Anam Cara

Suffering’s Slow Teachings

When suffering comes, we feel panic and fear. Frightened, we want to hide. You want to climb up on to some high ledge to escape the dismemberment of this acidic tide. Yet the strange thing is: the more you resist, the longer it stays. The more intensely you endeavour to depart the ground of pain, the more firmly you remain fixed there. It is difficult to be gentle with yourself when you are suffering. Gentleness helps you to stop resisting the pain that is visiting you. When you stop resisting suffering, something else begins to happen. You begin slowly to allow your suffering to follow its own logic. The assumption here is that suffering does not visit you gratuitously. There is in suffering some hidden shadowed light. Destiny has a perspective on us and our pathway that we can never fully glimpse; it alone knows why suffering comes. Suffering has its own reasoning. It wants to teach us something. When you stop resisting its dark work, you are open to learning what it wants to show you. Often, we learn most deeply and receive profoundly from the black, lonely tide of pain. We often see in Nature how pruning strengthens. Fruit trees look so wounded after being pruned, yet the limitation of this cutting forces the tree to fill and flourish. Similarly with drills of potatoes when they are raised, earth is banked up around them and seems to smother them. Yet as the days go by the stalks grow stronger. Suffering can often become a time of pruning. Though it is sore and cuts into us, later we may become aware that this dark suffering was secretly a liturgy of light and growth. Wordsworth suggests that “suffering…shares the nature of infinity.”

It is lonely to acknowledge that often only suffering can teach us certain things. There is subtle beauty in the faces of those who have suffered. The light that suffering leaves is a precious light. One often meets people who have had the companionship of suffering for forty or fifty years. It is humbling to see how someone can actually build a real friendship with suffering. Often these people are confined to bed. They are forsaken there. Yet I often think that such people are secret artists of the Spirit. Perhaps their endurance is quietly refining the world and bringing light to the neglected and despairing. The call to suffering can be a call to bring healing to the world and to carry light to forsaken territories. The way you behold your pain is utterly vital in its integration and transfiguration. When you begin to sense how it may be creative in the unseen world, this can help the sense of purpose and meaning to unfold. Gradually your sense of its deeper meaning begins to bring out the concealed dignity of suffering.

There is a belief nowadays that true growth can only happen when all the optimum conditions prevail. If a person has had a difficult childhood or has been hurt, there is a presumption that his life is eternally shadowed and his growth severely limited. Someone once asked a wonderful actress from which well she drew her creativity and how it was that she never got lost in the Hollywood glitter. She said, “All my life I have had the blessing of an extremely hard childhood behind me.” This is not to wish difficulty on anyone or naïvely to praise it, yet if we can embrace difficulty, great fruits can grow from it. The lovely things that happen bless us and confirm us in who we are. It is through difficulty and opposition that we define ourselves. The mind needs something against which it can profile and discover itself. Opposition forces our abilities to awaken; it tests the temper and substance of who we are. Difficulty is a severe looking-glass; yet in it we often glimpse sterling aspects of our soul that we would otherwise never have seen or even have known we possessed. Not that what happens to us is in the end decisive, but rather how we embrace and integrate it. Often, the most wonderful gifts arrive in shabby packaging.

In terms of history, every people goes through terrible times of suffering. Irish history carries a great weight of pain. It is difficult to come to terms with such lonely cultural memory. The theologian J. B. Metz speaks of the “dangerous memory” of suffering. There is a tendency now in revisionist history to explain the past in terms of movements and trends of the contemporary time. This is inevitably reductionist. The suffering of the people is forgotten; they become faceless, mere ciphers of a trend or dynamic of history. To sanitize history is to blaspheme against memory. Equally, to become obsessed with the past is to paralyse the future.