23 posts tagged “suffering”

From Paulo Coelho's blog:

A conversation between him and his spiritual master.

“It’s very difficult. But there is no choice: if you don’t pardon, then you’ll think about the pain they caused you and that pain will never go away. I’m not saying that you have to like those who do you wrong. I’m not telling you to go back to that person’s company. I’m not suggesting that you start seeing that person as an angel or as someone who acted without any hurtful intentions. All I am saying is that the energy of hate will take you nowhere, but the energy of pardon which manifests itself through love will manage to change your life in a positive sense.”

“I have been hurt many times.”

“That’s the reason that you still bear within yourself the little boy who cried hiding from his parents, the boy who was the weakest in his class. You still bear the marks of that frail little boy who could never find a girlfriend and was never good at sports. You haven’t managed to chase off the scars of some injustices they committed against you during your life. But what good does that do you? None at all. Absolutely nothing. Just a constant desire to feel sorry for yourself for being the victim of those who were stronger. Or else dress up like an avenger ready to inflict more wounds on those who hurt you. Don’t you think you’re wasting your time with all that?”

“I think it’s human.”

“It’s certainly human. But it’s neither intelligent nor reasonable. Respect your time on this Earth, understand that God has always pardoned you, and learn to pardon too.”

After this conversation with J, which took place just before I traveled to spend 40 days in the Mojave desert in the United States, I began to understand better the boy, the adolescent, the hurt adult I once was. One morning, going from the Valley of Death in California to Tucson in Arizona, I made a mental list of everyone I thought I hated because they had hurt me. I went along pardoning them one by one and six hours later, in Tucson, my soul felt so light and my life had changed much for the better.

So, I'm having an interesting discussion with a friend on a message board.  He belongs to the Orthodox Church, believes that no one goes to Hell when they die, and thinks that Jesus' message was primarily about *this* life and not the next.  So far I agree.

Our discussion is centered around the events in Christ's life, and whether them actually taking place in the time line has any affect on the meaning derived from them.  I'm quite enjoying this discussion, so I'm going to paste some parts of it here for remembrance sake...and for anyone who wishes to continue it. :)

*****

So, it's important to you because it gives you a warm feeling that you're on the right path? lol, I don't mean it that harsh of course, but if it was important to the apostles, *why* was it important? Surely this seems to be a question worth exploring, right?

I guess I find so much meaning in the story that I'm not sure what affect its historicity would have on its impact?

I mean, say we had the bible, but the names were all changed...would it still have the same power? If it doesn't, is it a meaningful difference, or does it just have less power because it's not what we are used to? Or, say someone came up with undeniable proof that Jesus never existed at all, would that shake your faith?

I think it was important to them for a number of reasons, including validation of Jesus' claims, encouragement in their sorrow, hope that they share the same fate, and confidence that they could now risk their lives and do anything they dreamt of.

I see your point here. And I know for a great many people throughout history it has been somewhat of a security blanket that gives them courage and strengthens their faith. But, I guess, that's exactly my point. It's a huge comfort, and since when did Jesus tell us to seek comfort? Again, I'm not arguing that the story *wasn't* historically true, I just think that we tend to be way too attached to that aspect, and it can limit our understanding so that we miss some of the most profound and meaningful things in the story itself.

I guess I am just wary of attachment to particulars.

For me, even thinking that the story may be entirely myth, I still find incredible power in it. My life experience validates Jesus' claims. The concepts in the story give me encouragement in my sorrows and hope for my own resurrection (mainly in my life here, but sure after death too). It doesn't always give me the courage to risk everything and follow my dreams, because often my vision is clouded by fear. But when I am calm and centered, I see clearly and that courage comes to me in waves. I worry that a courage based on a particular historical event is a way to deny that fear. It's a subtle underlying aspect of human life, and it cannot be denied.

The only way to be rid of it is, as through Jesus' example, letting it in and not avoiding it. It's a subtle thing I'm talking about, how someone might push down a feeling of fear because of their unshattering faith in a particular event...versus understanding what that event tries to show us (regardless of whether it happened that way or not) and listening to that advice and being open and receptive...even to fear and suffering.

