Mark Dohle
Well-Known Member
Everything about this life is important
“The world is a good place. Even with pain in it. Even with death.”
― Anna Smith Spark, From: The Court of Broken Knives
Life is not a choice. We were born, and that is simply the end of it. How we live is another question entirely. Floating through life is one way of dealing with ‘things’. One simply gets through the day, doing one’s best, and when not busy seeking ways to fill in the time. Buffers are looked for, something, almost anything to lessen the empty hours. Entertainment, frenzied activity, addictions, food, and yes, sex.
Yet even when trying one’s best, nothing seems to work, but only piles up problems, as well as suffering. It can be exhausting and make life a permanent case of ‘mind-fog’. Just getting by.
If pain is as C.S. Lewis says, “God’s wakeup call”, then I guess most of us who live here are in some kind of deep slumber, thinking we are awake. Pain can be like having a bucket full of ice-cold water poured over one’s body. It certainly brings one to the present moment, and out of any kind of ‘mind-fog’.
Pain is a challenge, suffering draws a line, the inability to escape forces the one who is suffering to deal with it. To deal with pain, any kind of pain, by seeking to avoid it, will only pile up the problems that already exist.
There is no ‘magic-man-in-the-sky’ that will take away our sufferings. God is not into magic, not into making things easy for us, but does one better, he experiences with us all of our sorrows, miseries, injustices, illnesses, and yes, our own death when our time comes.
Yes, we suffer, no one is exempt. Some suffer way more than others, for some life is hell, yet through it all, God-Is-With-Us. He is one with us, joining each in their pilgrimage through life, a very short life, soon over, but it can be filled with many joys and sorrows. If God is love, then what happened on the Cross, is an event outside of time, it is the union of Infinite Mind, whose nature is shown to us by Jesus Christ, united with the finite-minds of all of humanity, one unique consciousness at a time.
Everything about this life is important. How we relate to others, how we continue to move forward in spite of the hardships, as well as how we embrace suffering, and not try to escape it at all cost. There is no escape.
Yet life is good. This is a good place. What is life for? Jesus says that the goal of life is to love God, love others as ourselves (harder than it sounds; since self-love is rare), and to do good, to see Christ Jesus in all around us.
Each human being has a date with God. A time when we will be stripped of all excuses, when the truth of our true motives will be experienced by us, the suffering we caused others will be experienced, felt by us, as it was by those we hurt. We do not get away with anything. All must be faced. The same goes for the joy and happiness we also gave to others.
It is then that we are free to let it go, to release it into the Heart-Of-The-Father, to be healed by the fire of the Holy Spirit. Healing is painful, we can’t run away forever, for one day it all has to be faced. Why not face it here by opening up our hearts to the Love of God and allow the healing to begin.
We can also grow into a place where the love of God is actually repugnant to us, which is made in freedom over time by free choices that exclude God and others. Yet even then, mercy is there if only one will ask.
Slowly we learn that trust in God is never wasted, nor our prayers. We also understand that no one has God figured out to the point where we can judge the soul of another human being. Each human is a precious child of God, no matter who they are, or what they have done, for mercy is open to all.
So unite yourself to God, to Christ (if you are a Christian), and pray always for all of our brothers and sisters throughout the world, a good world, in spite of all that we have to go through—Br.MD