living with our pain

In Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind, Shunryu Suzuki talks about Japanese phrase that means “to succeed wrong with wrong”.  Seeing this not as a weakness, but, if seen correctly as a place of promise.  I am reminded of Paul’s lament in Romans, “I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do”.  Most of us, perhaps all of us at some level, if we are at all in touch with our humanity, live with a sense of our own futility and failure.  This is not a comfortable place.  But it is our learning place.

 

We must learn to sit with this pain.  Not to wallow in it, or become it (all it to define us), but so that we might face it and transform it.

 

As has often been said, we either transform our pain, or we transmit it.  We turn our pain on ourselves, we act in, or we turn our pain on others, we act out.  We see the tragic results of deferred pain, denied pain, all around us.  We see what happens when people become their pain.  Beautiful people leave us, tragically.  Other people stay, but become twisted, cruel and destructive, lashing out like cornered animals.

 

But if we can with what is wrong, if we can see what is wrong within us, and in the context of our union with all that is Sacred (God, for some).  If we can tap into the reality that we have sacred within in, that we carry divine DNA.  If we can realize that there is “good” within us, and strive to be who we were created to be, with all our hearts?  Then I think that even as we move from wrong to wrong we will grow, and learn, and become.

 

It is a journey. It is never over (not even when from our perspective it is over).  We stumble, we fall, we pick ourselves up, and we keep moving, left foot, right foot, left foot, breathe.  We keep moving toward what we value.  Toward whom we value. 

 

As we sit in the middle of our own problems we cannot let our problem become more real to us than our self.  We are not our problem, our failure, our illness.  We are bigger.  Not as we stand alone, but as we stand in union with the Sacred, and with all others, who are also in union with the Sacred.

 

Paul ends his lament with the question, “Who can rescue me?!”  He answers his own question.  “Thanks be to God who delivers”.  Our union with the Sacred has that power.  To keep us walking.  Moving.  To keep us trying.  Our union, our connection (as branches to a vine) with Love allows us to accept what is wrong within us, and accept our inevitable failure, and move forward, wounded and humble, but also hopeful, and ready to love, all that is Sacred, including those around us and, yes, even ourselves.