The last several weeks have been some of, if not the hardest of my life. They have brought me to my knees in ways I’ve never experienced before. Very few people have closely walked this journey with me, maybe 3 – one of which is my husband. It’s been lonely, scary, and maddening. It’s been a bunch of the opposites too – but this entry is not about those.
Our culture does such a grave disservice to human pain. We pass over it. We dismiss it with “it will get better” and “look at the bright side” and even “it’s not that big of a deal.” Empathy is lost on us. We don’t get into the trenches with people, standing ground with and for them. We merely peer down from above every now and then (through text message) and ask “are you doing okay down there?”
We are full of solutions and problems to be solved, of fix-its and trite responses and Christian clichés. Sometimes I don’t think we realize we’re doing it – living at arms length from people, too busy, too distracted, too out of touch with ourselves, that we lose touch with them.
Emotional pain, those deemed “negative emotions” get such a bad rap. They are seen as invaders of the psyche – enemies. People may not admit as such, but our collective behavior often points otherwise. We are scared of people who are hurting. We don’t, or may have never, done a thing with our own hurt – so to enter in to another’s is far too daunting. We’ve either boot-strapped our emotions, shut them down, or numbed them out it seems. So, perhaps indirectly, we communicate to others to do the same.
Not everyone has been through a ton of heartache – and I suppose it’s a blessing. Except compassion is born out of heart sufferings. I can’t help but wonder what kind of people we’d become if we sat with what hurts, without moving to fix it or rush it – I wonder if we went to the heart of what aches, when the aching comes, and simply let it be what it is, if we’d be a more compassionate people. To find God in that dark place, in the Immanuel, instead of in God the rescuer with our feet outside the pit. How often do we glance over the things that prick our heart because we don’t want to be the “downer” and we don’t want to dwell. There’s a big difference between self pity and victim of self, and someone simply willing to feel what hurts and be honest about it. We miss the well that’s hidden in sorrow. It’s deep, it’s down there, and we pass by it when we aren’t willing to feel it all before coming out the other side.
I’ve said in conversations before that people who lack empathy are those who haven’t fully felt their pain, so they can’t enter in to someone else’s. Compassion is stunted, and therefore so is the relational connection. Not everyone can be your “in the trenches person” but you need some, and if you have a few, you’re rich.
There is something deeply empowering and cathartic about diving to the very heart of what hurts, and naming the pain. I mean, specifically naming it. I think most of the time we generalize stuff, we speak vaguely about it, because specificity causes us to feel it more, while generalizations keep us at a distance. Naming it all never looks very pretty, its unedited, its raw… it’s a complete unraveling. We are wired to not feel what hurts, we are wired for survival, by default we avoid discomfort… so diving into the heart of things, while specifically naming it too, its hard – no, its more than hard. It’s… painful.
Until we deal with our own, we cannot be with another in theirs – not fully. And isn’t that in part what Jesus came to do? The Man of Sorrows, who wept when others wept. In his with-ness, his Immanuel, he healed. He didn’t offer solutions, he didn’t offer a fix, he offered his heart – an incredible definition I’ve heard on compassion reads, “your pain, my heart.” If only as a people we could be that in touch.
One of my favorites, Pete Rollins once said, “Contrary to what people think the key to easing peoples suffering is not in offering some insidious theodicy, but in allowing a place for people to mourn and to meet others who know what it is to have been burned by that black sun. Ths is not about providing an answer or a solution, but rather offering a site where we can speak our suffering. This may seem a little depressing, but such spaces are really sites for liberation and light.”
Because light is on the other side of dark, healing on the other side of pain. But we can’t rush people, we can’t overlook their cries – we cry with them, we hold them, and we tell them we’re here every step of the way.
Naming the pain takes an insane amount of courage. Which means those who can sit with another in heartache, and simply just be – in what’s called “the ministry of presence” – are some of, if not the most courageous people in the world.
Many of my circumstances have been out of my control. So far this path has felt chosen for me – the amount of tears and prayers have been sky high. I don’t know what to make of all of it – and in the throes of it, I realized last week that on some foundational level, I don’t feel loved, not by God, and certainly not easily by others. When I survey some of the things that happened as I grew up, it makes sense why I feel that way. Saying you love someone versus actively loving someone are two very different things.
But I have had to do my interior work – in the chaos of most of my day to day – I have moments of breakdown tears. I hand my baby off to my husband and go weep in the shower. I drive home from a quick coffee break and hit the steering wheel. I cry and I cry out. I am not all the way through this yet – there is another side, I trust that – I just don’t know where or when.
Skating over all this sounds pretty nice right about now – passing it over it, talking myself out of it, giving myself pep talks about how “so and so has it worse.” Dismissing myself. But I can’t and I won’t. As the trite saying goes, “it is what it is…” for now. So I sit in the midst of it, giving myself permission to feel all the things I don’t want to feel, and I believe some day, some other woman will be in this place – and I’ll look at her and weep, and climb down into her trench and help her take cover. Because I think that’s what love would do.
Live In His Light 