Our Unfinished Houses

Arriving one week after Easter and Passover .... this painful, difficult week — a week that began with Holocaust Memorial Day and ended with the eight year anniversary of the Columbine High School massacre [April 20, 2007] — is one of those moments when we would like to turn back our clocks to the first of the month (or the first day of this new millennium!)... and change the future.  If only we could.  How much we would change!

At times — times such as now (such as this week) — I might have preferred to live on a remote, isolated island.  Away from television, radio, newspapers, Internet.  Away from the human brutality, and horrific tragedy, of Virginia Tech and the Sadriya market in Baghdad.  Away from the painful images of victims crushed, and suffocating, under human suffering.  Away from our unfinished, imperfect houses.  Away ... anywhere, somewhere .... in paradise.

Philip Simmons, who served as an associate professor of English at Lake Forest College in Illinois, lived the last years of his life in suffering.  At the all-too-young-age of thirty-five, Professor Simmons, a father and a husband, learned that he had ALS, or Lou Gehrig's disease.  In the years that followed that painful discovery, Simmons embarked on a remarkable ten-year spiritual journey — a journey that challenged him to pursue the mysteries of life with the passion for life: a passion that motivated him to write one of the most inspiring books I have ever read: Learning to Fall: The Blessings of an Imperfect Life.

 "We have all heard poems, songs, and prayers that exhort us to see God in a
 blade of grass, a drop of dew, a child's eyes, or the petals of a flower.
 Now when I hear such things I say that's too easy.  Our greater challenge is
 to see God not only in the eyes of the suffering child but in the suffering
 itself.  To thank God for the sunset pink clouds over Red Hill -- but also
 for the mosquitoes I must fan from my face while watching the clouds.  To
 thank God for broken bones and broken hearts, for everything that opens us
 to the mystery of our humanness.  The challenge is to stand at the sink with
 your hands in the dishwater, fuming over a quarrel with your spouse, children
 at your back clamoring for attention, the radio blatting bad news from Bosnia,
 and to say 'God is here, now, in this room, here in this dishwater, in this
 dirty spoon.'  Don't talk to me about flowers and sunshine and waterfalls: 
 this is the ground, here, now, in all that is ordinary and imperfect, this is
 the ground in which life sows the seeds of our fulfillment.... The imperfect
 is our paradise."1

In his book When Bad Things Happen to Good People, Rabbi Harold Kushner — another victim of tragedy .. who, together with his wife (and friends and family), faced the loss of their young son to a terrible, fatal disease — steers us, deliberately, passionately, away from the 'WHY' questions that often surround pain, heartache, and suffering ... and asks, instead, that we focus on the 'WHEN' questions. 

  "In the final analysis, the question of why bad things happen to good
 people translates itself into some very different questions, no longer
 asking why something happened, but asking how we will respond, what we
 intend to do now that it has happened." 2

 

When a nation mourns, when a family grieves, when a boyfriend or girlfriend (or husband or wife) cries out in anguish — we cannot (and must not) run and hide in the past, or wish or dream to live in the future.... in a quieter place, during a more peaceful time.  Our responsibility — our human duty — is to deal with the present and to help ease the suffering.  To find a way, a mechansim, a process that helps bring comfort, and healing.  To find the courage and determination to seek-out doctors, nurses, teachers, rabbis, priests, pastors, imams, friends, relatives, parents, grandparents, .... healers, caregivers.  To discover the strength ... that reaches outward to all victims, to all wounded ... with care, and compassion. 

In our moments of pain, we cannot escape the present.  With absolute certainty .... we will struggle.  We will search for courage.  We will seek those who can help us cope, and heal.  But eventually, we will — we must — surrender .... "surrender to new meanings and new circumstances. "Joan Chittister reminds us .... "surrender is the crossover point of life.  It distinguishes who I was from who I have become ... Life, as I had fantasized it, is ended.  What is left is the spiritual obligation to accept reality so that the spiritual life can really happen in me."4

We will grieve, and grieve, and then grieve some more.  And the pain (at times) will seem insurmountable.  We will struggle in darkness and we will cry with despair ... until we surrender.  Until we shed everything in life but God.  And then ... at that moment when we are "sure of the absence of God, we actually become aware of the presence of God.  It is the paradox of faith .... I am reduced by misery [and mystery] to stop and look through the darkness to the light on the horizon that never changes ..... There is only one way out of struggle and that is by going into its darkness waiting for the light and being open to new growth ... Darkness becomes the incubator of light."5

From within our suffering, and struggle, and darkness — at that moment when we sense abandonment by God — we will, in the words of the Sufi Poet Jalal al-Din Rumi:

 Be a full bucket,
 drawn up the dark way of a well,
 then lifted out,
 into the light.

