by Rev. Thomas Disrud

A sermon given February 10, 2002

First Unitarian Church

Portland, Oregon

A couple weeks ago, the Edge column in the Oregonian had some interesting statistics:

In our lifetime, on average, we will spend six days and two hours blowing our noses.

We’ll spend four months and five days waiting in traffic.

We’ll spend eight months opening junk mail.

We’ll spend a year looking for lost stuff and three years in meetings. (And for some of us here at the church, I think that number is low.)

We’ll spend two years and seven months watching commercials.

We’ll spend five years waiting in line.

And we will spend five years, eight months and 15 days worrying.

Those are sobering statistics. Think about it. Five years waiting in line… and I wonder what that means for those of us who always seem to choose the slow line…

The statistics would seem to bear out that life has its share of suffering.

Woody Allen would probably put himself near the top of a list as someone who has suffered a great deal—at least suffered in public. And I’m sure others would be quick to point out that Allen has also caused his share of suffering. Here’s what he has to say:

"To love is to suffer. To avoid suffering one must not love. But then one suffers from not loving. Therefore, to love is to suffer; not to love is to suffer; to suffer is to suffer. To be happy is to love. To be happy then, is to suffer but suffering makes one unhappy. Therefore, to be happy one must love or love to suffer or suffer from too much happiness."

Not the most optimistic assessment of life I’ve ever heard, but he makes a point. No matter where we go or what we do life will have its share of suffering.

Of course, sometimes there is nothing subtle at all about our suffering. Sometimes life just throws us for a loop. We are faced with an illness. We have lost someone we love. We are faced with the reality of hatred in the world. We may not all have the fate of Job, but we may find ourselves asking God why this is happening. We may find ourselves feeling alone in the world.

And even if we haven’t experienced very hard things in life, all of us have had the experience of not getting what we wanted. Or we have had to deal with something we got but didn’t ask for.

One of the lessons I have learned as a parish minister is that people are carrying around all kinds of burdens. You may not know it to meet them, but as I get to know people’s stories, I’m aware of all that we bring with us. The truth is that suffering is the great equalizer. Nobody escapes it. Truth is, suffering, along with death, is probably the thing we all have in common. We can’t escape either one.

There are many ways we might find ourselves responding when we experience suffering in others.

The first, I think, is with a natural sense of empathy towards someone else. We see in them someone who is hurting and there is a strong impulse in us to reach out and help them. It is something that comes instantly and it is something we want to do. We see someone in pain and we want to reach out and do something. We hurt inside knowing that there may not be much we can do.

But because this can be hard, there are ways we learn to cope—ways that can keep us at a distance from our own suffering.

In our culture, there seems to be a vicarious pleasure in seeing others suffer. I thought of Woody Allen’s travails in the media the other night when I saw that there was going to be a news story on Tonya Harding, who was being evicted from her home. I have to confess that I found myself staying up later than I had planned just to see what she might say to the cameras this time. I have to say that I was not disappointed. Afterward, I also felt sorry for her that she still hasn’t learned the line "no comment." We live in a culture that seems to feed on this. In the suffering of others we see where we are not, and there seems to be some strange satisfaction in that for us.

But most of all, we often deal with suffering by pushing it away as much as we can. We’ll try to build walls up around us. The idea is that if we put them up, nothing will get to us. But we can only build walls so high. But we put a lot of effort into keeping those walls up and in the end we might suffer all the more because of it. Maybe what we need to do is to try to not push it away. Maybe what we need to do is simply try to stay there with it, and to see where it takes us.

Several years ago I learned a lesson that has been very important to me in the ministry.

I was serving as a chaplain at a hospital in San Francisco for a summer. On one of my first days there, I met an elderly woman named Kathleen. She was a tall, beautiful woman, and I remember how her red hair framed her long face. She liked to talk and I didn’t know her long before I was told of the importance of her Irish—make that Irish Catholic—roots.

The two of us hit it off. I think she was a little skeptical of me, a young Unitarian Universalist minister at the beginning. But I had been taught by Jesuits in one chapter of my life, and I think this must have meant that I couldn’t be all bad. She became my favorite patient. We seemed to talk about all kinds of things, although not necessarily things that were all that profound. I really didn’t feel like I was doing a whole lot for her. It was just good to be together.

