“ And one of the elders answered and said to me, ‘These who are clothed in white garments, who are they and from where do they come?’ and I said, ‘My Lord, you know.’
And he said to me, ‘ These are they who come out of the great suffering. They have washed their garments and made them white with the blood of the Lamb. Therefore they can stand before the throne of God and serve Him day and night in his temple.” Rev. 7:13-16
Goethe has said that “Color is the deeds and suffering of light.” Light then, having become more material than it would have wished to have been, breaks into color.
We are each one of us, familiar with suffering to a greater or lesser degree. We would acknowledge that as much as we do not like it and would never invite it, that it brings many gifts in its wake. Sometimes these gifts do not show themselves until years after the suffering has ended.
Our suffering helps us to be compassionate with others, brings insight, gives us pause, helps us to learn to ask the right questions. Learning to ask the right questions might be the key to the solution to many of our problems today. It may be the way out of our difficulties, the right way of salvation.
Parzival is the archetype of the evolving human being who only learns through great trials and suffering to ask the “right” question. He was immature, self-absorbed, and ignorant when he first came to The Grail castle. He failed to ask about the many wonders and also the suffering which was right in front of him. How often do we do this?
Why is it that for some people, suffering brings about kindness, generosity, gratitude and invites them to become better human beings? Yet others become bitter, resentful, cynical, eternally wounded, or worse, destructive? What is the determining factor?
There is suffering by natural causes, for which no one is to blame, save perhaps our own karma. Then there is suffering inflicted upon us by others. This adds another very painful layer to the suffering. It is greatly disturbing to the soul to realize that human beings can be terribly cruel to one another. Then there are the sufferings of the world, of which we are more aware than ever today. We have to bear this. And with it, we bear the pain of not knowing what to do about it, how to help, or even how we can make any difference at all. We suffer because we are imprisoned in this paradigm.
Gandhi, Martin Luther King, and other great leaders of the people have realized that if you give people immense purpose and meaning they are able to overcome their own personal needs for the good of the whole. People will summon courage and motivation they never knew they had and willingly sacrifice their own needs, their safety, even their lives for a greater cause. They willingly suffer. Is this a turning point?
When we have a higher purpose we are able to take suffering in a different, even useful way. It is still mightily painful but worth it if we can hope that through our suffering something good will come about.
Peace activist Paul Chappell says in a recent interview in “Sun” magazine: “We have poverty in this country. But we also have poverty of purpose, malnutrition of meaning, and many unhealthy ways of feeding our non-physical needs. We can consider all of this a kind of Spiritual Poverty. The people suffering from spiritual poverty are much more dangerous than people suffering from material poverty.”
Can we articulate and strengthen our sense of purpose so much so that others can “catch” our enthusiasm and join us? Can we carry the suffering of the world in a transformative way, rather than letting it take us into depression?
We have all become more material than we would have wished to have been. Let us arise in color; in all races and tribes and nations and languages.
Let it arise through Christ in us.
Rev. Carol Kelly