The Wound – the Teacher Within
In common with suffering, thoughtful millions who, in a warring world of evil and destruction, doubt and wonder about the meaning of a saving God, I too have hard questions now. Can people walk through a children’s hospital ward and still believe in a loving Saviour? David Attenborough asks many questions about a God who will not, or cannot remove the worm that is eating into the baby’s eye. There are massive questions about innocent suffering. There are times when I sit down, breathe deeply, and when dark thoughts close in, try to remember anything that might help me understand something of the mystery of these huge human issues; things that I can use for comfort, support, courage, meaning, for seeing my way through the presence of intense suffering, of rampant evil, of the triumph of the anti-Christ.
In his book When Bad Things Happen to Good People Rabbi Harold Kushner reflects on these issues too. How can there be a good or just God in a world wracked with pain, how can we call God a loving Mother in the face of so much wanton destruction? What is the point of praying to such a cold and callous operator? Again, there are no easy answers. For everything we hold about our unbidden suffering, there is a contrary viewpoint too.
Susan Sontag in her Letter to Borges offers an optimistic vision of the wound as a mysterious resource. All our experiences – even the most negative and humiliating – are, in her view, material given to us as raw material from which we may fashion our work and future. In her An Interrupted Life Etty Hillesum, a young Jewish woman who died at Auschwitz, wrote: ‘It still all comes down to the same thing: life is beautiful. And I believe in God. And I want to be there right in the thick of what people call horror and still be able to say: life is beautiful.’53
Sooner or later coping with suffering becomes central to our lives. Some of the greatest wisdom has come from those who are no strangers to pain themselves. People who suffer a lot are always seeking some kind of meaning in what they go through. Man’s Search for Meaning was written by Viktor Frankl who, as a Holocaust survivor, suffered so deeply for so long without becoming embittered or despairing. Finding meaning in his terrible condition became the pursuit of his life of pain. We give meaning to our suffering by the way we reflect on and respond to it. In itself it is meaningless. Frankl realised that life’s hard ways can take away everything you possess except one thing: your freedom to choose how you respond to your circumstances and wounds and ‘enemies’.
He kept himself sane and humanly authentic and free by protecting, nourishing and practising this priceless grace, in spite of his persecutors’ redoubled efforts to break his will and his soul. He cherished his graced ability to forgive them for their endless gratuitous cruelty at every moment of every day even though they fiercely tried to make him hate their very guts. In my own current circumstances at this hour of my life, it might mean that while I cannot control the power of my cancer in any way, I can control my reaction to it, my response to it; how I receive it, live with it, think and feel, and what I do about it. I find immense and helpful wisdom in the reflections of people like Frankl who have suffered beyond description, and yet, in and only through that suffering, have found an invincible light to sustain them for life.
For Etty Hillesum, it was the significance of her suffering that kept her relentlessly free within herself. Her struggle in the madness and evil of the concentration camps was both deeply and despairingly human and utterly divine. ‘We seek the meaning of life,’ she wrote in her journals, ‘wondering whether any meaning can be left . . . perhaps life has its own meaning, even if it takes a lifetime to find it . . . for a moment yesterday I felt I was about to collapse under a tremendous weight . . . I feel like a small battlefield in which some of the problems of our time are being fought out – to allow oneself to be a battlefield.’54 Commenting on these words, Richard Rohr said this is what it means to hold together the contradictions and pain of the world, of humanity, of each one, without despair.