Joy and Woe Are Woven Fine
Rev. Lilli Nye
October 15, 2006
The incontrovertible evidence is in (see reading below), that life is just too gosh-darn difficult. So if we want to lie face down on the floor and just give up, the urge has been scientifically legitimated.
So, what are we all doing here? We could be in bed with the covers over our heads. It’s supposed to be our day off, for Pete’s sake. What compelled us to want to come here in the clear light of this October morning to sing, and laugh, and praise life?
When Markus first suggested I listen to this song by John Denver, it very sweetly expressed my own sense of the world—so much suffering and so much beauty.
The songwriter doesn’t try to make any meaning of the paradoxical union of joy and sorrow. He just says “this is it”: This is being, this is the nature of the spirit and the reality of love. Our lives are a communion of pain and joy, an interweaving of possibility and loss. All being grows out of this. The song simply makes a vessel to hold that fullness, and in its silences we hear all the cries and laughter that cannot be expressed.
Our capacity to be fully responsive to life grows from the willingness to feel the whole of it—heights and depths, darkness and light. There is a great accumulation of the wisdom of ages that tells us that we will not know the intensity of joy without the same intensity of sorrow and pain. It was Kahlil Gibran who said that the “lute can sing only because it was hollowed out with knives.”
And in another passage from The Prophet, on Love, he writes that if we want only the peace and pleasure of love, then we should “pass out of love’s threshing floor, into the seasonless world where [we] shall laugh but not all of our laughter, and weep, but not all of [our] tears.”
There is a process, an alchemy of soulful becoming, by which sorrow can give way to greater appreciation of wonder and joy. But in truth, it’s a process that can really only be spoken about in poetry and story and song. It can only really be expressed in metaphor, as is true of anything of the soul and intuition. And so I will turn to poetry in this reflection to try to offer ideas and experiences that are hard to name.
However, I do want to begin with a real-life story that opens up the subject a bit more:
Rabbi Harold Kushner became famous when he wrote the book When Bad Things Happen to Good People. In it he wrestles theologically with the death of young his son Aaron from progeria, or “rapid aging disease.” By questioning and confronting the profound injustice of such undeserved suffering, he put words to the mute struggle of millions of others who were reeling from their own losses.
In a later book, he describes a dinner conversation between himself and a Hindu colleague. The two had met at an interfaith conference exploring how various religious traditions understand and respond to suffering. So the rabbi and his Hindu colleague sit down to dinner (sounds like the set up of a joke—a Rabbi and a Brahmin walk into a diner…).
Kushner’s dinner companion had heard the rabbi speak about the process he went through with the death of his son, and how he wrestled with it as a devout Jew. His companion tells him how the Hindu faith would relate to such an experience:
He says that Hindu philosophy teaches that we deal with pain and suffering … by rising above it. We are to “say to the most painful experiences imaginable, ‘I will not let you hurt me. I will experience the worst that can happen and triumph over it. I will learn the art of detachment and transcend the pain.’ ”
(Images flash in Kushner’s mind of yogis walking on red coals or maintaining strenuous postures for days in the burning sun without moving.)
His friend goes on to tell him that he should not see his son’s death as tragic, but as a great gift. That he was actually “lucky” because this loss offered him an extraordinary opportunity to conquer grief, pain, and desire itself.
Because, in Hindu religious philosophy, life in the world is full of suffering, but ultimately it is an illusion, the body is an illusion, the ego identity (what makes me me and you you) is a false identity, and all things of the earth are of course transient. Only the soul, which is an expression of the Universal Soul, is real and eternal. And so anything that helps us to let go of our attachments to the things of this world enables us to develop spiritually.
Now I don’t mean to present these ideas flippantly, as if they are absurd, because Hinduism has a profound and ancient philosophic tradition and offers a tested spiritual path. But I am taking on the perspective of Kushner a bit here.
Kushner finds himself flabbergasted by what this man is saying. He understands the idea that those who attach themselves to superficial things will suffer more insecurity. He understands that if one is pathologically clinging to something forever gone, it will keep one frozen in unrelenting grief. But, he cannot imagine his son’s death as a gift or himself as “lucky.”