Let's not forget though that it was important to Jesus too. For some reason, it had to happen, he predicted that it would, and told his followers to look forward to it.

It did have to happen, in the story, because of what it means. Because of how it teaches us. It would make sense that Jesus would acknowledge that it has to happen, because part of his point is that even seeing something like this looming up ahead in our future, we must not be afraid, for there is nothing to fear. If you imagine Jesus' prediction as a literary device in the story of the resurrection, it makes a lot of sense. Not that it can't be real as well, but it seems that the meaning is there regardless.

But as to why it should be important historically, I guess I don't really have an answer right now, but it seems inseparable from the story, to me anyway. Perhaps they are pat Christian answers, but if it's just a story, and never happened, and the Son of God didn't exist, and the Incarnation didn't really happen, I'm forced ask what the point would even be then? Besides just trying to be a better person by modeling your life after a character in a story. And the Gospels, as well as the other NT writings, and the writings of those shortly thereafter, place great importance upon these events really happening.

Do you really think the Bible becomes empty and meaningless if these events didn't happen? Acknowledging that the events may not have taken place in real life does not take away from the profundity and the *truth* found in the story. This story puts into beautiful and precise terms what so many other stories try to get at...some with better success than others. It speaks directly to our hearts the way only stories can. And there are echoes of these truths in almost every story we write, in almost every life we live. But here we have it unclouded by the fear in our normal stories. Jesus is a character without fear (or rather, who does not act of fear), without sin, and the huge tragedy in his life puts God's lessons to us practically in neon lights.

It's so much more than just trying to be a better person. It's discovering the path to truth, to life. It's trusting in the process, even if it looks like it is leading you toward death...because the path to death is a path to rebirth. It teaches us that there is no need to fear, ever. And that love is a never ending spring; the more you pour out of yourself the more you have. It is about letting go.

Stories are meant to teach eternal truths in such a way that we can resonate with them on the deepest level. Christ's story is one of, if not the, most profound of all. I don't know about you, but when I talk about these things my heart fills with excitement and joy at the sheer *truth* of it all. It's incredible.

Question for you, what was Paul meaning when he said if Jesus didn't really die and rise again, our faith is in vain? If it's not important as an event that really happened, why do they all place so much importance upon it?

Well, I'm not a bible scholar, so I can't tell you what his original meaning was. I can only tell you what I gather from it. Why must Paul be talking about a concrete event? In the same passage he talks about the reflection between Christ and Adam. But you don't believe Adam existed. You have no attachment to the particulars in that story. Yet somehow what Paul says is true, isn't it? That what was introduced with Adam is now overcome by Christ. Is it an event that somehow canceled out a prior event? No, because the prior event never happened in real life. It was a myth. But the meaning of it is still strong...and the eternal aspect of the myth, the truth of it...is now reflected and expanded on in the story of Christ.

I don't think he's really talking about Christ being risen on a concrete level (though again, it may be concrete as well), but on a personal and existential level that goes much deeper. If Christ is not risen, if there is no rebirth after death, then your faith and your preaching are worthless. You do not fully believe in the meaning you preach. You do not truly have faith. You are still in sin because you are still in fear of death and suffering. And in your mind, those who are asleep (notice he doesn't say dead, interesting) have no hope of awakening, so why preach? I think he's showing how their point of view is reflective of an inner state of despair and fear, when it should be one of hope and life.

Anyway, just my perspective.

*****

How do you find that place of detached and centered love when you're scared to death?  Fear makes you act stupid, controlling, suspicious, and makes you feel worthless.  It makes it all worse.  But the only thing you can do is work on your self, and your own reactions.  Regardless of what others may do, you still control your reactions to them. 

