The Deacon's Bench - January, 2010

One of the deep lessons people of compassion learn sooner or later is that we can only enter into another person’s pain to the extent that we can enter into our own. Even in the short run, compassion can’t be faked - suffering people can tell.

Entering into our own pain is not a journey undertaken lightly. I’ve watched some folks of perfectly good will walk away from the challenge. For them, there is simply too much unacknowledged suffering within, and they find it overwhelming to tackle it all at once. “Maybe after a few more years we’ll be back,” they say, “after we’ve done some of the work we now know we have to do.”

Where does all this unacknowledged pain come from? Some of it stems from ungrieved losses. Death of loved ones, health problems, job losses, moving, disappointments and separations of one sort or another are all examples of losses that need to be acknowledged and situated properly in the collage that makes up the image we have of our life.

I think you’ll readily see that these losses are simply the natural conclusions of the good things that also come in our lives - the attachments to people, things and situations that give us security, love, joy and pleasure. Conclusions are just as perfectly natural, and to grieve them is as necessary and acceptable as it is to celebrate onsets.

Denial or repression doesn’t really work as a way to deal with this kind of pain – ungrieved losses don’t go away – they simply manifest themselves in other, perhaps destructive ways until we deal with them. Sometimes though, we just plain don’t think about it, or refuse to give ourselves or other people permission to experience the painful part of a situation and develop ways to accept it. No one can do it for us, although compassionate people around us can help. People of faith know that prayer is essential.

There is a way to avoid pain, but it comes at a very high price. To avoid grief, love no one. Make no attachments and take no risks. In a word – refuse to live. That’ll do it, but I think you’ll agree it’s way too high a price to pay.

From time to time I see people at the hospital I fear may have made just such a deal. There’s no family. No friends or acquaintances. Perhaps there’s a defiant, crusty exterior, but almost always within there is a person who wants to be wanted: someone who wants to be loved. It breaks my heart to be with them in pain like that.

There’s a poem by the 13th century German mystic Meister Eckhart that can help us understand what this feels like, and what’s at stake. The poem is called The Hope of Loving and you can find it here.