What does Imam say about pain and suffering? Are there any firmans Hazar Imam has made about Pain and suffering?
Thanks
Pain, Suffering and Calamities
"My thoughts night and day are with you and though in this world, pain and sorrow can never end and everybody will have his own fair share of pain and sorrow, yet it is my prayer that you may have lesser weight and every happiness, due to Faith, Iman, and love of your Spiritual Father."
No. 139 (Precious Pearls, Imam Sultan Muhammad Shah)
Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional.
-M. Kathleen Casey
No. 139 (Precious Pearls, Imam Sultan Muhammad Shah)
Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional.
-M. Kathleen Casey
The following article gives an interesting perspective on freedom/freewill and its consequences upon suffering and calamities.
A Progressive Evangelical
Tony Campolo
http://www.beliefnet.com/story/193/story_19347_1.html
It's All About Freedom
God chooses not to be omnipotent for the time being--because he loves us enough to give us free will.
Does God control everything that happens? In the past, I've been criticized for suggesting that this is not the case. If it was, God would be responsible for all the tragedies and evils that are evident in the world.
A God who controls everything would keep us from ever maturing into actualized human beings. At some point, parents must decide to limit control over their children. Giving children freedom is a risky, painful business because freedom can be abused. Yet responsible parents are willing to take the risk and endure the pain of watching their children make bad decisions. There will be times when the parents weep as they watch their children do things that they know will have disastrous consequences. So it is with God, the parent of us all. When God placed Adam and Eve in Eden and relinquished control over their decision-making, God took an enormous risk. But that is what God had to do. Adam and Eve were not forced to obey God's will. Instead, their obedience would have to be freely chosen.
After giving Adam and Eve and all future generations this precious gift of freedom, God's greatest fears were realized. Not only did Adam and Eve blow it, but all who came after them have made matters worse with more of their own wrong and evil decisions. We read in the Bible that things got so bad that God "repented" of ever having created the human race in the first place.
All the sin and suffering that have marked human history since Eden are the result of God relinquishing control over what we do. People like you and me abuse our God-given freedom and thus increase the hurt and destruction that is in the world.
To all of this, most readers will say, "We agree!" Yet, when I dare to say that God is no longer in total control over this world, so many of my fellow Christians go ballistic. They refuse to stop and think. If they did, they would realize that God must be self-limited if we are to come of age and become fully human. Without God choosing to be limited, we could not love God, because love is something that must be freely chosen—nor could we freely choose to love each other. And love is what is ultimately important.
We are not puppets. We are creatures with free will. That fact alone necessitates a limited God. In simple and direct language, God chooses not to be omnipotent for the time being. Once we grasp this, we will not be so confused when someone we love gets cancer, nor ask why God allows such things to happen. Christians believe that we live in a fallen world—a world that is other than what God intended it to be. That helps us to understand that even natural tragedies such as Katrina or the Asian tsunami are the result of this fallenness.
Realizing that God is not in control of all that happens (because God chooses not to be) we recognize that the sufferings and catastrophes since Adam and Eve are because of the freely-willed decisions of those who disobey God. Then we will stop blaming God for the horrors of this world, knowing that the Bible says, "God is not the author of evil."
To say that God has chosen not to be omnipotent right now is not to say that this is the way it will always be. God is even now at work in this world extending love and justice through those who choose to "receive Him" as the Lord of their lives. Furthermore, history is moving toward a climax in which the will of Christ is going to be established. The Bible says that God placed Christ
Far above all principality, and power, and might, and dominion, and every name that is named, not only in this world, but also in that which is to come. And hath put all things under his feet, and gave him to be the head over all things to the church...
--Ephesians 1: 21–22 (KJV)
Jesus shall reign! But, right now, it is our responsibility to be persons through whom God's will can begin to be established here on earth as it is in heaven.
When tragedies and sufferings enter our lives, we should not be asking how a loving God could let them happen. We should be ready to recognize that such things are happening because God is loving and in that love God has given us freedom—with all of its potentialities for good and evil. We should be asking what we, as maturing children of God gifted with freedom, can do to bring good out of all that has gone wrong through the misuse of human freedom.
A Progressive Evangelical
Tony Campolo
http://www.beliefnet.com/story/193/story_19347_1.html
It's All About Freedom
God chooses not to be omnipotent for the time being--because he loves us enough to give us free will.
Does God control everything that happens? In the past, I've been criticized for suggesting that this is not the case. If it was, God would be responsible for all the tragedies and evils that are evident in the world.