It seems so easy, to stop and turn your outlook around.  Just quell the fear and act from your center.  It will keep you from feeling that intense fear that leaves you grasping and unable to let go.  It may be simple, but it's not easy.  The fear sneaks up on you.  It's not until afterward that you realize it has taken hold of you.  You acted petty, and you even tried to hide your motives from yourself.  You were completely innocent, not suspicious at all. Lies. 

Admit the truth.  You're scared.  And you're letting the fear turn you into something that isn't you, that you never wanted to be but always felt the potential for somewhere within yourself.  Your heart feels twisted, and escape feels impossible.  For where is there to go but into more fear and hurt?

But just...stop.  Tell all the voices of worry and fear and pain to shut up for one second.  Feel yourself fixed, still, present to the moment.  Expand your awareness to encompass more than the situation that turns you ugly.  Remember.  Remember everything else. The sky, the trees, your comfy couch, the people you love, the person you love.  Even in this moment there are a million things around you worthy of your attention.  Look at them, notice them. 

The fear subsides.  Now imagine yourself pouring out into everything you see.  There.  There it is. Your center.  You've found it.  Now, remembering that big world, look back on the small one.  It looks different now.  Closer, but more distant at the same time.  The pain of it does not go away, but somehow it doesn't penetrate you, because you can let your love expand and fill it.

What happens is no longer of consequence.  Let it be.  Love it.

Just love it.

Seen at Sujatin's blog.

Seeing the suffering in the world around us and in our own bodies and minds, we begin to understand suffering not only as an individual problem, but as a universal experience. It is one of the aspects of being alive. The question that then comes to mind is: If compassion arises from the awareness of suffering, why isnt the world a more compassionate place? The problem is that often our hearts are not open to feel the pain. We move away from it, close off, and become defended. By closing ourselves off from suffering, however, we also close ourselves to our own wellspring of compassion. We dont need to be particularly saintly in order to be compassionate. Compassion is the natural response of an open heart, but that wellspring of compassion remains capped as long as we turn away from or deny or resist the truth of what is there. When we deny our experience of suffering, we move away from what is genuine to what is fabricated, deceptive, and confusing.

"Things falling apart is a kind of testing and also a kind of healing. We think that the point is to pass the test or to overcome the problem, but the truth is that things don't really get solved. They come together and they fall apart. Then they come together again and fall apart again. It's just like that. The healing comes from letting there be room for all this to happen; room for grief, for relief, for misery, for joy. When we think that something is going to bring us pleasure, we don't know what's really going to happen. When we think something is going to give us misery, we don't know. Letting there be room for not knowing is the most important thing of all. We try to do what we think is going to help. But we don't know. We never know if we're going to fall flat or sit up tall. When there's a big disappointment, we don't know if that's the end of the story. It may be just the beginning of a great adventure."

Pema Chodron

Seen elsewhere on Vox...had to borrow it.  I've been flirting with buying one of Chodron's books for some time now.

Came across these today, and I think they apply to what I've currently been going through.

"The ego adopts the viewpoint of matter, and therefore is constantly trapped by matter—trapped and tortured by the physics of pain.  But pain, too, arises in your consciousness, and you can either be in pain, or find pain in you, so that you surround pain, are bigger than pain, transcend pain, as you rest in the vast expanse of pure Emptiness that you deeply and truly are."

-Ken Wilber, One Taste

"You who feel threatened by this changing world, its twists of fortune and its bitter jests, its brief relationships and all the “gifts” it merely lends to take away again; attend this lesson well. The world provides no safety. It is rooted in attack, and all its “gifts” of seeming safety are illusory deceptions. It attacks, and then attacks again. No peace of mind is possible where danger threatens thus.

Defenses are the costliest of all the prices which the ego would exact. In them lies madness in a form so grim that hope of sanity seems but to be an idle dream, beyond the possible. The sense of threat the world encourages is so much deeper, and so far beyond the frenzy and intensity of which you can conceive, that you have no idea of all the devastation it has wrought…You are its slave. You know not what you do, in fear of it. You do not understand how much you have been made to sacrifice, who feel its iron grip upon your heart. You do not realize what you have done to sabotage the holy peace of God by your defensiveness. For you behold the Son of God as but a victim to attack by fantasies, by dreams, and by illusions he has made; yet helpless in their presence, needful only of defense by still more fantasies, and dreams by which illusions of his safety comfort him."

