Looking for Meaning

 

Pain and suffering. We each experience these in some way in our own lives. We see it right up close, in our faces, and that’s hard to escape. 

If we choose, we may look around and see that this pain and suffering exists around us as well. A friend recently asked me why there was so much pain in this world. I cannot pretend to even begin to know how to provide any kind of answer to that one. I might attempt to philosophize my way through, supported by the many books and talks by people who have spent much time on this subject. All I know for sure is that it is part of this human life. We won't escape it. 

Not only is it all around us, but we also experience past trauma through our ancestors. I recall all the suffering my own grandparents went through, escaping their little town of Tomarza in the 1920s during the Armenian Genocide, the horror, the brutality, the loss of so many family members. After a few years of never knowing if their last day was today they made their way here to the United States and found a new life. It was still challenging, but they were able to rebuild their lives. 

This torment my ancestors experienced does not end with them. My parents suffered their own demons, and their deep inescapable pain was evident in our household when my siblings and I were growing up. We experienced the fallout from their past trauma. It all remains hidden deep in our bones.

And life is life. My grandparents lost children, my parents lost a son, and I lost a son. I joined a support group and have met hundreds of other parents who have also lost children. I am not the only one. We all suffer loss.

There is grief in loss, the loss of someone you love deeply. But loss takes many forms. Not only do we grieve our loved ones, our family members, our parents, our siblings, our children, our friends, but even if they are still here on earth and want nothing more to do with us, we grieve that estrangement. We also grieve job losses and pet losses and maybe even the loss of a home. Sometimes we may experience all of these at once and it feels like the world is crumbling around us. Where do we find that strength to go on? Wouldn’t it be easier to just give it all up?

I have gained a sip of wisdom from books I have read by others in history who experienced profound loss and still managed to see the good somewhere in this life. In Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning, Frankl survives the horrors of the Holocaust. In some miraculous way, he finds the fortitude and the wisdom deep within himself to say, “Forces beyond your control can take away everything you possess except one thing, your freedom to choose how you respond to the situation.” Your freedom to choose. Those are powerful words.

Etty Hillesum is the author of An Interrupted Life, a diary that chronicles the last couple years of her life before and during the time when she was summoned to Westerbork, a stopping point before her final destination of Auschwitz. Again, she exhibits a strength that is understandably rare for most anyone, a wisdom and a deep devotion to give and love and help and serve despite living within the most dire circumstances. Reading her book brought me to tears and even shocked me with her ability to state, “Despite everything, life is full of beauty and meaning.” Where does that come from?

I believe each one of us has that strength somewhere embedded deep inside. But it is not easily accessible, only retrievable in the silence, in the moments of contemplation, and, dare I say, of surrender. In the society and world we’ve grown up in, surrender is not a word we like to use. To most, surrender means giving up, letting go of our strength, and is an indication of weakness. But I don’t mean surrendering the necessary work against the crimes committed on humanity. This is an important effort as modeled by Martin Luther King Jr, Nelson Mandela and the like. 

I do believe there is another perspective from which we can view surrender. By letting go, by choosing to surrender the pain and the suffering and the anger and the vengeance, we actually make room for something else to come in. We can then create the space for the beauty and the love to come in and find us. I think that’s what Frankl and Hillesum were able to do.

And so I look up to them. I learn from them. I ponder who they were and what they gave to this world. I feel the ripple effects that continue to flow from their magnificence, from their strength and surrender. I search for the words and examples of others like them, whether from the past or even still here today in this world. I hope to follow in those footsteps when it seems the world is crashing down around me, when I’m feeling the sting from one loss or another.

I've said it before and I’ll say it again… We are here to love. We were never promised a rose garden (as an old song tells us). Life is not meant to be perfect. It is not meant to be all good, and when things fall apart it doesn’t mean we’ve done anything wrong. This is as it is. 

What do we do with that? That’s the question. Will we lose hope? Or become beacons of hope. Will the tiny steps we might eke out each day make a difference? Steps in the direction of kindness and peace, steps of serving someone else in a situation like ours or maybe even worse? That’s where I like to focus. 

Because then, somehow, I do feel the meaning of it all. Somewhere hidden in what sometimes looks like a pile of slop is meaning. And it takes nothing more than getting up each day and setting the intention to love and offer kindness, to be helpful. It is there. Deep within. And if you can find it within, you will find it around you as well.

