ETERNAL ECHOES PART 8

Like a tsunami rolling over a shoreline, the waves of suffering may wipe out our health, our happiness, our expectations about the future. As well, suffering can sweep away our sense of certainty.

“I watch what I eat, I exercise. I rarely get sick. I take care of myself,” a friend shared with me recently.

Her comments made me angry until I realized that Mike 1.0 thought that way before cancer took away his certainty. Suffering is a return to ground zero where the only tangible refuge is the love and support of family and friends. Hopefully for most, it’s also a place of possibility and, as O’Donohue writes, a place of transformation.

Out of the Winter a New Spring

In the land of suffering there is no certainty. We cannot understand suffering, because its darkness makes the light of our minds so feeble and thin. Yet we trust that there is great tenderness at the root of pain, that our suffering refines us, that its fire cleanses the false accretions from the temple of the soul. Out of the winter ground a new springtime of fresh possibility slowly arises. In its real presence suffering transfigures and enlarges the human being. We must be careful to distinguish it from the fabricated, self-imposed burdens we create out of our own falsity. Such burdens bring us nothing. They keep circling in the same empty rooms of dead fact. They never open us to the fecundity of possibility.

Real suffering calls us home in the end to where our hearts will be happy, our energy clear, and our minds open and alive. Furthermore, the experience of suffering calls our hearts to prayer; it becomes the only shelter. In this sense, suffering can purify our longing and call us forward into a new rhythm of belonging which will be flexible and free enough to embrace our growth.

Real suffering is where the contradictions within us harmonize, where they give way to new streams of life and beauty. As a Zen monk said, “When one flower blooms, it is spring everywhere.”