A God who controls everything would keep us from ever maturing into actualized human beings. At some point, parents must decide to limit control over their children. Giving children freedom is a risky, painful business because freedom can be abused. Yet responsible parents are willing to take the risk and endure the pain of watching their children make bad decisions. There will be times when the parents weep as they watch their children do things that they know will have disastrous consequences. So it is with God, the parent of us all. When God placed Adam and Eve in Eden and relinquished control over their decision-making, God took an enormous risk. But that is what God had to do. Adam and Eve were not forced to obey God's will. Instead, their obedience would have to be freely chosen.
After giving Adam and Eve and all future generations this precious gift of freedom, God's greatest fears were realized. Not only did Adam and Eve blow it, but all who came after them have made matters worse with more of their own wrong and evil decisions. We read in the Bible that things got so bad that God "repented" of ever having created the human race in the first place.
All the sin and suffering that have marked human history since Eden are the result of God relinquishing control over what we do. People like you and me abuse our God-given freedom and thus increase the hurt and destruction that is in the world.
To all of this, most readers will say, "We agree!" Yet, when I dare to say that God is no longer in total control over this world, so many of my fellow Christians go ballistic. They refuse to stop and think. If they did, they would realize that God must be self-limited if we are to come of age and become fully human. Without God choosing to be limited, we could not love God, because love is something that must be freely chosen—nor could we freely choose to love each other. And love is what is ultimately important.
We are not puppets. We are creatures with free will. That fact alone necessitates a limited God. In simple and direct language, God chooses not to be omnipotent for the time being. Once we grasp this, we will not be so confused when someone we love gets cancer, nor ask why God allows such things to happen. Christians believe that we live in a fallen world—a world that is other than what God intended it to be. That helps us to understand that even natural tragedies such as Katrina or the Asian tsunami are the result of this fallenness.
Realizing that God is not in control of all that happens (because God chooses not to be) we recognize that the sufferings and catastrophes since Adam and Eve are because of the freely-willed decisions of those who disobey God. Then we will stop blaming God for the horrors of this world, knowing that the Bible says, "God is not the author of evil."
To say that God has chosen not to be omnipotent right now is not to say that this is the way it will always be. God is even now at work in this world extending love and justice through those who choose to "receive Him" as the Lord of their lives. Furthermore, history is moving toward a climax in which the will of Christ is going to be established. The Bible says that God placed Christ
Far above all principality, and power, and might, and dominion, and every name that is named, not only in this world, but also in that which is to come. And hath put all things under his feet, and gave him to be the head over all things to the church...
--Ephesians 1: 21–22 (KJV)
Jesus shall reign! But, right now, it is our responsibility to be persons through whom God's will can begin to be established here on earth as it is in heaven.
When tragedies and sufferings enter our lives, we should not be asking how a loving God could let them happen. We should be ready to recognize that such things are happening because God is loving and in that love God has given us freedom—with all of its potentialities for good and evil. We should be asking what we, as maturing children of God gifted with freedom, can do to bring good out of all that has gone wrong through the misuse of human freedom.
After Great Pain, Where Is God?
Extract:
Jesus’ question, like ours, was not answered in the moment. Even he was forced to confront doubt. But his agonized uncertainty was not evidence of faithlessness; it was a sign of his humanity. Like Job, we have to admit to the limitations of human knowledge when it comes to making sense of suffering. “From the biblical evidence,” the Christian author Philip Yancey has written, “I must conclude that any hard-and-fast answers to the ‘Why?’ questions are, quite simply, out of reach.” So, too, is any assurance that the causes of our suffering, the thorns in our flesh, will be removed. So what, then, does Christianity have to offer in the midst of hardships and heartache?
The answer, I think, is consolation, including the consolation that comes from being part of a Christian community — people who walk alongside us as we journey through grief, offering not pieties but tenderness and grace, encouragement and empathy, and when necessary, practical help. (One can obviously find terrifically supportive friends outside of a Christian community. My point is simply that a healthy Christian community should be characterized by extravagant love, compassion and self-giving.)
For many other Christians, there is immense consolation in believing in what the Apostle Peter describes as an eternal inheritance. “In all this you greatly rejoice,” he writes, “though now for a little while you may have had to suffer grief in all kinds of trials.” It is a core Christian doctrine that what is seen is temporary and what is unseen is eternal, and that what is eternal is more important than what is temporal.