-ACIM

"Blessed are the souls that solve
      The paradox of Pain,
And find the path that, piercing it,
      Leads through to Peace again."

-My Peace I Give Unto You, Studdert-Kennedy

"I was filled full of everlasting assurance, powerfully secured without any pain or fear. This experience was so happy spiritually that I felt completely at peace and relaxed; there was nothing on earth that could have disturbed me. But this lasted only for a short time, and then I was changed and I began to act with a sense of loneliness and depression and the futility of life itself, so that I hardly had the patience to continue living. No comfort or relaxation now, just 'faith, hope and love', and truly I felt very little of this. And yet soon after this our blessed Lord gave me once again that comfort, so pleasant and sure, so delightful and powerful, that there was no fear, no sorrow, no pain, physical and spiritual that could bother me. And then again I felt the pain; then the joy and pleasure; now the one and now the other, again and again, I suppose about 20 times. In the time of joy I could have said with S. Paul: Nothing shall separate me from the love of Christ; and in my pain I could have said with S. Peter: Save me Lord, I am perishing. This vision was shown to teach me to understand that some souls profit by experiencing this, to be comforted at one time, and at another to be left to themselves. God wishes us to know however that he keeps us safe at all times, in sorrow and in joy."

- Julian of Norwich

I wrote this a year and a half ago for one of my last courses in college.  I'm posting it here so I don't lose track of it. I was really proud of it when I wrote it.  It's funny because as much depth as I've gained since then, I'm still spouting off the same things.  :)

Faith and Hope:
Paralleling the World of Science with the World of Personal Experience

Chaos Theory and Metamathematics:
An Engineering Perspective on Religion

June 12, 2006

“Hope consists in asserting that there is
At the heart of being,
Beyond all data,
Beyond all inventories and calculations,
A mysterious principle which is in
Connivance with me,
Which cannot but will that which I will,
If what I will deserves to be willed
And is, in fact, willed
By the whole of my being.”
- Gabriel Marcel, The Ontological Mystery

Throughout our recent history, there has been a serious disconnect between science and religion.  It was often felt that science would eventually explain everything, and that religion might fall by the wayside.  But is there something about our existence that eludes even science?  Can science explain, or at least exist in harmony with, not just religion but the human personal experience?  How can we as individuals deal with all of the pain and suffering in the world?  Does science help us or hinder us in this goal?  Or is there some aspect of life that makes its mysteries completely unintelligible?  Is there any reason to have hope in a seemingly meaningless world such as ours?

Most people think of faith as assenting to certain propositions, regardless of the fact that there is no available proof.  If you hold something axiomatically, you hold it on faith.  But this is not the only way to think about faith.  William Lynch has a much different opinion.  We all have a deep, primal urge to trust in something other than ourselves.  Faith is exactly that movement of trust.  In fact, the word “believe” actually comes from the root “to belove.” Faith is a way of imagining the world through the lens of what you have chosen to give your life to.  It is a way of seeing, a paradigm.  Just as science has paradigms, faith does too.  Our lives are greatly shaped by how we view the world.

“What we observe is not nature itself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning.” [1]

Annie Dillard describes it as the “artificial obvious,” which is what we construct that allows us to see better certain aspects of the reality which exists.  A geologist sees things in rocks at a glance that we wouldn’t even give a second look to.  Someone who loves cars can diagnose a problem just by listening to the engine.  We see what we know and what we expect, and what we expect depends on the artificial obvious that we have composed for ourselves.

