymity invades your individuality. A dark force of pain surrounds the unique signature of your presence. Suffering would be more manageable if its pain were restricted merely to the surface of one’s life or at least to some one corner of one’s individuality. Some religious theories suggest that suffering belongs only to the area of the non-self. If this were true, it would lessen the fever of pain that suffering brings. Alas, one’s individuality is not constructed in such convenient compartments. Your heart, mind, and body are a unity, each place within you intimately one with every other. Pain in one part of the body affects every other. Your nervous system is the miracle that makes of all the different parts one living and feeling presence. There is something about pain and suffering that is pervasive. It suffuses your full presence.
Third, we are vulnerable because we live in time. We cannot control time. The tides of time can throw absolutely anything up on the shore of your life. It is amazing how successfully we repress the recognition of our total vulnerability. We have learned to forget that any moment can bring an abrupt and irreversible change of destiny. As you are reading this, there are people who woke up happy this morning and are now receiving news that will utterly change their lives. Suddenly, death is a gathering presence. Others are coming under the blade of disappointment. Forever more, they will remember this day as the day that divided their life in two. The time before will be looked back on as a time of unrealized contentment, the time after as the time of carrying a new loss that turned meadows of possibility into a desert.