But even so great an assurance as eternal life, at the wrong time and in the wrong hands, can come across as uncaring. It’s not that people of faith, when they are suffering, deny the heavenly hope; it’s that in being reminded of this hope they don’t want their grief minimized or the grieving process overlooked. All things may eventually be made new again, but in this life even wounds that heal leave scars.
There is also, for me at least, consolation in the conviction that we are part of an unfolding drama with a purpose. At any particular moment in time I may not have a clue as to what that precise purpose is, but I believe, as a matter of faith, that the story has an author, that difficult chapters need not be defining chapters and that even the broken areas of our lives can be redeemed.
The book of Isaiah, in prophesying the messiah, describes him as “man of sorrows and acquainted with grief.” We’re told “by his wounds we are healed.” For those of the Christian faith, God is a God of wounds, where the road to redemption passes directly through suffering. There is some solace in knowing that while at times life is not easy for us, it was also hard for the God of the New Testament. And from suffering, compassion can emerge, meaning to suffer with another — that disposition, in turn, often leads to acts of mercy.
I have seen enough of life to know that grief will leave its mark. But I have also seen enough of life to know that so, too, will love.
More..
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/25/opin ... ef=opinion
Extract:
Jesus’ question, like ours, was not answered in the moment. Even he was forced to confront doubt. But his agonized uncertainty was not evidence of faithlessness; it was a sign of his humanity. Like Job, we have to admit to the limitations of human knowledge when it comes to making sense of suffering. “From the biblical evidence,” the Christian author Philip Yancey has written, “I must conclude that any hard-and-fast answers to the ‘Why?’ questions are, quite simply, out of reach.” So, too, is any assurance that the causes of our suffering, the thorns in our flesh, will be removed. So what, then, does Christianity have to offer in the midst of hardships and heartache?
The answer, I think, is consolation, including the consolation that comes from being part of a Christian community — people who walk alongside us as we journey through grief, offering not pieties but tenderness and grace, encouragement and empathy, and when necessary, practical help. (One can obviously find terrifically supportive friends outside of a Christian community. My point is simply that a healthy Christian community should be characterized by extravagant love, compassion and self-giving.)
For many other Christians, there is immense consolation in believing in what the Apostle Peter describes as an eternal inheritance. “In all this you greatly rejoice,” he writes, “though now for a little while you may have had to suffer grief in all kinds of trials.” It is a core Christian doctrine that what is seen is temporary and what is unseen is eternal, and that what is eternal is more important than what is temporal.
But even so great an assurance as eternal life, at the wrong time and in the wrong hands, can come across as uncaring. It’s not that people of faith, when they are suffering, deny the heavenly hope; it’s that in being reminded of this hope they don’t want their grief minimized or the grieving process overlooked. All things may eventually be made new again, but in this life even wounds that heal leave scars.
There is also, for me at least, consolation in the conviction that we are part of an unfolding drama with a purpose. At any particular moment in time I may not have a clue as to what that precise purpose is, but I believe, as a matter of faith, that the story has an author, that difficult chapters need not be defining chapters and that even the broken areas of our lives can be redeemed.
The book of Isaiah, in prophesying the messiah, describes him as “man of sorrows and acquainted with grief.” We’re told “by his wounds we are healed.” For those of the Christian faith, God is a God of wounds, where the road to redemption passes directly through suffering. There is some solace in knowing that while at times life is not easy for us, it was also hard for the God of the New Testament. And from suffering, compassion can emerge, meaning to suffer with another — that disposition, in turn, often leads to acts of mercy.
I have seen enough of life to know that grief will leave its mark. But I have also seen enough of life to know that so, too, will love.
More..
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/25/opin ... ef=opinion
The Misery Filter
Excerpt:
In America we have education for success, but no education for suffering. There is instead the filter, the well-meaning deception, that teaches neither religious hope nor stoicism, and when suffering arrives encourages group hysteria, private shame and a growing contagion of despair.
How to educate for suffering is a question for a different column. Here I’ll just stress its necessity: Because what cannot be cured must be endured, and how to endure is, even now, the hardest challenge every one of us will face.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/28/opin ... ering.html
Excerpt:
In America we have education for success, but no education for suffering. There is instead the filter, the well-meaning deception, that teaches neither religious hope nor stoicism, and when suffering arrives encourages group hysteria, private shame and a growing contagion of despair.
