Nov 26, 2017

How do we respond to seemingly

Random acts of terror:

Makes us wonder:

If this pain is present,

Is there a loving God?

Pain or Suffering

It appears that physical pain is going to be always part of the physical life of what God reveals, but, as it has been said, suffering is optional. Will change ever cease? Yes, but that is when the universe has reached maximum entropy, everything is at universal rest, and the universe is no longer capable of maintaining life – several hundred billion years from now, or so it is believed.

But what about humanity. We will reach a time when we will have conquered death, probably sometime during this millennia. That is, normal death and aging as we now know it will cease to occur. But the planet will continue to evolve, losing heat, shrinking, shifting orbit, and other changes that occur over time. Earthquakes will continue, volcanoes will erupt, and other natural occurrences will occur, so death will still occur but not be such daily happening as we understand it now. The body will be modified and be self-repairing, changing to become as to angels on earth. If we are fortunate, we will have learned to see each other as dependent on one another, and our rapacious approach to one another will be lowered. Can we truly see that “Kingdom that lies in our midst” that Jesus talked about? let us trust that God really is encouraging us to move in that direction, and by the constant enticing of God we will achieve that level of development.

But pain of some type is a constant in our physical level of being. I am only conjecturing but pain acts as the counter-balance to the ego drives that seem to encourage us to be smug and believe we are independently self-sufficient. I have seen words of wisdom through the years that echo this thought, including the modern mystics of Richard Rohr and Cynthia Bourgeault, Thomas Merton, and so many others. The present-day reality of life and death and the resultant pain, physical and mental, make us look twice and a third time at what so many consider happiness: the attainment of wealth and material goods that so many equate as happiness and consider as gods.

What I have not talked about is all this material is mental pain: pain caused by the loss of a loved one through abandonment or death. Add to this the pain of loss that has accompanied so many in our world due to changing conditions of war, material loss, and so many acts of nature and human against the order of society. And we have the added sense of loss that occurs as we age; that sense that we are slowly losing our physical (and sometimes mental) agility that we felt so smug portraying.

The ultimate goal of this life of physicality is to bridge the seeming gap between the world of physicality and the world of the spirit where we can feel and see the strange dichotomy of being “me” and part of the universal “one” at the same time. Just being buried in the world of physicality will not bring us to that bridge, but something must jar us into looking beyond the physical world to understand the whole of creation.

That is the place of change and the resultant level of pain, much of which is mental but containing some physical pain. It is pain that makes us look beyond, for we begin, through levels of pain, both physical and mental, to grasp that joy and internal happiness do not depend on anything physical but are totally dependent on our perceptions opening up and seeing a new and different reality. It seems that the truth is that we have to be shocked out of the world of the ego and id to see the grander picture, and pain is the agent that primes that pump of discovery.

In hindsight, we can thank the world of pain (mental as well as physical) for being that agent of change that opens up the world of the metaphysical.

Meditation

O Word of Creation, You have created me to be one with Yourself. I bow in gratitude for this opportunity of discovery, to catch glimpses of breathtaking beauty and grace of Your all-consuming Love that is being offered to me. This Love is mine, if I take it or not, and I am part of this Love for eternity. I am grateful for the chance to taste the joy and happiness that is part of Your Love, and now understand that the gateway to the world of joy is the unlikely road of pain that jars me from my walking sleep in the world. I feel blessed to be able to sing in Your joy and Love, and offer it back as a fountain of Joy to the world.