Furthermore, because both faith and science are made up of different paradigms, we can come to a conclusive definition of mystery, given to us by Gabriel Marcel:

“A mystery is a problem which encroaches on its own data, invading them, as it were, and thereby transcending itself as a simple problem.” [2]

A mystery is something that we cannot figure out from inside our paradigm.  It is because a paradigm is so subjective that these mysteries exist.  They encroach on their own data, meaning that he problem cannot be approached from the standpoint of an objective observer.  The observer is part of the problem, he is inseparable from it, and he cannot get out of it in order to solve it.  So it is with paradigms, both scientific and faithful or personal.

One of the most important features of an imagination of faith, according to Lynch, is that it is ironic:

“It is an ironic paradigm.  This is so important that I have chosen irony, the ironic imagination, the irony of faith, the irony of Christ, as the real subject for this book [3]

He goes on to show how deeply ironic the Christian view of the world really is.  He even argues that any faith in the world is necessarily ironic because of the fact that it must reconcile pain with meaning.  This will become very important in our discussion on what science and faith have in common later on.

Science and math used to be considered absolute disciplines.  That is, there was nothing that they chouldn’t find out given the right amount of time and resources.  There was always a certain amount of control and predictability that could be counted on in scientific experiments.  If you cannot repeat your findings, how can they be valid?  Both scientists and mathematicians alike were able (or at least thought that they would be able) to take the world in all of its complexity and label it.  They wanted to section it off and put it into nice neat little boxes, each separated from the other.  Or, even better, find one theory that could explain the entirety of our existence, tying together everything that we know and experience scientifically.

This sort of view we will hereby refer to as “kitsch.” Kitsch is that sort of naïve optimism that we see running rampant in our culture.  From the sappy fairytale endings in many of our movies, to many people’s daily outlook on life.  It is the idea that we can expect things to turn out for the better.  It gives us the sense that we have control over out own lives.  Most of us need it in order to function without being overwhelmed by all of the pain in the world.  It is a world that leaves absolutely no room for mystery.  Every instance of evil of darkness in life becomes a problem that we must find a way to solve.  Unfortunately, many people still think of science this way even today.

However, the more science has reached for this sort of ideal, the more it has discovered knowledge that undermines it.  In 1931, while trying to prove logical completeness within a formal system, Kurt Gödel was forced to come to the opposite conclusion.  Gödel proved that within a system, there will always be propositions that cannot be classified as true or false without an outside perspective.  These “unprovable propositions” are exactly mysteries in Marcel’s sense.  Unprovable propositions are problems that encroach on their own data.  It is precisely the fact that you are within a system that prevents you from figuring out the validity of a proposition.

As a consequence of Gödel’s proof, math and science became worlds where absolute knowledge will never be possible.  This proof was solidified when Chaos Theory came into existence.  Because chaotic systems require infinite precision to reproduce exact results, we as finite beings can never be certain what results we will obtain from a particular experiment.  It removes the elements of control and predictability that were so present in scientific minds before.

If we put those two together, we find that science now leaves considerable room for mystery.  We have had to acknowledge that we cannot figure everything out, and that we may not have as much control as we originally though we did.  Our kitschy view of what we can know and figure out has been removed.  That is why many scientists had such a problem accepting Gödel’s proof.  They could no longer live in a nice, safe, controllable, and predictable little world.

With the advent of modern physics, we have also been forced to realize that it may not be impossible for two opposing attributes to exist within the same object.  Didn’t Lynch say that faith was an ironic paradigm?

“The common division of the world into subject and object, inner and outer world, body and soul, is no longer adequate.” [4]

Faith, and now science, have the ability to hold together two contradictory things.  Light, and in fact all matter, have been found to behave as both a wave and a particle, depending on the circumstances.  Quantum particles have both spin-up and spin-down, even though only one will appear when measured.  Chaos seems to posit that we may be able to hold freedom and determinism together.

If we can keep all these things together, then it wouldn’t be too hard to see how God’s love and the evil in the world could fit together.  There must be a way to figure it out.  If God really loves us, then he must do so allowing us to freely love him back, or not.  He must allow us to becomes whoever we want to be and to do whatever we deem necessary.  He must give us free will.  And, of course, with free will comes bad decisions, and with bad decisions comes evil.  Evil exists in the world precisely because God loves us so much.  If that isn’t the ironic imagination that Lynch describes, then what is?

