This past week, I stumbled around, physically exhausted, in a mental and spiritual darkness, emotionally hurting, terrified of present and future, angry at God, hardly able to pray except to whisper to God "Help! Please get me through this!" I couldn't even write this blog; I felt so angry and alienated that anything "spiritual" I said would have seemed hypocritical! Perhaps you feel that way sometimes - that to "pretend" to be religious when you don't "feel" religious is hypocrisy. But it isn't. Feelings come and go. Thoughts about Who God is or might be come and go. Only our will can hold fast to God. And God is nearest to us when we can't think coherently about God and when we feel farthest from God. That's Who Love is; that's what Love does. I knew this. I still couldn't write.
I cried out to God over the nights and days. I slept! Yesterday and today I simply tried to "be" with God. To talk. To listen. To rest upon His shoulder. Slowly, surely, a faint dawn began to rise in my heart. Slowly my soul eased. Slowly my trust in God returned. It wasn't a trust or hope in anything specific. I can't go down that route any more. Life - and people - are too complex for me to begin to fathom what I can or should be hoping FOR. I can only hope in God. A hope that reaches out blindly to say "All is in Your hands; I place everything there for You. I surrender to whatever You will."
I reaffirmed to God and to myself that I choose to love, to be with those who suffer, that in the Divine Mystery their suffering and mine has meaning, that the greatest meaning my life can have is to love and to be with others. In this attitude, in this inner choice, I affirmed to myself and to God that my suffering life and the suffering lives of my loved ones have meaning, a meaning which only God knows perhaps, but also a meaning which I can choose to discover for myself. Each human being, I know, has eternal meaning and worth.
Today people think that the goal in life is to be happy, that we should expect to be happy in life, that happiness is what life owes us. That's an unrealistic goal. Most if not all of the time we are unhappy about something, and enduring some kind of suffering. Viktor E. Frankl, a devout Jew and a distinguished psychiatrist, lost all of his family except for a sister in concentration camps or gas chambers, and was interred in a concentration camp himself. There he found meaning in his suffering by choosing to love, to be "with" frightened, despairing prisoners, talking many out of committing suicide. Here are his observations about life, taken from his profound classic "Man's Search for Meaning":
"Any attempt to restore a man's inner strength in the camp had first to succeed in showing him some future goal....One had to give them a why - an aim - for their lives, in order to strengthen them to bear the terrible how of their existence. Woe to him who saw no more sense in his life, no aim, no purpose, and therefore no point in carrying on. He was soon lost: 'I have nothing to expect from life anymore.' What sort of answer can one give to that?
"What was really needed was a fundamental change in our attitude toward life. We had to learn ourselves and furthermore, we had to teach the despairing men, that it did not really matter what we expected from life, but rather what life expected from us. We needed to stop asking about the meaning of life, and instead to think of ourselves as those who were being questioned by life - daily and hourly. Our answer must consist, not in talk and meditation, but in right action and in right conduct. Life ultimately means taking the responsibility to find the right answer to its problems and to fulfill the tasks which it constantly sets for each individual....
"'Life' does not mean something vague, but something very real and concrete, just as life's tasks are very real and concrete. They form man's destiny, which is different and unique for each individual. No man and no destiny can be compared with any other man or any other destiny....When a man finds that it is his destiny to suffer, he will have to accept his suffering as his task; his single and unique task....His unique opportunity lies in the way in which he bears his burden....(In the camp), the hopelessness of our struggle did not detract from its dignity and its meaning....Someone looks down on each of us in difficult hours - a friend, a wife, somebody alive or dead, or a God - and he would not expect us to disappoint him. He would hope to find us suffering proudly, not afraid to die."
For Frankl, suffering had meaning, a sacrifice of life had meaning. We can only go on if we find meaning in our lives. We always have the freedom to choose our attitude under any set of circumstances. We can always choose, under any circumstances, what will become of us mentally and spiritually.
Frankl survived the concentration camp, and continued to help depressed and suicidal people. In one case he was visited by an elderly general practitioner who was severely depressed. His much-loved wife had died two years previously and he could not seem to get over her loss.
Dr. Frankl (who had lost his wife during the war) asked him "What would have happened, Doctor, if you had died first, and your wife would have had to survive you?"
