suffering and joy

Many voices of the wisdom of the ages tell us that we run from our pain, that we distract ourselves in any way possible from the pain, loneliness, emptiness and essential deficiency of our existence. And so we experience transitory joy when we have fulfilled a desire, experienced great pleasure, achieved success, won a game, won a lottery, fallen in love, given birth to a child, etc. At such times we feel really good about ourselves, we are happy with who we are. As good as any one of these experiences is, and as joyful as we feel, they are all transitory, and our lives are consumed with the quest for or maintenance of these personal satisfactions, which often are reliant on what other people think, the approval we feel from them in our socially constructed roles of parent, employer/employee, coach, performer, consumer, christian/hindu/moslem/buddhist/sikh/you name it. And so many of us live out our lives achieving enough of a balance between the good and bad experiences, that on the whole we are happy enough with our lives, content with our socially acceptable identities. We are good enough people, liked enough by enough people, own enough of the right stuff that we are comfortable enough in our own skins.



I have left all this behind me: like a Buddhist or Hindu monk I am in a process of dropping all attachments but I am doing so as a follower or disciple of Jesus. This process leads me directly into suffering, but this suffering is the suffering of not having the crutches we all need to feel good about ourselves, and so I'm faced with my own personal deficiency, loneliness as I increasingly refuse to make it better in the ways we all learned. Perhaps the story of Job can help as a way to illustrate my point.



Job was a very rich, successful and righteous person: he always did everything right and so had a great reputation on heaven and on earth. But his happiness or security was vested in all the signs of his success - he knew he was blessed of God because of his great success. Yet he lived in fear. He was afraid his children would offend God so he did sacrifices on their behalf, and when everything was taken from him including his health, he said, "I was always afraid this would happen." Having everything stripped away from him left him confronting his own misery not only from the loss of his children and health, but also his reputation and social standing because by the calamities that had befallen him he was now marked in that society as a sinner and cursed by God. It was only when after having everything stripped away from him, and nakedly confronting his creator that he finally MET God, and after that, nothing could ever make him afraid again - for now, he knew who God was and who he was, and everything else was secondary.



Like many before me who have chosen to leave the world (prestige, possessions, etc.) behind, I have given away or sold my possessions, and as I recognize attachments or ways of constructing an identity on which I like to rely, I drop them as well. In so doing I am responding to Jesus' invitation to follow him, but in order to do so leaving everything else behind. For I too have met our creator, whom Jesus revealed to us as Abba (literally Dadda in Aramaic), I know who I AM, and am content to more and more walk in His presence.



Yesterday I was again moved to tears listening to the story of Jesus suffering and sacrifice, after having already been confronted by the pain of the Tamil people demonstrating at Parliament Hill demanding that the Canadian government do something about the attrocities being committed against them by the Sri Lankan government (chemical warfare, bombing hospitals, churches and schools, etc.) through whom I walked on my way to Church. From the God's eye point of view, there is so much suffering in this world, and yet I know that S/He is surrounding us, holding us, waiting for us to awake from the illusions of our social "realities," our immersion in all of the constructs that imprison us from seeing the truth, that keep us compliant as good little consumers, happy in our nests, trading "Good days" with our friends and colleagues, chattering about weather, sports, or what the neighbours are doing, oblivious to the suffering we have insulated ourselves against, inside and out. But Jesus calls us to leave these comfortable illusions and distractions behind and to follow him on the path of suffering and joy.

It is interesting to note that Jesus described himself as coming for the "sick" (oppressed, poor, sick, imprisoned, rejected, etc.) and not for the well. Those caught up in the illusions of their goodness, of the good-enough quality of their life do not respond well to a radical like Jesus who said to the rich young ruler, one more thing you need to do beyond being a good person and loving God, and that is give away all your possessions and follow me. The young guy left saddened because he was to attached to his possessions and position to give it all up in order to follow Jesus. Oftentimes it's only those who've already been knocked out of the mainstream by society's cruelty, by illness, by their own misdeeds, it's only the marginalized who can truly respond to Jesus' call to leave the world behind. If you find yourself resonating with this post, then it is likely because you too are marginalized in some significant way, and, realize the value inherent in dropping all the superficial stuff and going all out for transformation and liberation . . . but that is material for another post.

So have a blessed Easter all; whether it is one in which your own personal suffering is deepening as you drop your attachments and leave the world more and more behind, or whether you are feeling the joy of the resurrection, the joy of liberation, the joy of new life. The two go hand in hand!