ETERNAL ECHOES PART 2

The following passage by John O'Donohue speaks to the hidden power of suffering. It also reminds me of a story my dear friend Jacques once told me about his aunt, Sister Marie-Louise Carron, who was bedridden with a spinal injury for over twenty five years. From her humble convent room , she ministered and brought courage to all who visited.

Sufferings 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 limitations of this cutting forces the tree to fill and flourish. Similarily 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 a 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.