Healing Halm of Time.

Letters To My SonChapter 11: Tragedy and Suffering
▬By Kent Nerburn
Tragedy and suffering will come to you. You cannot insulate yourself from them. You cannot avoid them. They come in their own season and in their own time.

When they come, they will overwhelm you and immobilize you. You will feel for a time like you can’t go on. If you are one kind of person, you will feel like no other human being has ever known the suffering you are going through. If you are another kind, you will feel that your suffering is so small and insignificant compared to the greater sufferings of others that you are being self-indulgent by feeling your own pain.

Don’t be duped by either extreme. A person burned by a match does not feel pain any less because someone else was burned in a fire. Your pain and suffering are real because they are yours. You must embrace them and realize that they, too, are a gift of life because they take you out of yourself and, for a moment, make you one with all others who have known loss or pain or suffering.

The great lesson of suffering comes from the fact that it is so much greater than the confines in which we live our daily lives. When all is going well, our world is a small, controlled experience bounded by our daily necessities. Going to the store, finishing a paper, getting new tires for the car, wondering whether the girl who smiled at me yesterday likes me - these re the levels of concern that occupy our daily lives.

When tragedy and suffering come swooping in, they are unexpected, unforseen, unprepared for. They shatter our tiny boundaries and break our world into pieces. For a time we are living inside a scream that seems to have no exit, only echoes. Those small cares that seemed so important yesterday become nothing, our daily concerns petty.

When we finally reclaim ourselves, as we ultimately do, we are changed. We have been dropped into chaos and nothing is as it was. We look longingly on life as it used to be and wish we had a chance to do things over again.

But we don’t. Our lives are unalterably changed, and we will never again be the persons we were before. We have been carried into a larger realm where we see what truly is important , and it is our daily lives. It is our chance to thing life afresh.

How we respond to tragedy and suffering is the measure of our strength.
I know a man who was chained to a bed and beaten as a child. He now lives alone in a single room, aligning his shoes perfectly and setting each object in its appointed place everyday. He has no friends other than his sense of order, which is nothing more than the warding off of the chaos that whirled around him as a child.

I know another man who survived Auschwitz as a child and stood by as his mother and father were killed. He now devotes himself to making money and living what he perceives as “the good life.” “I’ve suffered enough,” he says. “I have a right to try to claim some happiness.”

I also know a woman who was taken, blindfolded, at eighteen, to a dingy hotel room in a distant city to have a bloody, scraping, kitchen-table abortion. She dedicated her life to working with cancer patients, perhaps as an atonement for some perceived guilt, perhaps because she understood some broader dimension of suffering.

I can’t judge any of these people. They have each suffered deeply, far more deeply than you or I. But they share something in common - they changed their lives in response to the suffering they experienced.
Some people, like my friend with the shoes and my friend with the money, chose to respond to their tragedy and suffering by insulating themselves further. Perhaps they had to; perhaps the scars were so great they couldn’t endure another touch of pain such as they had known.

But what of my friend in the cancer ward? She did not deny her pain. She did not run from it. She accepted it, embraced it, and saw how it made her one with others who knew pain and suffering. Because she had felt death inside her, she chose to share herself with others who were feeling death inside themselves.

We need to see these dark moments as moments of growth. Those who insulate themselves from further pain miss a great opportunity. They miss the chance to use their pain to grow outside themselves and recognize something greater and shared in our human experience.

Maybe your pain is the loss of a girlfriend or the death of a pet. Maybe it is the death of a parent or an accident that maims or a sickness that never retreats. Whatever it is, it is your measure, and you need to look upon it as a gift to help you reclaim what is important in your life.

Remember, though a hurt may seem unbearable and all-consuming at first, with the healing halm of time it will begin to pass. The human being is a surprisingly resilient organism. We impel toward health, not sickness. Your spirit, as surely as your body, will try to heal.
The question you must ask yourself is not if you will heal, but how you will heal. Grief and pain have their own duration, but when they begin to pass, you must take care to guide the shape of the new being you are becoming. They reduce our lives to chaos, but in return they offer us a chance to rebuild our sense of values and meaning.
So you should not fear tragedy and suffering. From them can come your greatest creativity. No one should seek them, but no one can avoid them. Like love, they make you more a part of the human family. Experience them for what they are, but use them for what they can be. They are the fire that burns you pure.