Never Alone

‘He was oppressed and afflicted, yet he did not open his mouth; he was led like a lamb to the slaughter, and as a sheep before her shearers is silent, so he did not open his mouth.’ (Isaiah 53:7) Passive resistance enacted for all time in active submission. There is something there for all of us.

When it comes to suffering, sanity and survival depend on duality of purpose, on both accepting and resisting whatever situation we are going through personally, or perhaps as a nation. We cannot resist until we have learned to accept reality. I think this is especially true of what we are seeing in Western politics at present. What is happening in both Europe and America is neither a dream from which we will soon wake up, or some kind of game which will end well, even if we are taken to the very brink of self annihilation. It is reality, but it can be resisted. The same goes for our own lives. If we are going through hell, even a hell of our own making, it is still hell. But it can be resisted, rather than simply endured.

Life is not given to us to be simply endured. It is to be lived. But we cannot live, or even endure, without a sense of others being there, or perhaps having been there before us. In the context of neo-conservatism, which is the new fascism, and its subliminal nastiness, we know that others have been there before. Knowing this, we are sustained by the memory of previous generations, of the passive resistance of millions who lived under occupation in the last world war and in the active resistance of those who fought, even if their natural inclinations were to peace. It takes courage and humility to go against one’s natural inclinations when needs must.

 

Something comparable goes on in our own individual hard times. If we have known unconditional love, if we have been the centre of someone else’s world, with or without our knowing it at the time, the realisation of that love and the memory of that person keeps us company. Such memories sometimes consist of no more than a single passing moment of kindness, as the validation of one’s pain, of one’s humanity, perhaps by a stranger. 

The knowledge of this love supplies what is needed when it comes to both accepting and resisting whatever pain and suffering we are currently facing. The effect of that memory is to place us outside the pain, so that we can, for a moment at least, observe it and learn from it. We learn from the pain and suffering in experiencing once again the love. So in it, we also learn to love more deeply and, later perhaps, actively respond to the pain and injustice endured by others. Learning to respond to others in this way is the purpose of life and of all its hard moments.

It is also the essence of what we call hope. Where there has been sacrificial love, love which has perhaps gone unnoticed, there has also been hope. Love makes it possible to believe in a future, for ourselves and for our world. To live in hope is not delusionary. Delusion is more often comprised of a mixture of fatalism and blind optimism which, taken together, amount to very little. They do not require anything of us, or commit us to anyone. 

Fatalism is a kind of passive acceptance which simply returns us to ourselves. It does not enable any life giving connection. It does not feed the hunger of the heart, or assuage the mind’s restlessness. We are still left asking ‘why?’ Optimism, in its thinness, also returns us to this same place of non-acceptance.

The Isaiah passage I have just quoted refers to a deliverer, one who would restore a nation to itself, to what it was intended to be. For Christians it speaks, rather enigmatically, of another deliverer, one who in his own acceptance of suffering meets us in ours, wherever we are and whatever spiritual path we are currently travelling along. He validates our suffering there. He meets us on that path, using the language and thought processes with which we are most at home. 

Where human beings accept this invitation to be at one with him, even if only in a fleeting moment of recognition, they are no longer alone in their suffering. The Saviour of the world keeps company with them.