How to educate for suffering is a question for a different column. Here I’ll just stress its necessity: Because what cannot be cured must be endured, and how to endure is, even now, the hardest challenge every one of us will face.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/28/opin ... ering.html
The Imams never try to prevent the destined and natural calamities that befall upon an individual. If the Imam removed these calamities then there would be no distinction between this world and the Hereafter and this world would be Paradise. You should not be saddened by worldly suffering, in fact, you should be happy about it.
You should be happy with worldly suffering because such suffering is washing away your sins and the soul gains freedom and receives salvation. (Dar es Salaam, July 13, 1945)
You should be happy with worldly suffering because such suffering is washing away your sins and the soul gains freedom and receives salvation. (Dar es Salaam, July 13, 1945)
Dance with the Rain
Life is not about waiting for the storm to pass...
It's about learning how to dance in the rain.
- Vivian Greene
If you spend your whole life waiting for the storm,
you'll never enjoy the sunshine.
- Morris West
When the tempest rages, when the thunders roar,
and the lightnings blaze around us,
it is then that the truly brave man stands firm at his post.
- Luther Martin
Be thou the rainbow in the storms of life.
The evening beam that smiles the clouds away,
and tints tomorrow with prophetic ray.
- Lord Byron
Is today a day to gather strength from the storm -
a day to to learn life lessons for the next battle?
Or is today a day to sit by the fire and watch the storm rage outside?
Either way, the storm is just life.
Give thanks for all of Life.
- Jonathan Lockwood Huie
Life is not about waiting for the storm to pass...
It's about learning how to dance in the rain.
- Vivian Greene
If you spend your whole life waiting for the storm,
you'll never enjoy the sunshine.
- Morris West
When the tempest rages, when the thunders roar,
and the lightnings blaze around us,
it is then that the truly brave man stands firm at his post.
- Luther Martin
Be thou the rainbow in the storms of life.
The evening beam that smiles the clouds away,
and tints tomorrow with prophetic ray.
- Lord Byron
Is today a day to gather strength from the storm -
a day to to learn life lessons for the next battle?
Or is today a day to sit by the fire and watch the storm rage outside?
Either way, the storm is just life.
Give thanks for all of Life.
- Jonathan Lockwood Huie
When Life is Difficult
When It’s Darkest, Men See the Stars.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
If you cry because the sun has gone out of your life,
your tears will prevent you from seeing the stars.
- Rabindranath Tagore
Your success and happiness lies in you.
Resolve to keep happy, and your joy and you
shall form an invincible host against difficulties.
- Helen Keller
Only when life is difficult, are we challenged to become our greatest selves.
- Jonathan Lockwood Huie
When It’s Darkest, Men See the Stars.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
If you cry because the sun has gone out of your life,
your tears will prevent you from seeing the stars.
- Rabindranath Tagore
Your success and happiness lies in you.
Resolve to keep happy, and your joy and you
shall form an invincible host against difficulties.
- Helen Keller
Only when life is difficult, are we challenged to become our greatest selves.
- Jonathan Lockwood Huie
Taming Obstacles
One who gains strength by overcoming obstacles
possesses the only strength which can overcome adversity.
- Albert Schweitzer
Press on.
Obstacles are seldom the same size tomorrow as they are today.
- Robert H. Schuller
Real obstacles don't take you in circles.
They can be overcome.
Invented ones are like a maze.
- Barbara Sher
Obstacles are like wild animals.
They are cowards but they will bluff you if they can.
If they see you are afraid of them...
they are liable to spring upon you;
but if you look them squarely in the eye,
they will slink out of sight.
- Orison Swett Marden
One who gains strength by overcoming obstacles
possesses the only strength which can overcome adversity.
- Albert Schweitzer
Press on.
Obstacles are seldom the same size tomorrow as they are today.
- Robert H. Schuller
Real obstacles don't take you in circles.
They can be overcome.
Invented ones are like a maze.
- Barbara Sher
Obstacles are like wild animals.
They are cowards but they will bluff you if they can.
If they see you are afraid of them...
they are liable to spring upon you;
but if you look them squarely in the eye,
they will slink out of sight.
- Orison Swett Marden
There are Always Opportunities
In the midst of difficulty lies opportunity.
- Albert Einstein
Not what we experience,
but how we perceive what we experience,
determines our fate.
- Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach
Stay Alert, and doors will open.
You can never know when and where a magic door will open for you,
so pay attention, stay watchful, and never give up hope.
- Jonathan Lockwood Huie
Every problem has in it the seeds of its own solution.
If you don't have any problems, you don't get any seeds.
