The Way of Suffering

 

Something which the online gurus are loath to speak of is the necessity of suffering on one's spiritual journey. It doesn't qualify as click bait, and no one would willingly sign up for an adventure if they were sure that they'd come back as a husk of the man they once were. "All men die, but few men truly live," to which I would add that some men die more than once; some many times. 

Martin Luther once said of the common peasant that he dies as a pig dies. Perhaps apocryphal, but he said many similar things during the Peasant's War. What he means is that the internal psychic workings of the great mass of humanity is utterly sensual and incapable of beholding higher truths. This is an accurate assessment. Take one look at the YouTube or Ticktock shorts that garner 10's of millions of views and you are likely to find the basest tripe. Search for something more cerebral and it may have several thousand views. But if the topic is especially esoteric and rarefied it may have only several hundred. The mass of humanity could be made to suffer all at once, as the German peasants were slaughtered at Luther's behest, and still only a handful would be capable of transmuting the experience into anything better than a bad memory they attempt to forget. Man is a raw material. Not all clay is for making vessels. But give suffering to the right man and Saul becomes Paul.

Paul said that the beginning of every new harvest was found in death. The seed must first die and be buried. In our experience as mammals, life springs from life, but spiritually, life springs from death. The knowledge of Good and Evil was bought at the price of death; fire was stolen from Olympus at the price of perpetual agony while chained to the Caucasus; and Christ won his kingdom of heaven through the suffering of the cross. Greater love hath no man than he who would willingly lay down his life, and he who would lose his life is promised to find it again. When you begin a quest for truth and wisdom you must count the cost, because it will cost you everything for a time, until God gives it all back to you:

 "Verily I say unto you, There is no man that hath left house, or brethren, or sisters, or father, or mother, or wife, or children, or lands, for my sake, and the gospel's, but he shall receive an hundredfold now in this time, houses, and brethren, and sisters, and mothers, and children, and lands, with persecutions; and in the world to come eternal life."

When I was a very young Baptist I had a crisis of faith which ended in ego death; ego death because my entire personality was nothing but a foil for the Baptist deity. I had nothing that was intrinsically my own because the value of everything was measured by whether the Baptist deity would approve or condemn it. I did not lose belief in this God, otherwise I might have held onto it; chained it to my mind and soul with the brute force of fanaticism. The way it happened was in the same way a man loses his footing when the floor gives way beneath his feet: total free fall. There was nothing to salvage because the one thing this God was never supposed to do was disappear, abandon his own. Being abandoned by a father is a hard thing, but being abandoned by The Father is a wound impossible to heal. Who I was, up until that point in my life, ceased to exist, because I had to go on existing without reference to the only thing that truly mattered. It is not an exaggeration to say that person died. And I'm glad that I died.

Had I not died I couldn't have been renewed. I'd be marooned on an island of ignorance like Adam living a bestial existence in the Garden, utterly blind to the fact that he's naked and illiterate. Adam died the day that he ate the fruit, but that was also the day that humanity, as we know it, was born. Spiritual life is born of death. There is seemingly no limit to the number of times a man can die spiritually. I count myself to have died many times in this way. Each time is less painful than the one before, which I think symbolizes progress as there is less to leave behind, and fewer falsehoods to abandon, with every iteration. These deaths also force us to reassess our attachments. I once thought that there were certain things or people whose absence or rejection I couldn't survive. I no longer hold this to be true. I feel comfort now in putting no faith in man, because I know what resides in most men. But the last chord struck by God and Devil is the body, the locus of the human person and the nearest epicenter and source of suffering. 

Paul had his thorn in the flesh, Jesus had his cross, Ahab and Jonah both had their whales and Job had his weeping sores. God afflicts the body for its salvation. "Deliver his body to Satan that the soul may be saved in the day of judgement" was the command of Paul to the debauched Corinthians. Suffering from without teaches us about the world, but suffering that arises within the body, that cannot be escaped, bargained with, or remedied, teaches us about ourselves. Captain Ahab lay sick for three days, close to death, off the coast of Cape Horn, then went nearly mad after the loss of his leg. He was an ungodly god-like man, who had been to the colleges and cohabited with cannibals. If there was a man who should have known himself it was Ahab, but something new was born in his suffering that he couldn't have predicted. "It does not yet appear what we shall be," John says of our future state. But if we suffer enough in this world we can begin to taste the next. The veil will grow thin, and we can say with Ahab that this whole world is only a pasteboard mask. And Peter tells us that "whoever suffers in the flesh has ceased from sin."

Spiritual knowledge does not come to the comfortable; it is bought at a high price, and paid in suffering. James says "Whoever of you lacks wisdom should ask of God who gives liberally." This is true, but it is incomplete advice, because Solomon tells us that with much wisdom comes much sorrow. And Paul received his vision of the third heaven at the price of his thorn in the flesh, given to maintain his humility. Ask God for wisdom and he will give it to you, but this is not all that he will give to you. Wisdom, in fact, may come through the suffering itself. Wisdom without humility is the wisdom of Solomon who abused his gift to make illicit profit with the Egyptians and to build a large harem, only to abandon his God in the end. Pain and suffering are what keep us faithful to God after he has gifted us with his open vision. 

The last terrifying aspect of the journey to death and rebirth is the moment of our katabasis, or descent, into Hell itself. When we are thrust through and give up the ghost we have to be willing to say with Jesus, "Father into your hands I commit my spirit." What Christ represents on the cross is not merely suffering or death, but a picture of perfect faith. Christ did not raise himself from the dead; could not raise himself from the dead. He forfeited his life believing that God would raise him from the dead. We are no more in charge of our raising than we are in our birthing. Jonah could not release himself from the whale's belly. Lazarus could not wake from his tomb. The most difficult aspect of our dark night of the soul is the patience necessary to wait on God. We are made to believe that He will not permit his children to see corruption, that he will not leave our soul in Hell. I have sometimes waited for years for the answers I needed to proceed in life, during which time doubt and uncertainty were my constant companions. This is antithetical to the Baptogelical frame of mind in which the only thing that separates the saved from the damned is faith, and the opposite of faith is doubt; therefore, the doubter is damned, and certainty, no matter how ill founded, is rewarded. But these people cannot grow up. They are perpetual children. 

Religious deconstruction has been called the chief enemy of Christianity in the modern era, but I don't think this is the case. Deconstruction is necessary to wipe away centuries of religious absurdities. The danger is in making our home in the grave because we grow weary in waiting for the day to dawn, and for the Day star to arise in our hearts. Answers to spiritual questions do not come easily, or quickly. They come at the high cost of our dying. They come to those who are not only willing to die, but who also will wait patiently, as Lazarus waited, for the voice of the Savior: "Lazarus, Come forth."

CP