Suffering, Pain

    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.

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.