I’m finally home from the hospital. Thank you all for your messages and thoughts this week. I very much felt the support of Saint Andrews, other clergy, and of this wonderful online community
I would never have chosen to go through open heart surgery if I had an option. I am not one who believes that suffering is necessarily redemptive, but I also knew there is wisdom that can only be gained from suffering.
In a way, this week was like being kidnapped at knife point and taken to a radiant Zen monastery to sit on the razor’s edge with the greatest teacher of all- Life.
I am a person of enormous privilege. What I know of human suffering has been borrowed from Black activists who trusted me with their anger. I have had to borrow the lessons of human suffering from rape survivors and members of my LGBTQIA human family who trusted me enough to share the lessons of a depth of suffering I have never experienced directly myself.
It is a good thing to empathize with the sufferings of others, but is a better thing to learn to FEEL that pain in my own body. I’m not sure I am articulate enough to express this week’s experience. It was a Dante’s Inferno moving from subjective to objective perceptual states with the help of mythic symbols and hundreds of human rights teachers I have known in my life. I empathized with human suffering, but I did not yet FEEL the thorn of human suffering in my own heart.
Sometimes this week my inner hallucinations were so strong and clear that it was hard to witness the objective reality happening before me. Other times, the passionate empathy of ICU nurses clearly feeling my duress was so sweet and noble that they were my objective teachers in the the central importance empathy.
In the early North African Church there was a reverence for human reason. Many of the hymns of the early Alexandrian church spoke from a wisdom lost when Christianity became European, dogmatic and hierarchical. For some reason, lying on my back in this week I realized that most of my heroes in the early church were Black.
I also remembered that, just as “Logos” was the rational part of wisdom in the early church, there was also an emotive side to wisdom that Aristotle termed “Pathos.” To be fully human in an indifferent cosmos means to suffer. There may or may not be a meaning behind our suffering, but there is enormous wisdom to be found within it.
This week, it seemed to me, that “Pathos” was the mythic truth behind Jesus on the cross, Prometheus bound, and the Goddess in search of her absconded child or lover imprisoned in the underworld.
I remembered Jung’s statement that all neurosis comes from an unwillingness to suffer. (I didn’t have any books there so don’t trust my quotes yet.) It occurred to me this week that, perhaps, the MAGA movement is a collective neurosis of White people unwilling to FEEL what we have done to People of Color through history. Perhaps MAGA is shared neurosis of men lacking the courage to FEEL our connection to the rape and battering women have endured since the founding of this nation. Perhaps Christian nationalism is a shared neurosis of Christians unwilling to FEEL our connection to the German Holocaust and our betrayal of human rights through history.
Albert Schweitzer was my first real spiritual hero. He came to his “Reverence for Life” philosophy watching the duress of a herd of hippos struggle to cross a swollen river. Perhaps he was realizing the central importance of “Pathos” to any who seek to live an ethical life.
When the Buddha spoke of human existence as suffering, perhaps he was not being negative but teaching the message of “Pathos,” that peace of mind is to be found by becoming fully aware of our human suffering.
When Arch Bishop Romero said there are things in life that can only be seen through eyes that have cried, perhaps he was singing a hymn of homage to the Goddess of Wisdom whose name is “Pathos.”