Parenthood is an ever-changing mystery. One of its most neglected regions is the time when the parents are old. Perhaps, in the last years of their lives, parents do actually carry some of the pain their children are now enduring in their own lives. There is a tendency in us to underestimate parents when we have outgrown them; they are old now and do not understand us. We tend to lock them inside the images they present externally. They circle around the same old stories, habits, and complaints. Perhaps there is something deeper going on behind the façade of ageing and helplessness. They hold our images in their hearts, and maybe they carry us in a tender way through certain difficulties and pain without our ever suspecting it.
In the land of suffering there is no certainty. We cannot understand suffering, because its darkness makes the light of our minds so feeble and thin. Yet we trust that there is great tenderness at the root of pain, that our suffering refines us, that its fire cleanses the false accretions from the temple of the soul. Out of the winter ground a new springtime of fresh possibility slowly arises. In its real presence suffering transfigures and enlarges the human being. We must be careful to distinguish it from the fabricated, self-imposed burdens we create out of our own falsity. Such burdens bring us nothing. They keep us circling in the same empty rooms of dead fact. They never open us to the fecundity of possibility. Real suffering calls us home in the end to where our hearts will be happy, our energy clear, and our minds open and alive. Furthermore, the experience of suffering calls our hearts to prayer; it becomes the only shelter. In this sense, suffering can purify our longing and call us forward into a new rhythm of belonging which will be flexible and free enough to embrace our growth. Real suffering is where the contradictions within us harmonize, where they give way to new streams of life and beauty. As a Zen monk said, “When one flower blooms, it is spring everywhere.”
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One of the most tender images is the human person at prayer. When the body gathers itself before the Divine, a stillness deepens. The blaring din of distraction ceases, and the deeper tranquillity within the heart envelops the body. To see people at prayer is a touching sight. For a while, they have become unmoored from the grip of society, work, and role. It is as if they have chosen to enter into a secret belonging carried within the soul; they rest in that inner temple impervious to outer control or claiming. A person at prayer also evokes the sense of vulnerability and fragility. Their prayer reminds us that we are mere guests on the earth, pilgrims who always walk on unsteady ground, carrying in earthen vessels multitudes of longing.
