Suffering is the sister of your future possibility. Suffering can open a window in the closed wall of your life and allow you to glimpse the new pastures of creativity on which you are called to walk and wander. But this window often opens only when the suffering begins to recede. While you are going through the dark valley, it is almost impossible to understand what is happening to you. The light that suffering brings is always a gift that it leaves as it departs. While you are in pain, you can see and understand nothing. The flame of suffering burns away our certainties; it also burns out the falsity within us. Each of us lives with a certain set of illusions that are very dear to us. We use these illusions as consoling lenses through which we view the world. An illusion is always a false lens; it can never show us the truth or reality of a situation. Suffering cleanses us of the falsities that have accumulated in our hearts. So often our minds are like magpies. We pick up and take on everything that glitters, even though it may have no substance. In a magpie’s nest, one finds random collections of colourful but useless debris. The fire of suffering cleanses completely the falsities to which our longing has attached itself. This liberates us from the emptiness of false belonging and allows us to belong in a real and truthful way in our lives again. Truth is difficult to reach and endure, but it is always the doorway to new freedom and life. As Shakespeare says in
One of the most haunting questions is, How are the fruits of suffering divided? This question touches on the old question of the one and the many. Though there are billions of people in the world, we are all part of the one individuality. We are all one. Each of us is intimately linked with every other person. Though most of the others are strangers to us, who knows the secret effect that we have on each other? “No one lives for himself alone,” the Bible says. The pathways of causality and continuity are hidden in the world of soul. Perhaps the visitation of suffering in your life is bringing healing and light to the heart of someone far away, whom you will never know or meet. When lonely suffering is courageously embraced and integrated, it brings new light and shelter to our world and to the human family. This is the invisible work of the Great Spirit, who divides and distributes the precious harvest of suffering. Gifts and possibilities unexpectedly arrive on the tables of those in despair and torment. This perspective brings some consoling meaning to the isolation of pain. When the flames of suffering sear you, you are not suffering for yourself alone. Though you feel like a nobody and you are locked into a grey nowhere, you were perhaps ironically never nearer to the heart of human intimacy. When we receive the courage to stand gracefully in the place of pain, we mediate for others the gifts that help heal their torment. Through the fog of forsakenness, a new shoreline of belonging becomes clear.
A haunting poem by Fernando Pessoa captures the searing uncertainty of pain.
I KNOW, I ALONE
I know, I alone
How much it hurts, this heart
With no faith nor law
Nor melody nor thought.
Only I, only I,
And none of this can I say
Because feeling is like the sky—
Seen, nothing in it to see.
