All of these pieces offer a sense of what it means to endure, a sense of what’s necessary in order to face, experience, and enliven the life we’re given. Each of us must enhance our inner skills if we’re to live a full life: how to be whole-hearted, how to face death and welcome rebirth, how to stay in relationship to the Whole, how to inhabit the necessity of feeling in order to move through our suffering, how to withstand the puncture of grief until it reveals the proliferation of life, how to learn what to do with our will and when to surrender, and how to accept the hard gift of waiting and letting go. Our experience with these qualities forms our personal practice of enduring.

God, Self, and Medicine

GOD, SELF, AND MEDICINE

Since long before the story of Job, human beings, the most fragile and durable of all species, have had to deal with the paradox of suffering. And in our pain we ache to know, if there is a God, how can that eternal presence sanction pain and breakage, and further, in the face of all this, how can such an all-knowing force fuel us with the capacity and sensitivity to suffer so acutely. From the young slave crushed by a stone headed for the top of a pyramid to the senseless shooting of a clerk in Detroit, those left to grieve have asked in Universal echo why, as the rest of us stand in silent chorus voicing a bewildered hymn that has lasted centuries.

It is no mistake that to suffer means to feel keenly, to undergo experience. As we flex our knot of blood, which some call heart, we’re blessed and cursed to stumble through the searing moments that both threaten and enrich our lives. For to feel keenly is the only path to transformation and wholeness, if it doesn’t kill us first. Just like the stubborn rocks along the ocean, the pounding of the deep, in time, will reveal an inner beauty otherwise hidden, if we can endure the scouring. But we are not rocks. Our acuteness of perception and inner sensation, our unprecedented range of thought and mood, make us so vulnerable that we can die and be reborn daily, an emotional form of Prometheus. So our continual quest is to stay more renewed than devoured; our chief task, to find a way to gain enough from what is revealed to survive the pain of such opening.

That’s the point of engaging our experience: to gain enough from what we feel to survive the pain in feeling it, to live through the thresholds that paradox offers, to live through the pain of breaking to the other side, into the rearrangement of nothing less than our very lives. In truth, we don’t have to seek this sort of experience. We can’t avoid it. We somehow have to find the courage to feel the days keenly.