God — the Light that transforms all darkness — is our Divine Caregiver and Eternal Guide, present with us, always, ... in our suffering, in our struggle.  As Healer and Comforter, He is there .... waiting, patiently, in the heart of a friend — a friend who embraces and holds us with love, and hope, who extends a gentle, caring kiss to our cheek, who offers a soft, understanding shoulder to rest our weary eyes.  God is present in the Compassion of Humanity — in strangers who write notes of comfort, and in campus friends, teachers, and students who leave flowers, or light candles, at a makeshift memorial ... and who offer up words of support, and concern, and healing.


Escape is never an answer to the chaos, and pain, that affronts the tranquilities of life.  We may want to believe that relaxing on some beach on a distant island isolates us from the world's wounds.  And, in our imagination, such a perceived peaceful existence will offer us a temporary absence from the horrors of murder and the suffering of loss.  But lives abandoned to isolation, and remoteness, are lives lived outside of humanity.  If we choose to live life beyond the needs of others, without the opportunity to bring healing and provide comfort, how can we expect to grow as human beings?  How can we ever expect to discover "the light beyond the darkness" if we never struggle, nor confront, nor experience .... the cold, painful depth of an icy well?

 "When our fantasies of a better life consume us, when our memories of
 past hurts bind us and fears of pending calamity drive us, we are robbed
 of the only gift — the greatest gift — we can be sure of possessing: the
 present moment.  We cannot summon the future, we cannot remake the past. 
 The present moment is the unfinished house in which we dwell."6

And yet, in this unfinished all-too-human dwelling, as we face the chaos, the hurt, the tragedies of human life .... we will come to know Compassion, and Comfort, and Gentleness, and Healing.  We will come to know Security, and Confidence, and Trust.  We will come to know, and to see, God.  We will feel His Presence among us — for He lives among us.  And He lives within us.

 "It is not struggle that destroys us.  It is the unwillingness to move
 beyond struggle even when the struggle goes on forever.  We don't forget
 abandonment.  We still feel the flames of jealously.  We still resent
 bitterly their new partner.  We know we are divorced but refuse to be
 separated.... Exhaustion is what happens when we refuse in our pain to
 look for ways to bring light into darkness.  When we allow pain to consume
 us, to paralyze us, to nail our feet to the floor of the place where
 defeat has happened, danger sets in with a vengeance....It is not the
 struggle itself that kills us.  It is allowing ourselves to stay locked
 in mortal combat with it.  The refusal to move on in life to where God
 waits for us with new love."7

The present moment will always remain the unfinished house in which we live.  A house with challenges and struggles and broken walls and crumbling ceilings.  But it is not a house that we occupy alone.  "God is the One who made for us a good world [... a secure house] and who walks with us to hold us up as we go.  And sometimes, in the face of the God of life, the most faithful thing we can do is simply to keep on living."8


Sometimes — those equally difficult times ..... when we are moved to respond to suffering as a caring friend, or as a considerate stranger .... when we, ourselves, are not (directly) on the receiving end of human tragedy, although it consumes, and burns all around us — the most faithful thing we can do is simply to keep on caring .... to be there when someone needs a hand to securely hold onto.  Sometimes, when the world appears to be collapsing around us, the most faithful thing we can do is to show love, and compassion.

 "God is the One who made for us a good world [... a secure house] and who walks with us to hold us up as we go."  Sometimes, when we feel that our unfinished house is on the verge of demolition and destruction, the most faithful thing we can do is simply step back .... and allow God to sustain us and provide all our healing.

 Be a full bucket,
 drawn up the dark way of a well,
 then lifted out,
 into the light.

 

_________________________________________

  1. Simmons, Philip.  Learning to Fall: The Blessings of an Imperfect Life.  New York: Bantam Books, 2000.
  2. Kushner, Harold S.  When Bad Things Happen to Good People.  New Your: Avon Books, 1983.
  3. Chittister, Joan D.  Scarred by Struggle, Transformed by Hope.  Toronto: Noavalis, 2003.
  4. ibid.
  5. ibid.
  6. Simmons, Philip.  Learning to Fall: The Blessings of an Imperfect Life.  New York: Bantam Books, 2000.
  7. Chittister, Joan D.  Scarred by Struggle, Transformed by Hope.  Toronto: Noavalis, 2003.
  8. ibid.