Suffering for One’s Life (As Art)

“I think that taking life seriously means something such as this: that whatever man does on this planet has to be done in the lived truth of the terror of creation, of the grotesque, of the rumble of panic underneath everything. Otherwise it is false. Whatever is achieved must be achieved with the full exercise of passion, of vision, of pain, of fear, and of sorrow. How do we know ... that our part of the meaning of the universe might not be a rhythm in sorrow?” Ernest Becker

“I am content to live it all again
And yet again, if it be life to pitch
Into the frog-spawn of a blind man’s ditch
A blind man battering blind men...

I am content to follow to its source
Every event in action or in thought;
Measure the lot; forgive myself the lot!” W.B. Yeats

“On our earth we can only love with suffering and through suffering. We cannot love otherwise and know of no other sort of love.” Dostoevsky

"Life is suffering," Buddha’s central teaching, upon which hung all the rest of that religion, was incomprehensible to me back in 1978 when I was taking my first and only world religion class at Yale University as part of my program for a Masters in Divinity from Yale Divinity School. I was very concerned with the oppression of women, and of people of color. I admired liberation theology even though I was handicapped by my lack of a faith in God, but I was completely baffled as to Buddha’s meaning. Probably I assumed it came from the fact he was addressing those poor Asian people, people whose lives were ground down, I imagined, by poverty, short lives, many children, like I’d read about years earlier in The Good Earth.

My cluelessness was not an accident. The American attitude toward suffering, as I have experienced it and observed it, is complex: for instance, the suffering of “dumb animals” appears to be less tolerable than third world suffering, which we tell ourselves in the face of the staggering problems, “we can only do so much about.” Many stories about this anomaly come to mind, but in particular I remember a young man who used to come to our Café in Utica daily with his young daughter, before he moved away with his family several years ago. During all seasons, he parked his big Great Pyrenees out in front, tied to a newspaper box, but it was in winter that this practice caused disturbance for passers by. He was remonstrated by people from their cars as they drove by, and even received phone calls on the Café phone from people distraught over the suffering of the animal. He would patiently explain that the dog was made for the cold, and much preferred it to being indoors.

But as for human suffering, as far as I can tell, nice Americans like myself aren’t supposed to know anything about it personally. It is entirely something for other people.

True to my culture, I remained a virgin to suffering until, in 1995 or so, during a prolonged and agony-filled period when I was undergoing treatment in intensive psychotherapy, I realized that I had suffered in my childhood. I say “I” had suffered, but to this day I think of the one who suffered as “the child.“ Memory of the terror and the rage had persisted in my body for 40 years, though I had been unaware as I pursued a strenuously ambitious life of career, family, & activism. Gradually, through therapy, I learned to recognize and own those feelings instead of short-circuiting them by means of obsessive compulsions. But the fact that I am the kind of person who by cultural definition is not one who suffers, and who in fact enjoyed in many respects an ideal childhood, remains a strong influence on my perceptions, and vies continually with the truth of my actual experience.

I am interested in the notion my culture clings to, that some of us are not supposed to suffer, because of the serious obstacle it makes to important self-knowledge. Maybe if we were not so culturally predisposed to consider ourselves the luckiest, most blessed (exceptional) people on the face of the earth, we would not be so hard on ourselves, and not being so hard on ourselves might make it possible to be kinder to other people. Why is it that “exceptionalist America” is automatically accompanied by thorough saturation.in the diabolical art of suppression of feelings?

Going back to that Eureka moment in the 90's, the recognition that I had suffered as a child amounted to the same thing as learning I had feelings, just as other people have. In the instant of knowing my suffering, I knew such pain was not unusual or unthinkable, but the common thread binding humanity together. The knowledge humanized me in a way I have ever since been immensely grateful for. I had not known how cut off I was from the human community, from connection with all at a very deep level, until this discovery of my suffering. My story was now changed forever; or rather, I had found my story. I had learned a major truth that took me outside the boundaries of my culture: To be in a body, that is, to be human, is to suffer. In the end it is not the suffering endured that makes one ill, but the fact that suffering is not recognized, not allowed, in the American vocabulary that I grew up with. Not only does this taboo make healing from certain kinds of woundings next to impossible, it contributes to the building of the “shadow American” character that is not so benevolent and generous as we like to think.

Beneath the preferred American identification with exceptional goodness of our character, a whole range of suffering occurs, and is tolerated, which is a result of unconsciousness, rather than of out and out Simon Legree-type cruelty. Such suffering is still suffering, but it is socially invisible, not remarkable, and becoming ever less so, I believe. My suffering as a child was apparently invisible to all who knew me. The many “tics” of my childhood - persistent bed-wetting, nail-biting, food neuroses and insomnia, did nothing more than earn me a single visit to a child psychologist at age 10. In a sense, I was the elephant in the family living room, whose pain, and therefore her reality, was denied by all. My pain was not truly hidden, given all of those neurotic behaviors, but no one around me was trained to acknowledge it as pain. None of the adults around me were trained themselves in compassion, or in the recognition of the suffering of others. In my turn, I simply learned to go with the program: okay, if we don’t talk about these things, then I will do my level best to help us bury them. Thus, I became trained in an ethos that does not recognize suffering, beginning with my own.

An aside about the children: It seems therefore to me eminently possible today that we take the “I’m okay” statements from our resilient children of divorced parents, children stressed out from constant structured activity and parental fears for their achievement and success, who no longer are held by networks of extended family and community, as true enough, and ignore the inconvenient pain growing in the souls of young people. Is it time we stop the blather about the kids being so much more (smart, mature, savvy, seasoned, global, fill in the blank) than we were, and ask ourselves tougher questions, at great inconvenience to ourselves, of course, about how well they are doing in their souls?