- Norman Vincent Peale
In the midst of difficulty lies opportunity.
- Albert Einstein
Not what we experience,
but how we perceive what we experience,
determines our fate.
- Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach
Stay Alert, and doors will open.
You can never know when and where a magic door will open for you,
so pay attention, stay watchful, and never give up hope.
- Jonathan Lockwood Huie
Every problem has in it the seeds of its own solution.
If you don't have any problems, you don't get any seeds.
- Norman Vincent Peale
Opportunity in Times of Trouble
Opportunities to find deeper powers within ourselves
come when life seems most challenging.
- Joseph Campbell
Facing a difficulty requires a willingness of heart.
- Mary Anne Radmacher
Opportunities multiply as they are seized.
- Sun Tzu
When written in Chinese, the word "crisis"
is composed of two characters.
One represents danger and the other represents opportunity.
- John F. Kennedy
Opportunities to find deeper powers within ourselves
come when life seems most challenging.
- Joseph Campbell
Facing a difficulty requires a willingness of heart.
- Mary Anne Radmacher
Opportunities multiply as they are seized.
- Sun Tzu
When written in Chinese, the word "crisis"
is composed of two characters.
One represents danger and the other represents opportunity.
- John F. Kennedy
Even Extreme Circumstances
The answer to circumstances is choosing a positive response,
and the most positive choice is to be of service.
- Jonathan Lockwood Huie
There are no hopeless situations; there are only men
who have grown hopeless about them.
- Clare Boothe Luce
We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men
who walked through the huts comforting others,
giving away their last piece of bread...
They offer sufficient proof that everything
can be taken from a man but one thing:
to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances,
to choose one's own way.
- Viktor E. Frankl
When you say a situation or a person is hopeless,
you are slamming the door in the face of God.
- Charles L. Allen
Labeling yourself a "victim" prevents you from healing.
Don't let yesterday's troubles destroy today and tomorrow.
- Jonathan Lockwood Huie
The answer to circumstances is choosing a positive response,
and the most positive choice is to be of service.
- Jonathan Lockwood Huie
There are no hopeless situations; there are only men
who have grown hopeless about them.
- Clare Boothe Luce
We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men
who walked through the huts comforting others,
giving away their last piece of bread...
They offer sufficient proof that everything
can be taken from a man but one thing:
to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances,
to choose one's own way.
- Viktor E. Frankl
When you say a situation or a person is hopeless,
you are slamming the door in the face of God.
- Charles L. Allen
Labeling yourself a "victim" prevents you from healing.
Don't let yesterday's troubles destroy today and tomorrow.
- Jonathan Lockwood Huie
In the face of adversity, are you a Guernsey or a Brahman?
If the mother of a Guernsey and a Brahma calf dies, one of the calves will survive and one will not. One thing makes the difference. And is it the very factor that keeps us from reaching what we want most.
Persistence in the face of defeat often makes the difference in outcome.
Ask any farmer, and they will tell you that orphaned Guernsey calves die. It’s not the fact that they die, so much as how it happens, that stays in the mind. An orphaned calf soon gets so hungry she picks a new mother from the herd. The cow promptly kicks the strange calf away. After all, she didn’t give birth to the calf—why should she feed it? The Guernsey calf gives up, lies down, and slowly starves to death.
The orphaned Brahman calf gets a different result. The same scenario plays out, with the calf being kicked out by the reluctant mother. However, in this case, the naturally persistent calf keeps coming, until the potential new mother acquiesces out of exhaustion. As a result of this persistence, the calf survives.
Persistence is hard. It’s hard to get kicked in the face and to keep going. It hits at your self-esteem. You begin to wonder if you have value. You begin to think you might be crazy.
So often we’re told that having a positive attitude is the important thing. You can get through the setbacks if you find the silver linings and believe in what you are doing. But it’s important to remember that persistence and a positive attitude aren’t the same thing. They differ in some pretty fundamental ways.
Positivity is fragile. If you’re positively certain that you’ll be successful, you’ll start to worry the minute things deviate from your plan. Once this worry seeps into your mind, it’s impossible to get out. You’re done. When the going gets tough, positive attitudes often vanish.
Persistence, on the other hand, anticipates roadblocks and challenges. It gears up for the fact that things never go as planned and expects goals to be hard to attain.
If you run into failure, persistence continues, and positivity disappears. Persistence is antifragile and benefits from setbacks, while positivity, like that Guernsey calf, crumbles when it runs into hard times.