She was in the hospital because of some problem with her stomach. That led to one thing and then another. Her stay in the hospital went from what was originally a few days to a couple weeks and then a couple months. She became more and more ill and her case just seemed to get more and more complicated. As she encountered one thing after another, she was a real trooper. I knew that she was in a great deal of pain and the doctors were not sure if she would make it, but nothing seemed to get her down.

This went on and then one day I walked into her room and she didn’t respond to my greeting. She just looked up at me with a blank expression and said she didn’t know what to do. She said she had lost hope and that she was just sick and tired of sitting there and suffering, waiting for the next health problem to come up. She looked up at me and the usual spark that I was used to seeing was not there.

I was terrified. This woman was the Rock of Gibraltar. I had never seen her like this. I didn’t know what to do.

I sat by her bed. I took her hands and asked if she would like to pray. I spoke some words, but then we just sat there together in silence. That just seemed like what needed to happen, even though I was afraid that I should be doing something different. But soon the fear left and we were just there together. I’m not sure how long it was, probably half an hour, maybe longer. Time seemed to stop. Finally, I left the room not knowing what to expect.

The next day I went in and I was worried about what I would find. But there she was, sitting up in a chair for the first time in several days. She had a big smile across her face. It seemed that she had taken a turn for the better. And she really had. After some ten weeks in the hospital, within a couple days she was ready to go home. She would later credit the time that the two of us were in prayer. She said that something happened for her in that time and that she had made a decision that she was going to move through the suffering and get out of there.

I don’t know what happened between us, but it taught me a lot about ministry. I came to realize that most of the time when I was going into someone’s room, I really didn’t want to be there. I was afraid. I was afraid of the suffering I might encounter. I was afraid that I wouldn’t know what to do. I was afraid I might not remain in control of the situation. I expect that on some level I didn’t want to be reminded that someday I might be in a hospital.

But that day I learned that it was okay to not have the right thing to say, and that it was okay to just be with someone in their suffering. I didn’t have to try to take care of it; I simply had to try to be there.

Being with suffering—our own or someone else’s—is not always fun. Too often we will go to great lengths to avoid it. But suffering is part of life and if we can stay with it, it is through the suffering that we will find our way.

When the Buddhists say that all of life is dukkah, the most literal translation is suffering. All of life is suffering. But the better translation might be the word impermanence. It is that we cannot count on things staying the same. In fact, the one thing we can count on is that no matter what else happens, things will change. Even in seeing a child grow up there are those moments when we realize that another chapter is over and we will not have that chapter again.

All things are in flux and we are constantly asked to give and receive. It is when we get attached to things the way they are that we will get into trouble. Our job is to try to see them for what they are in the present and not be so concerned about the future.

In this we are asked to let go of our fears and simply to stay with what is. We are asked to let go of what we want to have happen and simply to be with what is happening.

In Ram Dass’ book How Can I Help, a caregiver tells her story of working in a neonatal intensive care unit. She tells about how at first she wanted to keep herself at a distance, how she did not want to get too close.

These are her words: "But it was the children themselves who began to open me up. Once it started, it began to pull me in gradually but steadily. It was very powerful, but you have to take it at your own pace. Because here, in a neonatal intensive care unit, you see incredible beauty and unbearable pain. And you have to figure out how to be with both.

"The children are beautiful because you just get to know them. You can’t nurse them, really nurse them, without knowing them. And you can’t know them, really know them, without seeing their beauty. What can be more beautiful than innocence? And that affects all their features: their tininess, the eyes, the fingers, the sound of their heart—just their breath can move you with its beauty. Part of it seems to come from how fragile they are, how uncertain it is how long they’ll be here—the cliché metaphor of the flower that blooms for a day. It’s like a garden of that in here.

"The picture on the surface, though, is also terribly grim. A room full of these little ones, many of whom are right on the edge of life and death, and some of whose faces and movements are pretty distressing. And then their parents: there on the other side of the window, with the most desperate and stricken faces looking in, so helplessly, in such pain. It’s something to be inside a picture that’s being looked at with such expressions. But you look back, just to let them know someone’s in here.

"It was the use of machines and extraordinary medical measures that moved several of us to see how much distance we were putting between ourselves and the infants. Even if the machines weren’t there, though, there was that tendency to keep it impersonal, to keep your distance, and you knew that wasn’t any good for the children—for the children least of all.

