Anam Cara

How Is the Hard-Earned Harvest Divided?

One of the most haunting questions is, How are the fruits of suffering divided? This question touches on the old question of the one and the many. Though there are billions of people in the world, we are all part of the one individuality. We are all one. Each of us is intimately linked with every other person. Though most of the others are strangers to us, who knows the secret effect that we have on each other? “No one lives for himself alone,” the Bible says. The pathways of causality and continuity are hidden in the world of soul. Perhaps the visitation of suffering in your life is bringing healing and light to the heart of someone far away, whom you will never know or meet. When lonely suffering is courageously embraced and integrated, it brings new light and shelter to our world and to the human family. This is the invisible work of the Great Spirit, who divides and distributes the precious harvest of suffering. Gifts and possibilities unexpectedly arrive on the tables of those in despair and torment. This perspective brings some consoling meaning to the isolation of pain. When the flames of suffering sear you, you are not suffering for yourself alone. Though you feel like a nobody and you are locked into a grey nowhere, you were perhaps ironically never nearer to the heart of human intimacy. When we receive the courage to stand gracefully in the place of pain, we mediate for others the gifts that help heal their torment. Through the fog of forsakenness, a new shoreline of belonging becomes clear.

A haunting poem by Fernando Pessoa captures the searing uncertainty of pain.