The idea I am working on here is that the cultural “face” that one learns to put on as a privileged white American (whiteness itself being the key privilege) plays a huge part in teaching us that we are not the ones that suffer. As one who is fairly steeped in New Age literature, and on a transformational spiritual path, I find that much of the literature of new age spirituality contributes to the persistence of this notion by preferring the word “compassion” to the word “suffering.” In general, it seems that if one is Africa American one is allowed to use the word "suffering," but if one is a member of the group defined by whiteness, one must talk about "compassion." Now I did not embark upon this topic with the idea that I was focused on race. But the distinction I’m talking about, and the suppression of knowledge of suffering entailed, has a direct impact on racism and racial discrimination. Because denial of one’s own feeling trains one to be, while perhaps intentionally kind and compassionate, unconsciously mean.

I believe there is no way around it. And this brings me to what it means to have an embodied, or body-centered spirituality, as many of us involved in transformational spirituality profess to have. Surely the embrace of the Goddess’s Life/Death/Life Cycles, means, centrally, living in one’s body, which means, in turn, suffering! I hazard this claim having myself made the perilous passage from the disembodied existence where suffering is not (consciously) known, to the one premised in feeling, which is emphatically "of the body."

From my earliest experiences with the language of transformational spirituality, the word compassion was given to me to help to explain the pain I was experiencing. I was growing a compassionate heart, these difficult changes would lead to a greater capacity for compassion for others. Such words were right on, in a way, but also they tended to leap over the intense suffering I was undergoing. In the 15 years since then, though I have done no formal study of it, I have observed that spiritual literature consistently prefers the word "compassion," with its high-toned connotations of eastern spiritual traditions, Buddhism in particular, to its poor disreputable cousin, "suffering." Of course, this is not a problem of Buddhism, but may lie in its translation by post-moderns who “choose” their religious tradition like a consumer commodity, taking what they like and leaving the messy parts back in Bhutan or Bombay. And there is the possibility that publishers recognize the greater market appeal of "compassion" as opposed to "suffering."

On the other hand, and directly in contrast to the association of “compassion” with the Buddha, the word and the concept of suffering are front and center in Catholic Christianity’s chosen archetype: the image of Christ on the cross is meant to evoke compassion in the beholder.

Which is not to defend Christianity, nor to make its case, but to make a case for individuals to become conscious of their suffering, and end the long practice of identifying only with the cheerier, more upbeat and optimistic version of ourselves. The case has already been made with the image of the man hung on the tree, but the point of Christ’s agony appears to be lost on many of the faith’s adherents. Being Americans first, and Christians second, means we’ll do our damndest to stay out of our bodies, in perpetual expectation of the heaven lying somewhere up ahead, that greater good, that growth and perfection surely attainable in the future. In the meantime, as best we can, we stay out of the moment, out of the eternal now, out of our bodies and our genuine feelings. As the tumult of violence and news of destruction becomes ever more clamorous, we remain outside it all, numbed and distracted by the pervasive media blitz, by shopping, electronic communication devices, and a slew of other distractions and addictions.

No wonder the rage of the Tea Partiers at the prospect of reduced expectations and a shrinking economy - no one ever told us we would have to suffer in this way during “peacetime!” The wonder is that they consistently fail to direct their rage at those who are not and will not suffer economically; they direct their rage at “government,” rather than at those who control and manipulate government through their power and wealth.

But I want to stay with my own “constituents;” the body of people who, to the extent that we call ourselves spiritual, are connected more with the transformational, “gnostic,” or esoteric wing of religion, rather than the institutional traditions or fundamentalist offshoots. Like the moderns or postmoderns we are, we indeed pick and choose from the traditions. However, if we are to trade “in-our-head” spirituality for heart-centeredness, if we are to follow the Goddess and learn to live in accord with Nature’s life/death/life cycles, if we truly want to stop the long habit of allowing nature, the earth, the diversity of animal and plant species, to suffer in our stead, we’d better start becoming acquainted with our own pain. And lest I be interpreted to mean that I am calling “ the victim” in everyone to stand up and be counted, I assure you I am not!

To be “worthy of our suffering,” a phrase attributed to Dostoevsky, we have now to learn our own joyful song. To accomplish such a soul triumph, victim identity is useless, and so is resolute optimism. Suffering is fearful because it threatens to destroy the meaning some of us have identified with for so long, the “sunny side of the street” optimism that we learn to carry like a potent talisman against the dark. In a sense this is true, but one must trust that giving up that identification will yield something far greater and more valuable. The voice you will have obtained in knowing your suffering, and must now use, is the voice of the artist, the mystic, the poet, the prophet that is you; contact with that forgotten one in you makes your more authentic voice manifest. To be “worthy of our suffering” each of us must learn what her/his song is and offer it to the community, where it is wanted and needed for the long healing.

As the world hurtles toward destruction, we cannot anymore leave the depth and the soul of our humanity, the pain of being human, to be lived out disproportionately by “the others,” the “less fortunate.” We come to know our wounds and our suffering not to withdraw in resentment and self-pity, but to fulfill the complete and magnanimous template we were given at birth. To have any hope at all of being able to “suffer with” those others, and with the planet, we must cross over and learn the rest of what we know, but have not only been afraid to acknowledge, but actively discouraged from attempting by dominant aspects of our American culture. If, at the deepest levels in ourselves, we do not know our suffering then we do not know the joy of connection either, its that simple. The most profound act of love is the one we direct to our own suffering; all else issues from that.