When met with setbacks, are you a Guernsey or a Brahman?
https://fs.blog/2019/03/adversity/
If the mother of a Guernsey and a Brahma calf dies, one of the calves will survive and one will not. One thing makes the difference. And is it the very factor that keeps us from reaching what we want most.
Persistence in the face of defeat often makes the difference in outcome.
Ask any farmer, and they will tell you that orphaned Guernsey calves die. It’s not the fact that they die, so much as how it happens, that stays in the mind. An orphaned calf soon gets so hungry she picks a new mother from the herd. The cow promptly kicks the strange calf away. After all, she didn’t give birth to the calf—why should she feed it? The Guernsey calf gives up, lies down, and slowly starves to death.
The orphaned Brahman calf gets a different result. The same scenario plays out, with the calf being kicked out by the reluctant mother. However, in this case, the naturally persistent calf keeps coming, until the potential new mother acquiesces out of exhaustion. As a result of this persistence, the calf survives.
Persistence is hard. It’s hard to get kicked in the face and to keep going. It hits at your self-esteem. You begin to wonder if you have value. You begin to think you might be crazy.
So often we’re told that having a positive attitude is the important thing. You can get through the setbacks if you find the silver linings and believe in what you are doing. But it’s important to remember that persistence and a positive attitude aren’t the same thing. They differ in some pretty fundamental ways.
Positivity is fragile. If you’re positively certain that you’ll be successful, you’ll start to worry the minute things deviate from your plan. Once this worry seeps into your mind, it’s impossible to get out. You’re done. When the going gets tough, positive attitudes often vanish.
Persistence, on the other hand, anticipates roadblocks and challenges. It gears up for the fact that things never go as planned and expects goals to be hard to attain.
If you run into failure, persistence continues, and positivity disappears. Persistence is antifragile and benefits from setbacks, while positivity, like that Guernsey calf, crumbles when it runs into hard times.
When met with setbacks, are you a Guernsey or a Brahman?
https://fs.blog/2019/03/adversity/
"The storms and tragedies of contemporary life can be termed a spiritual crisis, in which we must awaken to a greater sense of self... "
— Michael Meade
In her poignant article No Time To Lose, Joanna Macy says, "The truest form of touching the reality of this moment is this: to experience our capacity to praise and love our world, as it is. Even when it’s on fire." But how can we fall in love with what is, as we experience the loss of species and collapse of ecosystems, face the effects of climate change in our own backyards, the injustice in our own communities. As the heartbreak rolls through our collective heart, perhaps the better question is how can we afford not to? Why should our love be conditioned by whether our world is healthy? It is a time of terror and promise. Loving what is is the only way forward. Far from bemoaning it, Macy sees calamity as a sacred mirror that ultimately reveals our own true nature, our own deep heart.
"We will probably not know in our lifetimes whether we are serving as deathbed attendants to a dying world or as midwives to the next stage of human evolution," she says, and it is not up to us. We simply can’t know, and that’s the blessing. Our job is to be willing to show up anyway, to keep our eye on the Great Turning and our hearts together, to offer ourselves fully to this world that needs us so, without hope of results.
As Michael Mead says in his drumming, mythic, transfixing SAND talk, "we are at the edge of all we know." Here we cannot fix, we cannot see, we cannot proceed as usual, and that is our medicine. It is in this darkness that the path reveals itself, he says. "We have to stand in the places where we no longer know and then the answers come from unseen places if we only have the courage to face the dark, whether it’s the dark inside or the dark outside. It’s the unknown that is holding the answers."
Love,
Vera and the SAND Team
— Michael Meade
In her poignant article No Time To Lose, Joanna Macy says, "The truest form of touching the reality of this moment is this: to experience our capacity to praise and love our world, as it is. Even when it’s on fire." But how can we fall in love with what is, as we experience the loss of species and collapse of ecosystems, face the effects of climate change in our own backyards, the injustice in our own communities. As the heartbreak rolls through our collective heart, perhaps the better question is how can we afford not to? Why should our love be conditioned by whether our world is healthy? It is a time of terror and promise. Loving what is is the only way forward. Far from bemoaning it, Macy sees calamity as a sacred mirror that ultimately reveals our own true nature, our own deep heart.
"We will probably not know in our lifetimes whether we are serving as deathbed attendants to a dying world or as midwives to the next stage of human evolution," she says, and it is not up to us. We simply can’t know, and that’s the blessing. Our job is to be willing to show up anyway, to keep our eye on the Great Turning and our hearts together, to offer ourselves fully to this world that needs us so, without hope of results.