(Read more about my journey from grief to hope in my books Look Around and A Bird Called Wisdom.) 

Unlearning

(Disclaimer – the word God is used multiple times. Feel free to substitute as needed.)

I don’t know how to explain what God is. I don’t even believe it’s possible to explain who God is (or whatever name you may use for this magnificent power). 

But I do know what God is not. God is not an old man in the sky sitting on a throne. God is not angry or vengeful. Or unforgiving. God is not male, or even female for that matter; God might be both or God might be neither. God is not someone or something that either grants our wishes/prayers or denies them. The above describes such a small God. So limited. So manufactured. But that is the God that is so often advertised. No wonder so many people are atheists. 

I used to believe in this God because that’s what I was taught - a long, long time ago. As time went on, I began to let go of some of these ideas due to my participation in healthier religious readings and discussions. But seven years ago, when I experienced profound suffering after my youngest child passed away, I had to rethink all of this, because it felt like bullshit.

I searched. And searched. I read books. I listened to people speak on death, and life, and love, and suffering, and afterlife, and God. I sifted through all of it. I tossed what did not resonate in my heart as truth, and gently held and cradled that which did resonate. I sat in silence with myself. I pondered and contemplated.

Little by little, something deep within myself began to emerge. A truth. A light. Something immense. Expansive. Uncontainable. And I began to realize that, in this deepest part of me, was God.

I discovered that God is in all things, in all people. That is why God is always with us in every situation good or bad. Joyful or painful. I know that God is the Creator of this incredible, indescribably beautiful Earth and universe. And I have learned that He/She is the Source of all Love. And what is greater than unconditional love? 

Those small acts of kindness you may witness each day – holding a door for someone, letting a car in front of you on the road, offering a bottle of water to a stranger who appears to be in distress, even offering a genuine smile – that’s where God is. Right there. So easy to miss. 

I have come to understand that God protects us from nothing but sustains us in all things. For we are here for all of it. Suffering, I’ve learned, is part of life. And it is also a teacher. Through great suffering can come great transformation. We can become compassionate to the suffering of others. We are here to grow our capacity to love. Everyone. Even our enemies.

Love our enemies? Whoa. There it is. Tallest order I know of. But I do get it now. 

Forgiveness, I have found, is great love. It’s the acknowledgement that deep down inside each of us, where we never really look, we are actually all the same, and not one of us is perfect. We all make mistakes. We all fail, and sometimes we fail big time. We do something that feels unforgivable, and we may hate ourselves for it. Then someone hurts us in a way that also feels unforgivable. And here we are all sitting around, wallowing in our shittiness.

Did you ever ask for forgiveness? Have you ever been forgiven for a grave injustice? Do you remember how it felt? To be forgiven? A huge weight lifted off your soul. Immense gratitude to the forgiver. Didn’t that feel kind of like…love? 

And imagine offering that to someone else. For fucking up. Big time. Or even small time. Either way…how very…

Loving.

That’s God in action. Through you. Through me. Through each of us. No matter how imperfect we are.

This God is so much bigger than that small God I learned about, that God that was stuffed into a little box the size of a pea representing the small-mindedness of human understanding. I needed to unlearn that God. Because the God I now know of and see all around me is beyond any possible understanding. 

God is the magnificence of the ocean, the breathtaking view of the sunset, the peace and serenity of the face of a sleeping infant, the beauty in the delicate petals of a rose, the endless expanse of a star-filled night. Yet words fall short. God is more amazing than we can comprehend, describe or explain. God is awesome. Truly awe-some.

(Read more about my journey from grief to hope in my books Look Around and A Bird Called Wisdom.) 

The Transformative Power of Grief

We all have an idea of what life should look like. We all have a plan for how things should go. And why wouldn’t we? We are creative beings and we put in a lot of hard work building our lives. From a very young age we begin to construct an outline of what will unfold before us on our paths. In my case, my plan included college, career, marriage, a home, children, and grandchildren.

So, what do we do with the excruciating loss of a loved one? Nowhere to be found in that beautiful picture I painted of my life was the sudden passing away of my son as the result of a car accident seven years ago, my youngest of four wonderful children. That carefully crafted image of what I was building my life to be was shattered. What I had envisioned for the future was no longer possible. 