This discussion also brings us to a definition of beauty that does not conform to kitsch.  If beauty is only the good things in life, then we hold ourselves to a purely aesthetic view of beauty.  We imagine it as something that can be judged and looked at as an observer.  But doesn’t real beauty mean so much more to us?  It takes more than simple prettiness to really ignite us.  Annie Dillard wrote about just that in her Pulitzer Prize winning novel The Pilgrim at Tinker Creek:

“One late afternoon at a low tide a hundred big sharks passed the beach near the mouth of a tidal river in a feeding frenzy.  As each green wave rose from the churning water, it illuminated within itself the six- or eight-foot-long bodies of twisting sharks.  … The sight held awesome wonders:  power and beauty, grace tangled in a rapture with violence.”[5]

A sight like this seems to touch us in a much deeper way than a cute little bird signing a song ever could.  It seems more real somehow.  It inspires awe, a mixture of fear and respect.

So, now we have found a way to make the pieces of life fit together very nicely.  The worlds of science and philosophy merge and are inseparable.  But now we must proceed with caution.  If we are not careful, we risk falling into a new sort of not-quite-so-naïve optimism.  It will be the mystery itself that becomes kitsch.  Ernest Becker writes of this in Denial of Death:

“It need not be overtly a god or openly stronger person, but it can be the power of an all-absorbing activity, a passion, a dedication to the game, a way of life, that like a comfortable web keeps a person buoyed up and ignorant of himself, of the fact that he does not rest on his own center.”[6]

In face, even Dillard herself was wary of this fact.  Years after writing Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Dillard found herself in a slump.  She didn’t like what she was writing, and so she went back to Tinker Creek to try to recapture the experience that drove her to write her prize-winning novel.  It was there that she realized how she had been fooled.  She had been dealing only with the world of nature.  A world that was outside of herself.  How can we really talk about violence and suffering if we don’t talk about the human aspect of it?  And so she set upon writing another novel, Holy the Firm, which would better describe how we deal with our own personal suffering.

But didn’t we just do what Dillard did in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek?  Didn’t we let the mystery become our new kitsch?  If we don’t consider our own human pain, then we are just drawing on

“…an experience which is not drawn from the most intimate and living part of himself, but, on the contrary, is considered from a sufficient distance to allow certain contradictions to become alternated or fused into a general harmony.”[7]

It seems that earlier we were somehow able to logic away the pain that comes from evil.  We put ourselves at a distance and talked about suffering as a global term.

“…evil which is only stated or observed is no longer evil which is suffered; in fact, it ceases to be evil.” [8]

Without our own pain, can we really call life a mystery?  Doesn’t this element of our own suffering make the problem encroach on its data in a whole new way?

It’s one thing to talk about suffering on a global scale, where you are a passive observer of it.  However, things become completely different when you are the one in pain.  I don’t just mean physical pain, although that has its problems as well.  What I am talking about is existential pain.  The pain you feel when your deepest love and trust have been betrayed.  It’s not hard to come up with an example of this type of anguish.  Most have experienced it before.  When you are really, truly suffering in this way, the explanation we gave before that our pain is a consequence of God’s love just doesn’t seem to satisfy you.  Not only that, but it almost infuriates you.  When you are really hurting, anything with a hint of kitsch reminds you of the love you lost.  You get mad because you know how futile it was to believe in such a greater harmony.  You yourself had believed it until it was violently ripped away from you.  You look at everyone’s life and feel like you know something they don’t.  Like they are just going about their stupid, superficial lives but you know better.  You know that whenever you put your trust in something or someone, that trust will ultimately be betrayed.