As Michael Mead says in his drumming, mythic, transfixing SAND talk, "we are at the edge of all we know." Here we cannot fix, we cannot see, we cannot proceed as usual, and that is our medicine. It is in this darkness that the path reveals itself, he says. "We have to stand in the places where we no longer know and then the answers come from unseen places if we only have the courage to face the dark, whether it’s the dark inside or the dark outside. It’s the unknown that is holding the answers."
Love,
Vera and the SAND Team
Where Is God in a Pandemic?
The honest answer is: We don’t know. But even non-Christians may find understanding in the life of Jesus.
Last summer I underwent radiation treatment. And every time I passed through the doorway marked “Radiation Oncology,” my heart seemed to skip a beat. While I was in little danger (my tumor was benign, and, yes, one sometimes needs radiation for that), I daily met people who were close to death.
Every weekday for six weeks I would hail a cab and say, “68th and York, please.” Once there, I would stop into a nearby church to pray. Afterward, walking to my appointment in a neighborhood jammed with hospitals, I passed cancer patients who had lost their hair, exhausted elderly men and women in wheelchairs pushed by home health care aids, and those who had just emerged from surgery. But on the same sidewalks were busy doctors, smiling nurses and eager interns, and many others in apparently perfect health. One day it dawned on me: We’re all going to 68th and York, though we all have different times for our appointments.
In just the past few weeks, millions have started to fear that they are moving to their appointment with terrifying speed, thanks to the Covid-19 pandemic. The sheer horror of this fast-moving infection is coupled with the almost physical shock from its sudden onset. As a priest, I’ve heard an avalanche of feelings in the last month: panic, fear, anger, sadness, confusion and despair. More and more I feel like I’m living in a horror movie, but the kind that I instinctively turn off because it’s too disturbing. And even the most religious people ask me: Why is this happening? And: Where is God in all of this?
The question is essentially the same that people ask when a hurricane wipes out hundreds of lives or when a single child dies from cancer. It is called the “problem of suffering,” “the mystery of evil” or the “theodicy,” and it’s a question that saints and theologians have grappled with for millenniums. The question of “natural” suffering (from illnesses or natural disasters) differs from that of “moral evil” (in which suffering flows from the actions of individuals — think Hitler and Stalin). But leaving aside theological distinctions, the question now consumes the minds of millions of believers, who quail at steadily rising death tolls, struggle with stories of physicians forced to triage patients and recoil at photos of rows of coffins: Why?
Over the centuries, many answers have been offered about natural suffering, all of them wanting in some way. The most common is that suffering is a test. Suffering tests our faith and strengthens it: “My brothers and sisters, whenever you face trials of any kind, consider it nothing but joy, because you know that the testing of your faith produces endurance,” says the Letter of James in the New Testament. But while explaining suffering as a test may help in minor trials (patience being tested by an annoying person) it fails in the most painful human experiences. Does God send cancer to “test” a young child? Yes, the child’s parents may learn something about perseverance or faith, but that approach can make God out to be a monster.
So does the argument that suffering is a punishment for sins, a still common approach among some believers (who usually say that God punishes people or groups that they themselves disapprove of). But Jesus himself rejects that approach when he meets a man who is blind, in a story recounted in the Gospel of John: “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?” “Neither this man nor his parents sinned,” says Jesus. This is Jesus’s definitive rejection of the image of the monstrous Father. In Luke’s Gospel, Jesus responds to the story of a stone tower that fell and crushed a crowd of people: “Do you think that they were worse offenders than all the others living in Jerusalem? No, I tell you.”
The overall confusion for believers is encapsulated in what is called the “inconsistent triad,” which can be summarized as follows: God is all powerful, therefore God can prevent suffering. But God does not prevent suffering. Therefore, God is either not all powerful or not all loving.
In the end, the most honest answer to the question of why the Covid-19 virus is killing thousands of people, why infectious diseases ravage humanity and why there is suffering at all is: We don’t know. For me, this is the most honest and accurate answer. One could also suggest how viruses are part of the natural world and in some way contribute to life, but this approach fails abjectly when speaking to someone who has lost a friend or loved one. An important question for the believer in times of suffering is this: Can you believe in a God that you don’t understand?
But if the mystery of suffering is unanswerable, where can the believer go in times like this? For the Christian and perhaps even for others the answer is Jesus.
