Has great suffering been a path for your own transformation?
Great love and great suffering are universal paths to transformation
While our tendency with suffering is to draw inward and isolate for protection, the experience of great suffering can often be transforming. The easiest way to see this is to notice our heartfelt empathic reaction of care when someone is hurting. We often then move out of our usual limited vision and concerns and vulnerably reach out to help. Our sense of self and the world changes. We can feel ourselves more connected, part of a gradually expanding vision of vulnerable community and humanity with responsibilities for others and power, or at least longing, to help. This is an experience of greater wholeness.
When we ourselves suffer, we can experience ourselves as not in control, vulnerable, and in need of others. Often, we cry out. We cry for understanding and companionship as well as relief. In these cases too, our sense of our connection to others and humanity expands as we learn we cannot exist alone. Our empathy increases. As we admit our own pain, we see others’ pain. Our gratefulness expands as we are able in any way to feel their care for us and contribute to others’ care.
Richard Rohr writes of “paths” to transformation because typically our first experiences of great love or great suffering are initiating experiences. They do not open and transform us once and for all into loving empathic humans connected and devoted to everyone else and the earth. Fortunately, however, our initial experiences of love as well as empathy for suffering often lead to a longing for more, more love, and making more of a positive difference in the world’s suffering.. They become touchstone experiences that guide us on our life paths toward what is most meaningful and toward wholeness. And, in my experience they are such reliable guides that even when we fall off those paths or are attracted to something else that leads off those paths, it is not difficult at all to find our way back on.
At least, as I say, that is my experience. What is yours?
Questions:
Has great suffering been a path for your own transformation? How?
Looking back over your life, can you see how your paths of great love and suffering developed over time?
Have you been able to find and come back to them again if you have fallen off the paths or lost them for a while?
What other paths to transformation have you experienced?
Share your thoughts