The fundamental issue asks why we suffer in the first place? And the many answers that have been offered have been endlessly debated and quarrelled over - it's due to godly intent or punishment, the result of past sin or karma, as an existential teaching, or simply the inescapable nature of how reality is. To name but a few. Most of these don't make a precise fit as an explanation. Nor exactly make you warm towards the idea of any deity who would play such games with their creation. And yet, humanity continues to reach out to a wide panoply of gods, saviours or spiritual gurus, who profess to be able to teach us how to transcend this suffering world.
In times past, when a woman suffered a bereavement, she took to wearing widows weaves. It was a signifying outward expression, that everyone else recognised. She had suffered the loss of a loved one. Dressed all in black, her face shrouded in a dark lacy veil, to conceal the widows face from public view. It hid her suffering, so no one need see the pain, the tears, the person wracked with grief. Society could, nonetheless, acknowledge and mourn her loss. And the bereaved woman didn't have to risk the embarrassment of having her grief erupt and be exposed to public consternation. This prohibition to hide sorrow behind a veil, was placed on the widow alone. Men wore black, or black arm bands, their faces could still be seen. The perceived potency and unpredictable nature of female emotion, was considered far too unsettling and perturbing. Attitude in the wider society, at that time, did not wish to see nor hear of any of that, thank you.
Veils continue to be used to this day in some societies to completely conceal a woman's face. To demonstrate modesty or lack of vanity, or to beguile, or that the woman is the possesion of their husband, and therefore not available for male fantasies or sinful desire. A bride can wear a veil before her wedding, as a virtuous metaphor for the mythic virginal chastity supposedly about to be revealed to her betrothed. People in the medieval period, who suffered from a disfiguring disease like leprosy or syphilis, could conceal themselves behind veils, so no one has to see the extent their bodily flesh was rotting or being eaten away. Veils do that, they possess a self evident utility. Veils shield and protect. Veils mark in symbolic dress a human state or transition. Lives are transfigured behind the mysterious curtain of them.
There is a sense then that suffering is a response laid over the human pain, in a blanket of turbulent disruptive feeling. In ancient societies, and in some cultures existing today, it is not uncommon for wakes and funerals to be accompanied by an extravagant amount of wailing, crying and heavenly beseeching. You can see them vividly portrayed on ancient Egyptian wall murals. This public eruption of sorrow and grief, was frequently carried out by 'professional mourners' on behalf of the bereaved families. Private grief was kept behind the walls of their house, whilst the outward expression of suffering and the public process of grieving was in this case, a performative one. It was put on for show, often expressive of a certain degree of status.
All of which causes me to raise a slightly troublesome question - is suffering then entirely or at least in part a performative human behaviour.? Can we fully feel the pain of sickness and loss, allow ourselves to grieve, without the demonstrative carapace of an effusive eruption of suffering? I know this may seem a tad absurd, if not insensitive. And I emphasise at this point, that I'm not saying outpourings of suffering are faked or not genuinely felt. And yet, I can recognise in myself, that I do actively work myself up into crying. I hunt down the tenderest point of the suffering and exploit the moment, where I can become gushingly inconsolable about an issue. It's a bit like vigorously shaking a bottle of fizzy water, and then finding a way of letting it all burst out. It all feels better out than kept contained within.
J
Often when we are bereft, we feel at a loss what to do with the pain we experience, and might wish to find a way to diminish it, or a least a consolation. The suffering desire only grows worse because you feel alone with it, because indeed you are always alone with your pain, upset or grief. And there is an element to this suffering, I recognise, that could be viewed as artfully contrived, however functional it maybe. Simply so the build up of pain you don't know what to do with, that has nowhere else to go, to allow all that to be vented or expelled. It's how we as humans attempt to manage and cope with our internally turbulent emotions. We feel this compelling urge to expell this deep well of pain. We search for consolation in ones faith, or in familiar friendly company or a listening ear. I don't wish to trivialise the expression of suffering, but to view this as a veil we habitually assume the wearing of. It is not the fundamental pain, suffering is our distraught response to something that has occurred, which we have had little or no control over. Suffering is a bit like coughing up the pain filled residue of phlegm.
What we chose to do, or do not, in the expression of our suffering, this changes our relationship with the original pain that lies beneath it. That pain inevitably becomes self mythologised . We make it our individual unique pain, that we alone can understand the qualities and depth of. And it is true, that no one else can really know what our pain feels like. Empathy requires exercising our emotional imagination, and supposes what that must feel like. The pain is certainly real enough for the bearer of it, even though most pain is not visible to the naked eye. Though other people can become disbelievingly sniffy about the existence or otherwise of some forms of psychological distress or chronic physical fatigue. Yet there are aspects in how we choose to express our suffering, that could be seen as unhelpfully dwelling upon it, and perhaps indulging in the unique specifications of our personalised pain.
If I were to describe suffering as an emotional intoxication between our sense of our self and our bodily pain, this puts it extremely coldly. Perhaps to the point of being unhelpfully blunt. Because it's all very well for me to pontificate in the theoretical abstract about what the true nature of suffering is, when this poor suffering soul that is confined to bed. just wants you to listen, to care, to comfort, to have some empathy and for them. Suffering has in most religious traditions been met with compassion not categorisation. No one wants to be prejudicially judged simply for being in pain, and hence suffering. As Dogen once said, you should never get too carried away by either the abstract or the practical. To attempt to keep our responses grounded and real, without losing empathy or perspective completely in the process.
There is not a faith in the world that does not have something to recommend to us by way of the transcending or at least the relief of suffering. Sometimes the relationship between our suffering and some form of original sin, seems inescapable. The redemptive nature of Jesus's suffering on the cross, works for me purely on the level of metaphor, but I cannot get my head around how it realistically operates salvifically for everyone who believes in him. In Buddhism it's about going beyond suffering, a truly hard thing to concieve, let alone achieve. Suffering is couched in terms of a human response to an experience we do not want or desire. And in its characteristically plain manner of expression, points out if we desist in desiring for it to be otherwise, the suffering will gently part company from the painful experience. It can all sound like we are following the intricate instructions of a car maintenance manual. That with a bit of minor tweaking you can reach the destination of a world without suffering. Ah, if only that were so.
When Jesus said ' suffer the little children to come unto me' he was asking his disciples to endure or indulge these children's exuberant natures. To 'bear with' any discomfort or irritation arising from being around the chaotic ebullience of youth. So there is a way of couching human pain and discomfort as something you 'bear with', you endure it, you inhale your grief deeply, but resist being completely carried away by the surging paroxysms of it. To attempt to suffer the pain behind a veil of calmly contained silence. Its more usual, however,for the line between the pain and the suffering that arose from it, to become so blurred, that the two experiences burn together to the point of becoming indistinguishably, one all consuming flame that torches everything. Life can often become about the ' bearing with' the ' bearing with'.
Both Jesus and the Buddha, left this mortal coil, with what would have been for us ordinary folk, an excruciatingly painful demise. Jesus by being hung nailed like a piece of crudely processed meat to a high wooden cross, and the Buddha, reputedly by a culinary mishap, of being poisoned by some badly cooked mushrooms. In both cases, we must assume, they endured the painful experience, quietly resigned to their fate. These highlights the raw experiential quality of suffering as a veil that we find ourselves wearing. A more sage like perspective might allow us to put that to one side. However insubstantial it may be when viewed in absolute ultimate terms, however overshadowed it can sometimes be with sentiment and enforced pathos, suffering is still extraordinarily real to us, and resolutely human. If it teaches us to be compassionate and not indifferent, that's a step forward.
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