He reflects that the loss of his son is still very painful many years later, although he has learned to live with that pain. But more importantly, he believes that the loss was and is supposed to hurt. We can cut off our hair and fingernails without pain because this is not living tissue, but if you cut into something that’s alive, it bleeds, it feels pain, and it’s supposed to.
He reflects on these things in a chapter called “Feeling No Pain, Feeling No Joy,” and he quotes the lyrics of the Simon and Garfunkel song: I am a rock, I am an island. And a rock feels no pain, and an island never cries. No thank you, he says.
Through sorrow, he has been changed, he has matured, he has become more compassionate, more capable of feeling, and he has developed a much more profound and tested sense of faith than the naïve faith he had before his son’s death. It was supposed to hurt.
Now, I do understand that there are many, many kinds of pain. The pain that comes from the loss of a child is very different from the pain that comes from a life of grinding oppression or the pain that comes from childhood abandonment. Each needs its own hard journey toward wholeness.
And here I would offer the words of Audre Lorde, who expresses the idea of what she calls unmetabolized pain, pain that is locked up inside and so has not been able to yield its power and teachings.
She writes:
There is a distinction I am beginning to make in my living between pain and suffering. Pain is an event, an experience that must be recognized, named, and then used in some way in order for the experience to change, to be transformed into something else, strength or knowledge or action. Suffering, on the other hand, is the nightmare reliving of unscrutinized and unmetabolized pain. When I live through pain without recognizing it, I rob myself of the power that can come from using that pain, the power to fuel some movement beyond it. I condemn myself to reliving that pain over and over and over whenever something close triggers it. [Although it is] true, experiencing old pain sometimes feels like hurling myself full force against a concrete wall, but I remind myself that I have lived through it all already, and survived.
But somewhere between a cool detachment that protects us from the suffering of the world and unrelenting suffering that binds our wings and keeps us locked in anguish, there is another way.
And so this is where we turn to poetry. Poets tell us about another way, in which we can let ourselves be carved out by sorrow, and this makes us a deeper vessel with which to hold the beauty and wonder and the joy of life. They tell us—although it’s hard to imagine—that a willingness to let pain flood in and flow through us without getting fixed blows us open for great intensities of love.
They tell us that the human heart is really meant to be broken. As Gibran says, “Your pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses your understanding; just as the stone of the fruit must break so that its heart can stand in the sun, so must you know pain.”
A poem by Naomi Shihab Nye (no relation) tells us how great kindness is born when one becomes willing to feel great sorrow.
Before you know what kindness really is
You must lose things,
Feel the future dissolve in a moment
Like salt in a weakened broth.
What you held in your hand,
What you counted and carefully saved,
All this must go so you know
How desolate the landscape can be
Between the regions of kindness.
How you ride and ride
Thinking the bus will never stop,
The passengers eating maize and chicken
Will stare out of the window forever.
Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness,
You must travel where the Indian in a white poncho
Lies dead by the side of the road.
You must see how this could be you,
How he too was someone
Who journeyed through the night with plans
And simple breath that kept him alive.
Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,
You must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.
You must wake up with sorrow.
You must speak to it till your voice
Catches the threads of all sorrows
And you see the size of the cloth.
Then it is only kindness that makes any sense anymore,
Only kindness that ties you shoes
And sends you out into the day to mail letter and purchase bread,
Only kindness that raises its head
from the crowd of the world to say
It is you I have been looking for,
And then goes with you everywhere
Like a shadow or a friend.
Another poet who writes of the transmutation of pain into joy is the great Indian poet, Rabindranath Tagore, whose poetry is so full of life and passion. I learned only recently that he had lost his wife, two children, and his father all within five years. Looking again into his writing, I could see him working the alchemy of survival by transforming his immense grief into works of beauty. Through these and many other devastations, he could still write of ecstatic surrender:
Let all the strains of joy mingle in my last song—
the joy that makes the earth flow over in the riotous excess of the grass,
the joy that sets the twin brothers, life and death,
dancing over the wide world,
the joy that sweeps in with the tempest,
shaking and waking all life with laughter,
the joy that sits still with its tears on the open red lotus of pain, and
the joy that throws everything it has upon the dust,
and knows not a word.