The Doctor replied "Oh, for her this would have been terrible; how she would have suffered."
Dr. Frankl told him "You see, Doctor, such a suffering has been spared her, and it is you have have spared her this suffering; but now you have to pay for it by surviving her and mourning her."
How did the man respond to this? He shook Dr. Frankl's hand and calmly left his office. Frankl comments "Suffering ceases to be suffering in some way at the moment it finds a meaning, such as the meaning of a sacrifice."
A woman was admitted to his clinic after a suicide attempt. Her eleven year old son had died. Now she was left alone with the care of an older son crippled by polio. When she tried to commit suicide with this son, he prevented her; he liked living! Dr. Frankl asked her to imagine herself as eighty years old and lying on her deathbed, looking over her life. What would she think and feel? This was her reply:
"I wished to have children and this wish has been granted to me; one boy died, the other, however, the crippled one, would have been sent to an institution if I had not taken over his care. Though he is crippled and helpless, he is after all my boy. And so I have made a fuller life possible for him; I have made a better human being out of my son."
At this point, she broke down crying. Then she continued:
"As for myself, I can look back peacefully on my life; for I can say my life was full of meaning, and I have tried hard to fulfill it; I have done my best - I have done the best for my son. My life was no failure!"
She had discovered a meaning to her life, a meaning that included her sufferings. Later she realized that the life of her eleven year old who died had also been rich in joy and love and meaning.
Lastly Dr. Frankl, with his patients, would always pose this question:
"Are you sure that the human world is the terminal point in the evolution of the cosmos? Is it not conceivable that there is still another dimension possible, a world beyond man's world, a world in which the question of an ultimate meaning of human suffering would find an answer?"
Dr. Frankl, a believer inn heaven, thus encouraged his patients to contemplate heaven and the existence of a just, merciful, loving God Who is the Author of Life. This God loves each of us in every moment of our lives, to the point that, purified by sacrificial love, joy, and suffering, we are ready to be embraced by Him for eternity.
Dr. Gerald D. May, a distinguished Christian psychiatrist, urges us to take a new look at God, to realize that a God Who loves is vulnerable and woundable. Christ still bears His wounds in Heaven! This God is forever being wounded for us and with us.
So often I find myself praying almost desperately for the ones I love. Dr. May suggests a different approach:
"Though we often think of intercessory prayer as praying to God for the sake of someone else, the contemplatives often sense an invitation to pray with God, to share God's joy and sorrow, which in turn God is sharing with all creation. There is a notion here of 'keeping God company' in whatever God is experiencing." (in "The Dark Night of the Soul.")
These dark nights of suffering tend to, on the surface, alienate us from God, so that we feel as if we're on our own, that God is our non-understanding Adversary, that life is one blow after another, and essentially meaningless.
Yet if we think of Dr. Victor Frankl, and the lessons he learned in the suffering of a concentration camp, we can see that God has created us to be Makers of Meaning, to choose our attitude under any set of circumstances. We can prayerfully contemplate our lives and sense our mission and our life's meaningful purpose in the ordinary concrete experiences of our daily lives.
Life expects us to engage with it, loving sacrificially and bearing our sufferings with dignity. After death, God will reveal to us the ultimate meaning of our individual sufferings, how, deep beyond our understanding, God was re-shaping us through them to prepare us for deeper more compassionate loving on earth and union with God in heaven.
And God is not our distant, uninvolved Adversary. Dr. May teaches us that God is Love, God suffers with us and rejoices with us, with God's entire world! Instead of praying to God, we can choose to be praying with God, experiencing God's joys and sufferings, which are our very own. For God lives beyond us, yes, but God also dwells in the depths of our souls. There everything we experience is experienced and carried by Him. We are never alone, never abandoned.
After every dark night in our lives, there comes a dawn, faint at first, but perceptible. The dawn of a new, deeper hope and trust in God, a new deeper trust that everything in our lives has meaning, including suffering. The dawn which comes after tears of love to reveal deeper, more steadfast love in our hearts. The raw darkness of suffering gives way, once again, to the brightness of morning, hope, and a renewed intimacy with a God Who is forever Suffering and Triumphant Love. Through each darkness and dawn, we learn at a deeper level to surrender and leave everything in God's hands. Through each darkness and dawn, we see a little more clearly that God's hand is in everything!
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