How can God let us hurt so badly when he has the power to stop it?  It doesn’t make sense.  There is no logical reason for it.  It sucks.  It hurts.  There’s no way to prevent evil from causing pain.  But that does not mean that something good can never come from it.  Violence and suffering have a way of causing paradigm shifts.  Flannery O’Connor, a Catholic fiction writer, articulates this very well:

“…in my own stories I have found that violence is strangely capable of returning my characters to reality and preparing them to accept their moment of grace.  Their heads are so hard that almost nothing else will do the work.  This idea, that reality is something to which we must be returned to at considerable cost, is one which is seldom understood by the casual reader…” [9]

We convince ourselves that we have control over our lives.  That kitsch isn’t so bad.  We get so stuck in our ways of thinking that almost nothing else but violence will do the job of waking us up.  Peter Godfrey-Smith also has something to say about paradigms and what can change them:

“In this way, a paradigm is like a well-shielded and well-designed bomb.  A bomb is supped to blow up; that is its function.” However, “A well-designed bomb will be shielded from minor buffets.  Only a very specific stimulus will trigger the explosion.” [10]

Violence and pain are often the specific stimuli that we need to make our paradigms blow up.  But let’s not forget that this process of blowing our old world view to shreds is not easy.  It hurts.  We spend so much time and effort trying to gain a sense of mastery over our world that when it is ripped away, we feel completely and utterly betrayed.

But even here, there are two levels of suffering.  There is a difference between an accident, where the pain comes from without, and what Jerome Miller calls a “tragic reversal.”  We usually construct our lives in such a way as to avoid something.  What the thing is depends on the particular person and their history.  A tragic reversal happens when these very avoidances set you up to invite the exact type of pain that you were trying to run from.  It is the realization that:

“I have set in motion my own disintegration insofar as I am responsible for grounding the whole structure of my life on avoidances which the very realities that I excluded from my life are now undermining.  … Such an experience upsets the ego in a profoundly intimate and humiliating way.” [11]

With an accident, you can always blame some external force.  However, with a tragic reversal, most of the blame lies in you.  It is so upsetting because you caused your own pain.  You set yourself up for this.  Everything you had thought was true and safe and good was a lie.

Miller himself has a very illuminating example of a tragic reversal.  It is the story of a man who loves to welcome people into his home.  He feels he has built a good atmosphere in his house, based on his wonderful relationship with his wife and son. When people go over to his house, they feel at home because of how loving and perfect the household is.  But it is precisely this striving for perfection that causes his son to feel that he has to hide his homosexuality.  The son imagines that the father would be perfectly fine with some stranger being gay, but how can his son be gay?  How could they have lived all this time together and keep such huge secrets from each other?  He does not want to shatter his dad’s image of the perfect home, and so he starts to feel like the one stranger who cannot be welcome in the house.  The haven becomes a prison.  One day, his father finds him hung from the ceiling in an act of suicidal despair.  To the father, it will seem that his son’s death came from out of nowhere. But if he really thinks about it, he cannot help but realize his part in all of this, as inadvertent as it was.  It was by his very generosity that he unwittingly set up a dynamic that led to his son’s suicide.  Acknowledging this fact would probably be the most painful and horrible act of the father’s life.  It would shatter his world even more entirely that the death of his son on its own ever could have.  How can you live in a world of kitsch after that? The father’s imagination has been completely destroyed.

But even the pain won’t necessarily change a person’s imagination.  Whenever pain is involved, there is a huge temptation to just gloss over it and to convince yourself that you had nothing to do with it.  But in order to get past your defenses and shift your paradigm, you need to enter into crisis.  Allow the bomb to really blow up and deeply hurt you.  Otherwise, you go back to your normal life with your normal kitsch and never fully awaken yourself to the terrible, uncontrollable thing that is your life.

At this point, many get lost in the depths of despair.  What good is a paradigm shift if it is a shift into darkness and nihilism?  However, it absolutely crucial that we rid ourselves of our kitschy preconceived notions in order for us to be able to see clearly what true hope is.  You can only really see the light if you are in darkness.

