Tagged: suffering

Poem

Jesus Christ Pose

These days
it seems like everyone is
a survivor of some kind of
disease or awful trauma

We are a culture of wounded
brandishing our scars
jockeying for position
with the other cripples

The horror stories predominating
to pluck at the heartstrings
a martyr’s complex going
back to Golgotha
church

Photo credit: Liam Burns

A few more words about grieving and loss

After writing my previous mini-essay, I discovered some wise words from the dean of comparative religion, Huston Smith.  This excerpt is from his autobiography, Tales of Wonder, and relates his experiences following the deaths of a beloved daughter and grand-daughter.  I revere Mr. Smith and this is why:

“After Karen’s death I had returned to work; after Serena’s, I sat in a dark room, to which eventually I admitted a few friends, not for them to utter words of comfort—what comfort was there?—but for the mute warmth of another presence.  Yet when a reporter asked me, ‘Have your tragedies shaken your faith in God?’ I thought it a ridiculous question.  What about the Holocaust and all the other catastrophes we know as history?  They did not make my own loss less but kept me from imagining that I had suffered a unique vengeance that impugned the idea of God instead of making God more necessary.

Christ said, ‘Blessed are those that mourn’.  Had I been living in Jerusalem, I would have joined the mourners grieving and praying at the Wailing Wall.  Suffering led the Buddha to enlightenment, and it may cause us, against our will, to grow in compassion, awareness, and possibly eventually peace.  In Buddhism monks daily recite the Five remembrances, which are:  I will lose my youth, my health, my dear ones and everything I hold dear, and finally lose life itself, by the very nature of my being human.  These are bitter reminders that the only thing that continues is the consequences of our action.  The fact that all the things we hold dear and love are transient does not mean that we should love them less but—as I do Karen and Serena—love them even more.  Suffering, the Buddha said, if it does not diminish love, will transport you to the farther shore.”

The Physics of Death

I want to tell you it will be all right.

There’s been a lot of bad news of late.  Friends and close acquaintances in dire straits.  A memorial service for a kid only a few years older than our boys.  Death seems to be hovering in the air around us, playing eeny-meeny-miney-mo with people we care about.  A cruel, arbitrary figure, a Shade with a mean streak.

We’ve reached middle age now and we have to expect losses.  Like the old Doors song goes:  no one here gets out alive.  But it’s not right when it’s kids who are afflicted and young mothers and devoted partners…blameless ones who shouldn’t be singled out for torment or earmarked for an early demise.  They deserve better.  That they should suffer is unfair and a universe that permits that to happen can’t possibly be caring or sentient or the slightest bit aware of our existence.  A cold, dead universe.  Endless and eternal and empty.

I know nothing of the physics of death.  I can’t tell you the weight of a human soul or confirm that such a thing even exists.  I’ve tried reading up on the science—the conversion of matter to energy and the possibility of alternate universes, hyper-realities—but, in the end, my intelligence and imagination just aren’t up to the task.

All I know is that I love you and these recent, grim reminders of mortality make me appreciate what we have and give thanks for every drawn breath.  These bedside vigils and funerals are rehearsals for a time that is bound to come and we lose one of ours.  That may sound selfish but it’s not.  Our grief is just as sincere and our sympathy for what those poor families must be enduring genuine and heartfelt.  We imagine what it’s like to be in their shoes and our souls quake.  When faced with such a horrifying spectacle, we avert our eyes.

To experience the death of a loved one is, to my mind, the ultimate test of faith.  Can your belief system withstand a loss so profound?  Can your theology and/or worldview accommodate an agony that rends your very being?  Can your God bear the heat of your anguish and rage?

We’ve been together a long time, you and I.  Not only in this lifetime but before that.  We’ve known each other and always recognize one another each time we meet.  As long as you are with me, I can survive anything.  I truly believe this.  Grief and despair may make me a shadow of my former self but as long as I am comforted by the knowledge of your existence, I will persist, I will struggle; against the odds, against the darkness, believing to my dying breath that being your lover and confidante ennobles me and gives me purpose, the will to go on.

You are all the proof I need.  There are terrible things afoot, a darkness creeping in from the edges.   Let’s treasure our time together, love, rather than allow fear to take from us all that is worth keeping and preserving.  We must refuse to allow mortal dread to defeat us and it is our shared strength that will save us.  In the face of death, affirm that we are alive and full of passion and joy and foolish dreams.  Confronted by the worst, we pledge to show a brave face, while clutching at each other for the companionship and comfort we know we will find there.