Suffering, Self, and What to Do With Them

 

Who was the Buddha?

The person we know as the Buddha, Siddhartha Gautama, summed up his teaching in a simple sentence: "I teach only suffering and the end of suffering". I doubt there is anyone to whom that doesn't sound good. No one wants to suffer and the Buddha maintained that there was a way out of it, a way out of Samsara, the unending cycle of suffering that humans endure. This is what he taught, and this only. 

The way to do that, he said, was to undo our humanity completely, to dismantle all the pieces that make us discrete human beings, to define all the parts of our actions, thoughts, and personality that comprise our Self and to jettison them into the aether, leaving spirit unencumbered and absorbed into the stream that is life itself. There are no desires, no evils, no joys, no sorrows. We are completely and perfectly free forever. Nirvana. 

He said this was possible for anyone and his followers say he achieved such a state, but returned to teach others how to do it. He became bodhisattva, an enlightened being who delays entering nirvana out of compassion and helps all willing sentient beings to achieve awakening as well. He became a teacher and is said to have passed down (verbally - Gautama never wrote anything down) the way to do what he did and many have followed him. 

Sounds Pretty Good to Me

I can't blame them. Who doesn't want to leave suffering by the wayside and live in perfect happiness? Pretty much everything we do in life is geared toward making either ourselves (primarily ourselves, if we're honest) or someone else happy. It rarely works the way we think it does, of course, because generally what we think will make us happy is more life, not less. More love, more money, more health, more ease...more, more, more...and what it usually gets us is more complications and often more trouble. 

It's possible that the Buddha was on to something by telling us we are better off with less of ourselves rather than more. Desire is thrilling and can make us feel ecstatic and alive but it is not always our friend, often leading to bad decisions, waste, and misery. I wonder, however, whether he took his idea of achieving happiness a few steps too far and for those who think their humanity is not a misshapen impediment, it might be worth looking at an alternative.

Die to Self

The Buddha wasn't the only one who thought we needed to rid ourselves of too much Self, but it's a matter of degree. Jesus did it, too. But Jesus' dying always carried with it a resurrection. In other words, Buddha undressed us and escorted us into a different kind of existence stripped of flesh, bone, blood, and intellect, but Jesus did something different. Jesus changed the clothes of humanity. He taught a way to remove the cloak of pride and selfishness and destructive desire and put on a new one, removing a forbidding, fortified heart of stone and replacing it with a vulnerable heart of flesh, open to hurt and death but somehow enlarged by them. 

In short, Jesus taught us how to remain human, suffer constructively, and still find happiness. 

How to Be Human and Happy

There are some Christian sects that treat our bodies like a red-headed stepchild, of course, who say that we are unavoidably and irredeemably corrupt by physical nature, and in that, they have philosophical agreement with the Buddha. But Jesus was a man. A man who never apologized for being a man or tried to undo his humanity. A man who lived fully and died fully, too. A man who knew that complete divorce from suffering was not the way we were meant to live and demonstrated it by suffering with intent right before our eyes. 

Rather than undoing his humanity, He detached his humanity and his suffering from their catastrophic nonessentials, the desires and decisions that augment our sense of self but lead to nothing but the loss of the love, peace, and happiness we think we're working toward. He did leave a couple of pretty plain roadmaps for how to do this: his own life and the Sermon on the Mount. The sermon gives practical examples of which desires we should keep and which we should work to abandon. It tells us what we will look like while this is being accomplished - we will look like Jesus. 

I admit I'm tempted to say Duh here because that is his aim all along - to make us like him. He said to "follow me" more than 20 recorded times and in that, please note, that He did not live any nirvana. He suffered and in that, I deduce that, even when we are following and doing as much of the right thing as we can muster, we will suffer too. It's part of the deal. It's part of life. It forms us. It confirms our humanity, and in case you haven't noticed, we are, at least for now, all human.

The Alternatives

It turns out that we can have our cake and eat it, too. Sort of. We have a Self and do not need to kick it to the curb to know joy and peace. With that Self and the desires that it brings, however, we will also suffer. That's the deal. It's either that or the way of the Buddha: immolation of the Self and absorption into a blessedly sense-free Nirvana. 