“Hope is situated within the framework of the trial, not only corresponding to it, but constituting our being’s veritable response.” - Marcel [12]

There comes a moment, not as quickly for everyone, where somehow it is through the pain that we come to see something deeper.  Something that touches the most genuine parts of ourselves.  All of a sudden we see how complex and terrible and beautiful our lives really are, and we are filled with awe.  With wonder.  But we cannot force this moment.  It is not something we alone can cause:

“…hope is always associated with a communion, no matter how interior it may be.  This is actually so true that one wonders if despair and solitude are not at bottom necessarily identical.” - Marcel [13]

It is through our ties to other people that we will find hope.  Not just in what others can do for us but in the very obligations that our relationships demand of us.  It’s not someone else’s love that will bring us through; it is our love for others.  It is the acknowledgement of all of the shit in the world and the fact that there is not easy way out of it.  However, at the very same time we must recognize how much love there is in the world and how it all ties together, the good and the evil, to make a horrible, beautiful picture.  But again, it is not something we can just will to happen.  It is something which requires a certain relaxation.  A willingness to go wherever life takes us.  But when it finds us, the only reaction possible will be that of complete and utter awe.

And then, after this experience of hope, we inevitably construct new walls and defenses around ourselves.  We create new kitsch, and we begin to fool ourselves again.  And we will never know that we are doing it until the moment that it betrays us.  However, Marcel says it best when he writes:

“…it is never a simple return to the status quo, a simple return to our being, it is that and much more, and even the contrary of that, an undreamed of promotion, a transfiguration.”[14]

Even though we are endlessly repeating this cycle of avoidance, pain, and hope, the repetitions are not meaningless.  Each time we reach the hope it fundamentally changes us and how we view the world.

Now that we have more clearly defined the mystery, can science or mathematics really have anything to say?  I’m not convinced that it can.  It is no fault of scientists or mathematicians; it is just a difference in subject.  Math can never really focus on such a personal, data-encroaching pain because

“The business of a science is to concentrate on similarities, not differences, to be general, to omit whatever is not relevant to answering the severely delimited questions it sets itself to ask”[15]

Scientists have a certain amount of control over the objects of their study, and we have come to the conclusion that there is no such sort of control in the personal and religious spheres of life.  In addition, even though science and math have been proven not to be completely objective, they still tend to require the scientist to be in the mindset of an observer, not a participant.

So maybe science doesn’t hold all the answers, but I seriously doubt that anything or anyone actually does.  Perhaps we all have parts of the answers to varying degrees.  But whatever we do, we can never think we’ve got it all figured out.  That is precisely when we fall into the worst kind of kitsch.  We even have to be careful that, even allowing for mystery, we don’t let that mystery become kitsch as well.  Go where life takes you; be willing and relaxed.  And when darkness comes, invite it in.  It will hurt, and it will tear you apart.  You will tear yourself apart.  Life will not be merciful, and it does not take requests.  But somehow, find a way to trust in the world, and to fully invest yourself in it.  Marvel at the complexity and the interconnection all around you, and believe that there exists in the world, at the very heart of being, a mysterious power that cannot but will with you whenever what you will deserves to be willed, and is in fact willed by your entire being.

*****

[1] Werner Heisenberg
[2] Gabriel Marcel, The Ontological Mystery
[3] William F. Lynch, Images of Faith
[4] Werner Heisenberg
[5] Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
[6] Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death
[7] Gabriel Marcel, “Sketch of a Phenomenology and a Metaphysic of Hope”
[8] Gabriel Marcel, The Ontological Mystery
[9] Flannery O’Connor, “On Her Own Work”
[10] Peter Godfrey-Smith, Theory and Reality
[11] Jerome Miller, The Way of Suffering: A Geography of Crisis
[12] Gabriel Marcel, “Sketch of a Phenomenology and a Metaphysic of Hope”
[13] Gabriel Marcel, “Sketch of a Phenomenology and a Metaphysic of Hope”
[14] Gabriel Marcel, “Sketch of a Phenomenology and a Metaphysic of Hope”
[15] Isaiah Berlin, “The Concept of Scientific History”