You must be ground like wheat, and once you have recovered, then you can turn and help the brothers. (Luke 22:31–32; paraphrased by Richard Rohr)
Suffering is the sand paper, from the spiritual point of view, that can awaken people. And once you begin to awaken, you re-perceive your own suffering and start to work with it as a vehicle for awakening. (Ram Dass, Going Home)
‘I hate death’ was what I felt inside, and I decided it was the only intelligent thing to say. It had been a hard two weeks — my step-sister died, our dog died and I drove my unsuspecting step mother to a memory facility where she would live out her days. Plus, I cooked Christmas dinner for 18 people. Each of these is a few short words to say, but those few words summarize many months and years of love, worry, and all the kerfuffle that caring involves (like long family conferences, doctor’s appointments, and wading through belongings). It was an achy time for our whole family.
At the end of these two weeks, I truly felt ground like wheat. When friends asked how I was doing, I simply said, “I decided I hate death.” They would just nod with tender, sympathetic smiles.
Sure, I was acting like a five-year-old refusing to eat my peas, but there was mental and emotional silence to be claimed in that simple refusal. I had to do and say very little else to explain my feelings. Everyone understood.
If we live long enough, we each will face days, weeks and months when we feel ground like wheat. For me, looking back, this was the beginning of my deeper acquaintance with end of life issues. Yes, friends and family members had passed away before these two weeks, and after these two weeks. But there was a stunning mix of realities that hit me fast and hard in this short period that I could not ignore. I did not have time to recover from one before the next was on my plate.
I do not mean to equate the three events, but just to acknowledge that, if I were a batter, three pitchers were throwing fastballs my way at the same time. Naturally, the game stopped making sense to me at a certain point.
It is that ‘non’ sense that grounded me like wheat. If only one pitcher had been throwing fast balls, perhaps I could have played the game, clung to hope, or built stories that would carry me over to the next pitcher without too much suffering. But landing in ‘non’ sense gave me nothing. I simply was still here. That was all I knew. Me and my bat. By the time I began to wake up, the pitchers had left.
The confusion of suffering
The ‘non’ sense that suffering drives us to seems to be what Ram Dass means when he claims that suffering is the sandpaper that awakens the spirit. You do not need to believe you have a spirit, or believe there is a God, to land in ‘non’ sense. All that has to happen is for each of the stories, beliefs, or justifications that you thought were true to suddenly not matter. They are not undermined or overturned. They are just not the point anymore. It is like life has landed you at a kind of ground zero, rudderless, without anything to hold onto.
Some spiritual teachers refer to this as ‘the cloud of unknowing’ — a time when knowing does not seem relevant to the deeper understanding of life you are faced with — and they would suggest it is the only ‘true’ place to stand. Hannah Arendt might say that this is the most deeply intimate space, where words themselves have no purpose or meaning. My preference for silence during this period would not have surprised her. It would be the only truthful expression I could make.
Buddha begins his four noble truths with ‘Life is suffering’. Wake up to that, he seems to say. Stop hoping it is something else. Yes, life is also love. But the twin of love is suffering. Don’t think you can have one without the other. And don’t think you can avoid one to avoid the other. Avoiding love is not a human life.
Shakespeare writes:
Ruin has taught me thus to ruminate,
that time will come and take my love away.
This thought is as a death, which cannot choose
but weep to have that which it fears to lose.
Suffering is a reflection of love. It shows where love has been, and where it may still be. It is the tracks love has left after leading us through the woods of life.
And as our various loves are lost, suffering is the proof they were there in the first place. We can love so many people and things, and so we suffer over so many people and things. Tracks everywhere. Buddha knew this.
Making sense of suffering
Being ground like wheat seems to be the spark that asks us about these loves, once the shock of loss has softened. Suffering helps us wade through the grief it triggers by pointing out all the tender places that need attention. (It also teaches us about over-attachment, mis-attachment, and under-attachment.)
When we find ground zero, our moment of ‘non’ sense, we awaken for the first time perhaps to this foundational fact that love and suffering are one, and that there is no escape from this reality. As words leave us, we are welcomed into the speechless infancy of truth. As words begin to surface in us, we are welcomed into toddlerhood. We slowly become ready for real life, often with all our former stories, beliefs and justifications turned upside down and given a good shake because of the radicalness of this truth.
The velveteen rabbit became real because he gave love and was loved. Participating in the matrix of love around us makes us more fully human. Suffering is just the thing that points that out. It says, ‘You are human. Let’s start there. Your heart can be broken. You are real. Welcome to life! We have been waiting for you.’
Buddha, Jesus, and many of our best teachers have a lot to say about what is next in the process, about how to get unstuck. But let me jump to Parker Palmer who simply pointed to the fact that when our hearts are broken, they can be broken open or broken closed. If they are broken open (indeed, if we can encourage that opening), then we become more compassionate and more able to contain the difficulties of life. We are able to help others find their way. We can become part of the multiplication of kindness around us.
And so, in that liminal stuckness of ‘non’ sense, which is unavoidable if we are human, perhaps we should endeavor to land on our new, wobbly feet with a heart that is more open, more real, more ready, and more able to continue loving and suffering through this world. We cannot avoid suffering, but as Ram Dass says, “we can work with it as a vehicle for awakening,” for becoming better at being ourselves.