Last Saturday I participated in a faith-sharing session that
started off with reflections on suffering and went on to cover a wide variety
of topics. Throughout, I struggled both
to follow the turns in the conversation and the particular perspectives
offered. What follows represents my
contribution: a salad of notions that occurred to me at that point.
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| From Pastoral Meanderings Blogspot |
First
of all, suffering and pain are not the same. The Buddhist tradition is particularly
rich in this regard. In that tradition, suffering is understgood to be created
by our expectations. When we practice “mindfulness,” as proposed by Thich Nhat Hanh,
we discover that physical or mental pain does not necessarily entail suffering.
It can even be “embraced.” The Christian tradition has muddled suffering and
pain by attempting to give it a liberating meaning. It has also been confused at
times with sin and evil -- just to complicate things even further.
We
need to go back to the roots. In Hebrew, sin has less to do with transgressing
norms than with wandering from the path. This helps get us out of the enormous
weight of “guilt” that has caused so much harm in the Catholic tradition. Guilt
is a disease that we need to extirpate from our baggage. Straying from the path
is an invitation to rediscover that path and return to it. It is a much more
inviting concept and more in tune with the sources of our tradition.
The
concept of evil also gets thrown in to confuse things even more. Sometimes evil
seems to take on a life of its own in our theories. In the tradition however,
evil is good that has not yet succeeded. The presence of evil is an invitation
to take account of how far we have strayed and wander back onto the path. Moreover,
evil is certainly not the same as death or pain, which are generally
manifestations of a transformation in process. What appears to us as death is
not necessarily evil but rather a transformation of the configuration that
allows entirely new realities to emerge. It is often at the marginal moments of
disequilibrium that the greatest creativity arises. (This does not mean that we
should be stressing our planet to its limit, as we are doing at this point
through our excessive over-consumption. Currently, we are stretching the
capacity of the life-community of the planet to survive -- and certainly
putting in jeopardy our own survival.)
And
that brings me to the final observation: Physicists tell us that we can only
recognise about 10% of the universe. The other 90% is entirely hidden from us.
It is that vast “dark void or space” that lies between the wave particles that
make up our universe. However if the dark void may well be represented by the
image of the colour black (which absorbs rather than reflecting light), it is
anything but empty. It seethes with
enormous energy. What we speak of as dark and void is actually the
surging foundation for all that has found concrete form in our universe and that
allows to engage with the universe as we know it.