There is a kind of happiness in either path.

I came so that you might have life, and have it more abundantly.-John 10:10

image: owlcation

Winter Full Moon - and Living 100 Years

 

Winter full moons. Their blue light and the way they look cast on snow. Not reflecting, but drawing out what can't normally be seen. A stark beauty only possible because it happens in harshness. Is this why we have seasons?

Living to 100

I've been reading the diary of Calvin Tomkins, a former writer for The New Yorker, and his comments regarding how he is spending his 100th year - what he's thinking and how he feels. The changes happening to him and how he assimilates them into what he's known as his life until then. It comes down to this: most of our lives (or mine, anyway) assume a level of health and lucidity. We are supple and flexible and energetic and strong. We get sick sometimes, sure, but then we get well again, as well as we were before the illness. We get used to being this way. It is our normal. 

Our Timeline of Progressive Maturation

Put in terms of a projected timeline, we reach physical maturity in the first season of our life, and that is our main concern. We, well, we grow up. Then, however, if we're paying attention, spiritual and psychological maturity start to catch up. We've reached the best our physical body will ever be and we start to build other kinds of muscles. This is middle age. Then our body begins to decline. Slowly at first, but somewhere in the 70s the disassembly begins to accelerate. By 99, Mr. Tomkins has a long list of physical  facilities that don't work anymore. Ones that just seemed to sneak up him almost overnight, one after another. 

We grow up, you see, mostly without much effort. It just happens. One's cells know what to do automatically. We become our most beautiful and vital selves so easily that we can sometimes stop other people in their tracks. We hum with electric pleasure. We are immortal and it feels so good, like the natural order of things. And it is. For awhile.

We aren't immortal, though, and sooner or later, our body begins to remind us. We learn the rest of the natural order and this, too, like our strength, is a kind of gift because while we are exulting in our vitality, our spirit is awakening and growing. What our body has long known, our spirit can also now know. We have been men and women who strode with gods in the flesh. Now we can learn to stride with God in the spirit.

This is the final and complete maturation. 

What if Feels Like to Live It

This last spiritual growth signals its arrival, like the first one, through the flesh. What was a strong, beautiful body sags and greys and begins to grow slack no matter how much we try to build it up. Skin and bones thin. Organs stutter and fail. When we sicken or fracture, we may heal, but not to prior levels of vitality. We have to get used to lower physical plateaus, new normals, reduced horizons. And it is from this place that the fruit of the spirit stands out in greater clarity. The spirit we grow during our waning days of physical strength becomes our final, sustaining strength, bearing us up not to greater physical feats but to different heights. The God who first showed himself during the noise of our vigor becomes our entire beautiful world. The voice that was still and small grows to a symphony in crescendo. 

I do not achieve much in the flesh anymore, so what I do achieve originates not from the flesh but from the spirit. I have a broken arm now and it is healing, but it will probably not heal to a level as supple and nimble as it once was. This new level will dictate my next reduced physical plateau and as such, is a gift not only to gently prepare me for my end, but to give me a chance to marvel at the grace that brought me here. 

What I Had, What I Have

I will never again be completely healthy. 

I will never again know spiritual poverty. 

The moon is full tonight while I find I am in my life's winter.  It is beautiful because what is real in me lives still unlimited, unfettered. I can still sing. 

Photo: Forbes, Sports Health

Shadows: Dust to Dust

 

It's happened twice now -  not that we remember a place but that the place remembers us. It may be only a shred, or a wisp that remains of a step we made on the grass of a song we sang while wandering there, or the contrast we made on a landscape that could be seen from far off like a flag. What might a place remember of me? 

The sidewalk on 53rd St. might remember the swift run and quick, gentle ascent of flight no one (except maybe granddaughter Autumn) believes I made. The same place might remember shadows cast under streetlights by mounded teens playing cards, pretending to be ten years older.