We are to let it all in, all this joy, all this sorrow, all this promise, all
this pain. Let it all in, and let it all out. Like the two angels on the cover
of the leaflet, perfectly balanced, we will know joy and sorrow as the two silken
threads that weave themselves through our lives and make the garment for the
soul. These are the words of William Blake.
His poetry will close our service as we sing together Hymn #17, “Every
night and every morn.”
Excerpts from “Researchers Say,” by Ian Frazier
Published in the New Yorker,
Dec. 9, 2002
According to a study just released by scientists at Duke University, life is
too hard…. Years of tests, experiments, and complex computer simulations
now provide solid statistical evidence in support of old folk sayings that described
life as "a vale of sorrows," "a woeful trial," "a kick
in the teeth”… and so on. Like much common wisdom, these sayings
turn out to contain more than a little truth.
Authors of the twelve-hundred-page study were hesitant to single out any particular
factors responsible for making life tough. A surprise, they say, is that they
found so many. Before the study was undertaken, researchers had assumed, by
positive logic, that life could not be that bad. As the data accumulated, however,
they provided incontrovertible proof that life is actually worse than most living
things can stand. Human endurance equals just a tiny fraction of what it should
be, given everything it must put up with. … As yet [researchers] have
no plausible theory as to how anyone gets through it at all.
A major disadvantage to living which the study called attention to is, of course,
death…. So obvious are its drawbacks that no one before had thought to
examine … them empirically. Death's effects on life, the scientists pointed
out, are two: First, death intrudes constantly and unpleasantly by putting life
at risk at every stage…, For individuals of every species, death represents
a chronic, worrisome threat that they can never completely ignore.
Secondly, and far worse, death also constitutes an overwhelmingly no-win experience
in itself. Many of life's well-known stress producers—divorce, loss of
employment … even fighting traffic—still hold out hope of a better
outcome in the future…. Death, by contrast, involves as much trouble as
any conventional stress, if not more. Yet, at the end of the medical humiliations,
physical suffering, … fear, and tedium of dying, one has no outcome to
look forward to except being dead. This alone, the study found, is enough to
give the entire life process a negative tinge…,
Somewhat simplifying the study's collection of data was the natural law first discovered by Newton, that things are rough all over. Thus, what happens to you will always be just as bad (relatively speaking) as what happens to anybody else. Or, to frame it another way, no problem is effectively "minor" if you yourself have it.
One example is the mattress cover … that goes over the mattress before you put on the fitted sheet, and that pops loose from one corner of the mattress in the middle of the night nearly sixty per cent of the time, experts say. After it does, it will often work its way diagonally down the bed, taking the fitted sheet with it, until it becomes a bunched-together ridge of cloth poking up at about kidney level. The problem it represents to the individual experiencing it at that moment is absolute, in the sense that it cannot usefully be compared with difficulties in the lives of people in China or anywhere. The poke in the kidneys and the press of bare mattress against the face are simply the accumulating misery of life making itself known.
Nine out of ten of the respondents … stated that they would give up completely
if they knew how. The remainder also didn't see the point of going on any longer
but still clung to a slight hope for something in the mail. Quitting the struggle
and lying face down on the floor was a coping strategy favored by most….
The point of going on with existence, when charted and quantified, paints a
very grim picture indeed. Merely trying to get a shoe off a child has been shown
to release a certain chemical into the system which causes a reaction exactly
opposite to what the task requires. Despite vigorous effort and shouting, the
thing just won't come off, dammit, as can be seen in the formula written out
in full in Figure 7. Furthermore, that level of suffering doesn't include the
additional fact that a person's spouse may not consider what the person does
every day to be "work," because he or she happens occasionally to
enjoy it; so what is he or she supposed to do, get a job he or she hates, instead?
From a mathematical standpoint, this particular problem is an infinite regression….
Why we were brought into the world in the first place only to suffer and die is an area of research in which much remains to be done. Like other problems thought impossible in the past, this one, too, will someday be solved. Then anybody afflicted with questions like "Why me?,'' "What did I do to deserve this?," "How did I get in this lousy mess?," and so on could be given a prescription, maybe even through diagnostic services provided online. The possibilities are exciting. At the same time, we must not underestimate our adversary, life itself. Uncomfortable even at good moments, difficult and unfair usually, and a complete nightmare much too often, life will stubbornly resist betterment, always finding new ways of being more than we can stand.