Richard Rohr, ecumenical teacher and author, says that two of the most powerfully transformative experiences in our lives are great love and great suffering.  When I first read these words of his a few years back, they immediately resonated with me. From what I had experienced, this rang as truth.

Yet just today, listening to a podcast, I heard writer and speaker Paula D’Arcy tell about losing both her young child and her husband in an instant during a car accident when she was 27. She was also 3 months pregnant at the time. Incomprehensible. The world as she knew it had vanished. She explained that during the brutal pain of this loss, she felt the great love and great suffering that Rohr describes occur at the same time. She said that this is how it is with the grief we experience when a loved one dies. Our love and our suffering become one.

A new understanding reverberated in my heart when I heard this. Yes. Yes indeed. Through my experiences sitting with and hearing from hundreds of parents who have a child in spirit, as I watched their love for their child spill out through the tears running down their faces, I could see that the immense love they have for their children, as the unbearable suffering they felt were one and the same. The love and suffering were integrated. And, when I consider my own loss, the physical loss of Eric, I have come to understand that this suffering is absolutely transformational, for we will never be the same. 

But what do we do with this transformation? It is natural to ask why - why did this happen?  There will never be a satisfactory answer to that question. But maybe instead of asking “why,” we can ask “what.” If I will never be the same, what now? What do I do with these broken pieces of my dream? What do I do with this transformational shift? 

This grief is precious. I recently had the honor of attending a play that centered around the theme of grief. In The Rhythm of Mourning, performed by Bethesda Repertory Theatre based in Los Angeles, we see the main character, The Woman, wrestle with all the parts of her psyche that run amok as she is consumed by grief after the death of her brother – Innocence, Anger, Bargaining, Denial, Hope, Depression, Anxiety, Shame, and The Void. The Woman faces each facet of her pain, converses with each, argues with each, and ultimately participates in a beautiful dance with each. And from that acknowledgement of each part of herself, comes healing. She says, “I cherish this sadness I have. This exquisite grief, it’s mine, and the most precious thing I posses.” She sees the treasure in her grief. She is transformed.

The journey is a mysterious one. There is no way to know what’s ahead. This movement through all the emotions of grief — it’s all part of the journey. There is no way to anticipate how this new road will manifest. In my experience, I surrendered. I allowed all of it to express and move through me. I couldn’t pretend the grief was not there. It was. It still is. And it does what it’s there to do, which is not obvious at first. It’s there to heal. 

But only if you allow it, as impossible as that may seem. D’Arcy says, “The stumbling stone is the seed for growth. Rather than stay the same, allow yourself to grow.” It won’t happen by itself. You need to give yourself permission to do so, permission to grow and heal. When you are catapulted towards transformation, you have the opportunity to become more.  Let it teach you. 

Grief taught me to look around at others who have gone through this same loss. And when I did, I saw myself in others, and I saw them in me. We were connected by our pain, by this experience that is part of life. I saw that I was not alone. I saw the immense beauty in how someone else with a hole in her heart the size of her child could see me and reach a hand out to me to help lift me up. And then, when my legs felt a bit steadier, I was able to do the same for someone else. It’s the pebble tossed into the water that creates that amazing ripple effect. It is exquisite. And I allowed myself to be part of it. 

I express this sentiment in my book A Bird Called Wisdom…

If this is what has happened

Then let me take it and run with it

Let me take all of it

And have it turn me into

The very best self

I can be

If somehow

I am to live this life

As a mother with one child

On the Other Side

Then rather than let it break me

Let it build me and expand me

Let it take the broken parts of me

And allow the light inside of me

My truest self

To shine through

Bright and bold

Let it teach me

All that I came here to learn

To honor my son

I will do this

To honor my mother and grandmother before me

Whose children also passed before them

I will do this

I will do this with my son on my left

My angels on my right

My ancestors behind me

Mother Earth below me

And God above me

Show me

Teach me

Guide me

I prevail.

Whatever your loss, may your pain transform you into the very best of you. May you find a way, deep inside of you, to step over bitterness and despair, and find the steady ground of hope, of love, and of connection with those on this same path. It is there for you, if you will allow it.

(Read more about my journey from grief to hope in my books Look Around and A Bird Called Wisdom.)