What do you hold onto when you are in real distress? Do you have a faith? Do you have a relationship with God? Do you have a philosophical system or a conscientious existential orientation or a physical technique, something that you have recourse to when you're actually in trouble? In moments of real, tangible dread, fear, loss, despair.
I ask this because I've been experiencing a lot of strong feelings recently, a sort of bottomless sadness, and it's had me reflecting on the actual relationship that I have with my faith. Is this thing real? It's certainly real, but how real does it get? What is the point where it crosses over from being an idea, a sort of worldview or language of transcendent value, to being an absolute, vital and tangible necessity to survive?
My own tradition is Christianity. And Christianity makes a lot of use of the Psalms, the Jewish texts from around the 10th to 5th centuries BCE or so that also provide much of the core liturgical fabric of the Christian Church. And in these Psalms we have many instances of this tension. In fact, I got inspired to do this video while reading and praying along to Psalm 86, which begins, “Hear me, Lord, and answer me, for I am poor and needy.”
But what does this answering entail? What actually happens when you talk to God? Does nothing happen? There's also, for instance, Psalm 88 where the speaker cries to God continuously and receives nothing back, but more of a sense of being overwhelmed. I cry to you for help, Lord, in the morning, my prayer comes before you.
Why, Lord, do you reject me and hide your face from me? Your wrath lies heavily on me. You have overwhelmed me with all of your waves. In this case the answer doesn't come in the form of being given respite or being given consolation. The consolation itself is merely the affirmation of the suffering itself as an existential fact.
The fact of suffering is the first of the four noble truths of Buddhism, which leads to the other truths that offer an escape from it. In Christianity though, the suffering itself is, in a paradoxical way, the substance of transcending it. One suffers with and in Christ, leaning into feeling one's suffering as an actual instantiation of the suffering of the source of all being who entered incarnated form as a human.
This has been the shape of my own prayer of late: being answered, has come in the form of being given the will to actively participate in the being of suffering itself. The suffering that is being the reality of loss, of separation, of death, the passage and change of all material forms, the disappointments, the total failure of what we expected and meant to pursue: the things that break our heart.
At one point the other day, I found myself literally groping in the air as I was praying to Mary, desperate to be held by the mother, the mother who is there, but not physically there. And in that physical absence, feeling the pain of no longer being in the womb, but not yet totally in the bosom of God or wherever I'm going, yearning, yearning in my grief. It made me realize that I'm going to lose everything I've ever had. Eventually, I'll lose my own physical mother. I'll lose everyone and everything. I'll lose my own body.
And this sense of thorough loss brought me more viscerally than ever to put my heart into the suffering in Gaza. It's hard to talk about it without sounding like I'm trying to make a political statement because we're so inundated with these images.
But in this age of representing images and ideas, we have to reconnect ourselves to the actual suffering of others. The image of a woman with her murdered niece was one of the first things that I saw today when I turned on my phone. A couple weeks ago I read about a Palestinian mother of ten who lost nine children to an Israeli airstrike. This physical being who no longer has physical life, the utter enormity of loss that is not merely a cause, but is the raw fact of suffering in the most intense possible way, the tearing of flesh from flesh. (Israeli mothers and fathers of course lost and have lost children too — this discussion is not about discounting that, but about the vividness, immediacy and intensity of the present Gazan plight.)
I have some friends right now that are doing a fast for Gaza, restricting their caloric intake to something that approximates the amount that Gazen are currently getting. Which is around 245 calories, less than 12% of what you're supposed to have in a day. What difference does this fasting make?
It's a show of protest, yes. But the deeper meaning is the same as the point with the Psalm. It is a sacred act of literal sympathy, suffering with. Suffering with the Source — the Source whose being withdraws itself from its own fullness in order to have there be this world of creation that there is -- this strange gift. God in God's infinity is the one who is.
It is in this infinite being that one rests even in the constant motion of finite individual material loss when shitty and terrible things happen. In this connection, I also think about a 19th century hymn written by a Presbyterian named Horatio Spafford. He received the news that his four daughters had died in a shipwreck, and in processing that loss, the loss of his entire progeny, the whole material substance of his own individual being, he wrote this hymn “It Is Well with My Soul”
It is well with my soul. The fundamental content of faith is that no matter what happens, what loss or sadness or terror or catastrophe or disappointment or heartbreak, it remains the case that in some mysterious way it is well -- it is good that we are, and that which truly is will always be.
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