If our life is to be celebrated as God’s Life, how are we to understand the suffering that permeates human existence? 

Part 2:  Understanding Suffering

If our life is to be celebrated as God’s Life, how are we to understand the suffering that permeates human existence?  This is the instinctive question that arises in all theistic traditions:  why is there suffering if God is all-powerful and all-good?  Elie Wiesel reports the following form of this question and its solution, or dissolution, by an illumined soul master in the lineage of the Baal Shem Tov.  This rebbe, Zusia, was heavily burdened by illness and other problems.  He was asked how he could continue to praise God.  In the mood of ecstatic love, he responded:  Who is suffering? Not I.  I am happy.  Zusia is happy to live in the world that God, blessed be He, created.  Zusia lacks nothing, needs nothing…and his heart is filled with gratitude.  When holy ecstasy is deep enough, the question Who is suffering has no answer, for the individual is immersed in Divine Presence, and therefore the question Why suffering?  dissolves.  But this revelation occurs only on the level of ecstasy, not on the level of pious or rational explanation.  Zusia recognized that he was sick and burdened with all kinds of suffering.  He did not close his eyes to the facts of daily experience.  But he perceived Divine Presence throughout these painful situations.  He mystically understood existence in all its infinite detail as welling up with divine Plentitude, not as alienated from the Divine.  On another occasion Zusia responded in a different mood to the question of suffering:  True, suffering exists, but like everything else, it, too, comes from God…Man is too weak to accept or absorb divine love, which is absolute.  For the reason, and that reason alone, does God cover it with the veil that is pain. This response, too, can be assimilated only in the mood of openness to revelation, not as an explanation.  The mystery of Divine Life is to be lived, not explained.

Zusia speaks of our suffering or pain as a Divine veil but suffering also removes the human veils by which we have obscured the Divine Life living through us. The soul master does not seek to avoid or to escape suffering but purposefully accepts suffering to unveil the intrinsic freedom of the soul.  Wiesel gives this illustration of the voluntary suffering of Zusia:  He came to an inn and noticed birds in a cage.  Naturally he freed them.  Birds are meant to fly.  And naturally the innkeeper thought otherwise and gave him a lesson without words.  No matter, here was Zusia, back on the road, his body aching but his spirits high, carefree and deliriously happy. The soul master, with every act, creates a parable.  This is a story of liberation from the cage of mundane thinking that confines our consciousness and prevents the ecstatic flight that is natural to it.  The innkeeper represents not only oppressive social institutions and personality structures but also the universe itself when regarded as a place of suffering, sickness, and death.  What releases us from our imprisonment is the ecstasy of Divine Life, focused through such an illumined being as Zusia, who in the face of suffering remains fearless and free.

Suffering clears access to the ecstatic experience of the soul’s intrinsic freedom.  As a spiritual discipline attuning one to the Divine, suffering is to be cultivated rather than to be escaped.  Padre Pio who for some thirty years during the present century manifested continuously the five wounds, or stigmata, of Christ, made this simple but radical statement:  If you but knew the value of your sufferings, you would pray fervently that they not be removed from you.  Such a prayer must reflect the authentic longing to be purified or freed, not the neurotic pattern of clinging to our suffering.  Suffering should be embraced under the spiritual guidance of someone who lives in holy ecstasy, who knows how to use all we encounter as a path to the Divine.

See Also:
Part 1: Holy Ecstasy
Part 3: Guidance from Soul Masters
Part 4: Awakening to Our Divine Nature
Part 5: Spiritual Life on an Earthly Plane