I'm pretty sure Oak Knoll Drive wouldn't remember much of me. I was a lodger there, not a full-fledged occupant, awkward and temporary, but after that, the farm might still fume because of what I tried to make of it. The decapitated saplings, though long ceased bleeding, may have resurrected themselves in the way of stubborn plants, knowing they always belonged even when I thought they did not, understanding the irrelevance of subduction. It may be that deer would have wandered through the back lawn, looking for me lounging in my usual chair, but the time is coming when any deer that might have thus remembered will lie blanched in a field or have been dragged home by a hunter. The dogs and the chickens I knew there were all dead before I could abandon them, but the cats might recall the winter nest I  made for them as a retreat on bitter days.

Regardless, the shadows of all these places will have changed - grown taller or shorter - and the farm's great oak and globular maple might still stand far enough to observe, but never accessible enough to be threatened except by lightning, the only thing bold enough to challenge them. I surely was not.

We are just passing through in the end. If we leave any memory at all, it is only a whisper shared in ever-deepening layers of dirt or in tree rings long secreted by newer seasons. And that is probably as it should be. We are only dust, after all, gathered by greater hands and blown into life in a way no one quite understands, only to return to the same dust after our seasons of strutting and fretting.

We won't be remembered long, but I am content with that. It no longer matters so much. There have been many good days and I am satisfied with them.

Images: Kinder Institute for Urban Research and Planting Tree

Be Careful What You Pray For

 

My husband died in 2016. Later that same year, a Christian movie called Miracles from Heaven was released. It was supposed to be an inspiring story of faith and restoration based on true events and my closest friends, thinking that seeing it would refresh my sad heart, convinced me to go. It didn't work. 

I should have known that it wouldn't when I saw the theater vestibule full of women fingering tissues, anticipating the tears they expected would come. They may have found a measure of joy in weeping, but I did not. My weeping came all too easily and from a more intimate core. But for my friends' sake, I stayed and watched the movie. It was worse than I expected.

Its centerpiece was the against-all-odds rescue of a daughter from illness and accident, a rescue that resulted in the renewal of her mother's faith in God. For almost everyone there, this was supposed to be a happy ending. Not for me. 

If there is such a thing as prayer abuse, this is it. 

First, from my point of view at the time, it was easy to see the woman's answer to prayer as a betrayal. Sure, her daughter was healed, but overwhelmingly, desperately sick people do not get healed; they die. Dead people do not rise; they stay dead. I knew this from personal experience. As these women wept for joy and hope for someone they never knew, my husband stayed dead. That, of course, is the selfish view. 

More generally, though, prayer - any prayer that asks for God to manipulate circumstances He put in motion - works against itself. If we ask God (an attitude that dares to suppose we know something is needed and He doesn't) for something in our material world to change, it might happen, but whether it does or not, all we'll get is a change in our material world. Our spiritual world will not enlarge, it will shrink.

That is why the gate to God is narrow. 

Prayer for healing, prayer for relief from suffering, prayer for happiness and ease, prayer for good fortune, prayer for safety and peace - they demonstrate lack of confidence that God knows what He is doing. Almost all prayer operates from a place of broad, shallow faith. Letting God have His way and knowing it is the best way, even when (maybe especially when) it results in something unpleasant, drives faith narrow and deep. It is the faith of the one who does not see, but still believes.

We rarely remember that this whole life adventure only ends one way. We all die sooner or later. Delaying that or assuming we know better than God when that is supposed to happen negates the faith we say we have in Him. 

I would have liked to ask the moviemakers about the nature of this mother's faith. Would she have had it if her daughter died? If her faith was based on her daughter's rescue, it is small indeed. 

The same principles apply to determining whether we have circumstance-based faith or whether our faith is based on knowing the real presence of God, the God who lives and makes His temple in our very bodies, who tells us we will never be free difficulty and suffering while we live but that He makes Himself available through it all. 

The goal is worship God because we believe no matter what, not to believe because we worship God for all the good He has brought. 

This is how we figure out who we are. Once we realize that God truly does reside in us by His own design, what happens in our lives becomes a kind of partnership. God does what He does and we trust Him to do it. God is not apart from us, changing the world around us because we plead with Him like  child next to the candy rack in the checkout line. 

There are those that say prayer changes us, but what we really want is for it to change the circumstances around us. Trust, the knowledge that the best is already happening, supersedes prayer and then we become more what we are meant to be.