"So a group of us began to talk about it, to open up to our feelings, to decide to be with the children more, and when it go too hard and we’d break down, we’d support each other and talk it over. The more we opened up, it just became natural that we began this new practice of holding infants when the time would come for them to die. It wasn’t a decision as much as something we’d become ready to do. So at the end we’d take them off the monitors and into our arms in a rocker. And we’d sit with them in their final moments.

"It tears you apart, because holding them, sometimes you can feel them go. And the death itself is different. On the machines, it’s monitored as brain death. In your arms, it’s the heart and the breath.

"You feel ten dozen things at once. Terrible sadness, because you’d become attached to the child. But glad too, because their suffering is about to end. Maybe anger, at the world, at God, at whatever, for allowing this to happen. And such empathy for the parents. And something like awe and wonder: like there must be some kind of explanation for all this which you don’t yet understand. But patience too, that things become more clear in time and peace of mind, because you’re doing the best you can. All of the above, often at once.

"It’s unbearable and beautiful at the same time. How do you explain that? It’s just the part of you that’s with them is getting ripped up. But the part of you that’s like, trying to understand it all… well, that’s beautiful because you see that you can be, we all can be, in the presence of great pain, but still appreciate life, even in its last moments. Especially then."

Theologian Matthew Fox has said that if we are able to go into the suffering, what we will find is that we are able to move through it to find something new. It is almost like we are able to give birth to this something new. Just as in birth there is pain, but that pain is transcended by the new that comes from it. The two are not separate, but all of a whole. Think of the people who live with terminal illness. Now there is a new appreciation of life—whether they live or die.

Having the courage to stay with such pain is not easy to find sometimes. When I was growing up my mother used to say that God never presented you with anything you couldn’t handle. I’m not so sure that is true, but as I have reflected on that, perhaps that was an expression of faith, that things really would work out all right and that no matter what might happen, you would make it through.

But we know there are risks. We don’t know what will happen when we open ourselves up. We risk having more suffering. It is when we are in life fully that we get close to people and know that we will lose them someday. There is the paradox that we live with.

After the terrorist attacks on September 11, Dorothy Stafford, widow of the great Oregon poet William Stafford said, "We have now joined the suffering of the world." In those first days it seemed as if some walls had been broken down, that in rallying around the people hurt or killed in the attacks, there was some coming together. It seemed as if the destruction here in our country might open our hearts to suffering in other places that we, as Americans, seemed so isolated from.

There is much that divides us and much that makes us see ourselves as separate. It is too easy to shore up our own walls only to find that we cannot block out the suffering of the world. But we can only build the walls so high. I’m not sure how much that has really happened. I fear that we are too much back in old patterns. Maybe that is because this is such hard work.

The challenge comes in letting our hearts be open to the world in all of its suffering and in all of its beauty. The answers in life are not always clear. But if we can put ourselves forward, they will become clear. It is not up to us to solve all the problems of the world. But it is our call to do our part to witness to suffering when we see it. It is our call to not close our hearts but to keep them open.

These are words of Mattie Stepanek, a boy living with a rare form of muscular dystrophy. He has written a number of books of poetry. This is from Journey Through Heartsongs and was written in 1996, when I would guess Mattie was six or seven.

God is everywhere the wind takes me.

The wind takes me to God, and

God takes the wind to me.
It asks me where I want to go

without even saying anything, any word.

It just knows.

It just knows.

I always see in the wind,

and so, I will follow the wind as it

Moves inside my world and

Inside my house and inside my heart.

I will trust the wind, and

I will let it take me wherever it is going,

because God is in the wind.

God is in the wind,

and I am here for God.

To witness to the suffering of the world is a privilege. If we are seeing it and knowing it, it means that we are alive. It means that we are aware of our interconnection. It means we feel the wind. It means that we are part of the world and that the world is part of us. It means the world needs each and every one of us and all that we bring.

PRAYER

God of love, we so often come in search of answers. Help us to be patient, help us to have courage. Help us to know the way. No matter what troubles us, may we find peace in you. May we know love and hope in our days. Amen.

BENEDICTION

Give yourself to life, as life gives itself to you, good people. Go this day in love. Go in peace.

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Copyright 2002, Rev. Thomas Disrud.  All rights reserved.