Day 10: Prayer, Suffering & Job

Now here's a hopeful subject. Job! Know him? Heard of him? He's a cat in the Bible who suffered tremendously in life--even though he was the most righteous chap in the land. I mean, shoot, you'd think being on good terms with the Man Upstairs would get you some slack in this-world, wouldn't you? I know I would.

I don't know anyone who has not been confounded by the Book of Job (yeah, he has his own book in the Bible! Now that's a successful authour there!). Job's story is perplexing to our all-so-human logic. One would think that if you were good and righteous then life would work out. You would be a success! Do all the 'right things' and you will be rewarded, right? Who hasn't been raised that way and cultured into similar assumptions as that: work hard; be an upstanding citizen; be nice, kind, sweet and generous; do the right thing and you will be ok.

It sounds good. But life is not always like that, is it? Life is confounding to our tidy, little notions that attempt to predict causality linking our behaviour with the outcomes we inevitably attain. Those notions are summed up in the Eastern/Hindu principle of karma. Or in the Western slang that suggests 'What comes around goes around.' You get what you put out.

So why didn't Job get what he put out. If he put out kindness and generosity and human decency why didn't he get that back? Why did he suffer so? Why, do so many good people and wise souls seem to get the short-end of the existential stick (or the long-end up side the friggin' head!)?


Christ Crucified

If, as it is conveyed in the New Testament, that Christ, the Son of God, was crucified--i.e., that was his fate on Earth, to die and suffer in that way--then how or why should any of us expect to be spared suffering, pain, and humiliation in this-world, even if we are good?

Of course, the story goes that Christ died and suffered that way so that others following him would not have to (to which I say, really?--has suffering experienced a tremendous loss of power in this-world since Christ's time here? did someone forget to tell me?). The proverbial tale of the martyr--suffering for the sake of others--is used to rationalize and justify why a 'Perfect Man' would suffer in this-world like Christ did. He was crucified so those who believe in Him do not have to. Believers are spared.

But are they? Where is the evidence that so-called 'Christians' suffer less because of Christ's crucifixion? Where is the evidence that anyone suffers less because someone else suffered more? Isn't that some awfully childish logic: that if I am hurting all I have to do is make another hurt and my pain will go away (which is a very much in use method for dealing with pain in the human realm, in case you hadn't noticed.) I would think that God and the Son of God would be a little more creative than that, don't you? There has to be more intelligence in the Land of the Omniscient than such crude thinking as 'In order to spare all others from suffering someone must suffer the greatest death of all.'

Maybe God is up in Heaven somewhere scratching his flowing grey locks, or running his slender fingers through his silvery beard, going, 'Damn Jesus, I thought for sure having you killed like that would have done something more to alleviate human pain and suffering. It's been two millennia since the time you were offered up as a blood sacrifice for the sins of humanity, and during that two millennia we have had the Dark Ages, the Holocaust, Hiroshima, Mustard Gas, the H-Bomb, Jerry Springer, The View, and Pauly Shore.'

Obviously something went wrong in the plan. Maybe in the realm of Quantum Uncertainty God could not factor in every possible outcome. Maybe there is a Creator, but that Creator is unable to totally manipulate the outcome regarding His/Her Creation. Maybe humanity is God's Frankenstein (ever think of that?)?

At A Loss

I don't know how to explain suffering. I don't know how to justify or rationalize why someone so good could suffer so bad. I just don't know. I am at a loss. I am bereft of explanations.

But I do know this: I do know that when someone close to me suffers I am not given to explanations. I am just given to Presence. I feel an inner urging to just 'be there' for them in whatever capacity I can. And to me that is the Greater Power evidenced as a result of suffering: not some Freudian spiel about why someone is suffering now. Not some 'you create your own reality' bullshit fresh out of the Sedona Journal. Not some quasi Hinud Karmic mumbo-jumbo about 'you must have been really bad in your last life.' And not some fqaulty gene rhetoric fresh from the halls of science. None of that matters. None of that makes a bit of F%$NG DIFFERENCE.

What does matter is the Presence we bring into the suffering. To me that's God-like. Not an Integral Psychograph that seeks to deduce/infer all the facts behind the causality of suffering, but the Warm-Wakefull Heart diving straight into the Samsaric Sea and illuminating The Living Water from the inside out.


 
Experimental Reflections: I am 37 and I don't pray any longer for pain to go away. I don't pray for the absence of suffering. I don't ask that suffering be removed. I mean, if suffering is removed and displaced then where does it go? Does someone else 'catch it?' I just don't know, maybe someone else does. Maybe that is when we come down with some mysterious sh&t! Someone else prayed to be healed and then we get it out of the blue!!  ; o )

Seriously, though.... I don't pray for suffering to go away as much as I pray for Love to come, for Compassion to be ignited. See, I don't think/feel/believe that suffering can be resolved apart from a process of addition. We don't get rid of suffering so much as watch suffering fade in the Light of something Greater. That's what I believe: that suffering is a moon that fades from view when the Sun rises.