Christians believe that Jesus is fully divine and fully human. Yet we sometimes overlook the second part. Jesus of Nazareth was born into a world of illness. In her book “Stone and Dung, Oil and Spit,” about daily life in first-century Galilee, Jodi Magness, a scholar of early Judaism, calls the milieu in which Jesus lived “filthy, malodorous and unhealthy.” John Dominic Crossan and Jonathan L. Reed, scholars of the historical background of Jesus, sum up these conditions in a sobering sentence in “Excavating Jesus”: “A case of the flu, a bad cold, or an abscessed tooth could kill.” This was Jesus’s world.
Moreover, in his public ministry, Jesus continually sought out those who were sick. Most of his miracles were healings from illnesses and disabilities: debilitating skin conditions (under the rubric of “leprosy”), epilepsy, a woman’s “flow of blood,” a withered hand, “dropsy,” blindness, deafness, paralysis. In these frightening times, Christians may find comfort in knowing that when they pray to Jesus, they are praying to someone who understands them not only because he is divine and knows all things, but because he is human and experienced all things.
But those who are not Christian can also see him as a model for care of the sick. Needless to say, when caring for someone with coronavirus, one should take the necessary precautions in order not to pass on the infection. But for Jesus, the sick or dying person was not the “other,” not one to be blamed, but our brother and sister. When Jesus saw a person in need, the Gospels tell us that his heart was “moved with pity.” He is a model for how we are to care during this crisis: with hearts moved by pity.
Whenever I prayed in that church near 68th and York, I would pause before a statue of Jesus, his arms outstretched, his heart exposed. Just a plaster statue, it wasn’t great art, but it was meaningful to me. I don’t understand why people are dying, but I can follow the person who gives me a pattern for life.
James Martin is a Jesuit priest, editor at large of America magazine, consultor to the Vatican’s Dicastery for Communication and the author of “Jesus: A Pilgrimage.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/22/opin ... 0920200323
The honest answer is: We don’t know. But even non-Christians may find understanding in the life of Jesus.
Last summer I underwent radiation treatment. And every time I passed through the doorway marked “Radiation Oncology,” my heart seemed to skip a beat. While I was in little danger (my tumor was benign, and, yes, one sometimes needs radiation for that), I daily met people who were close to death.
Every weekday for six weeks I would hail a cab and say, “68th and York, please.” Once there, I would stop into a nearby church to pray. Afterward, walking to my appointment in a neighborhood jammed with hospitals, I passed cancer patients who had lost their hair, exhausted elderly men and women in wheelchairs pushed by home health care aids, and those who had just emerged from surgery. But on the same sidewalks were busy doctors, smiling nurses and eager interns, and many others in apparently perfect health. One day it dawned on me: We’re all going to 68th and York, though we all have different times for our appointments.
In just the past few weeks, millions have started to fear that they are moving to their appointment with terrifying speed, thanks to the Covid-19 pandemic. The sheer horror of this fast-moving infection is coupled with the almost physical shock from its sudden onset. As a priest, I’ve heard an avalanche of feelings in the last month: panic, fear, anger, sadness, confusion and despair. More and more I feel like I’m living in a horror movie, but the kind that I instinctively turn off because it’s too disturbing. And even the most religious people ask me: Why is this happening? And: Where is God in all of this?
The question is essentially the same that people ask when a hurricane wipes out hundreds of lives or when a single child dies from cancer. It is called the “problem of suffering,” “the mystery of evil” or the “theodicy,” and it’s a question that saints and theologians have grappled with for millenniums. The question of “natural” suffering (from illnesses or natural disasters) differs from that of “moral evil” (in which suffering flows from the actions of individuals — think Hitler and Stalin). But leaving aside theological distinctions, the question now consumes the minds of millions of believers, who quail at steadily rising death tolls, struggle with stories of physicians forced to triage patients and recoil at photos of rows of coffins: Why?
Over the centuries, many answers have been offered about natural suffering, all of them wanting in some way. The most common is that suffering is a test. Suffering tests our faith and strengthens it: “My brothers and sisters, whenever you face trials of any kind, consider it nothing but joy, because you know that the testing of your faith produces endurance,” says the Letter of James in the New Testament. But while explaining suffering as a test may help in minor trials (patience being tested by an annoying person) it fails in the most painful human experiences. Does God send cancer to “test” a young child? Yes, the child’s parents may learn something about perseverance or faith, but that approach can make God out to be a monster.
So does the argument that suffering is a punishment for sins, a still common approach among some believers (who usually say that God punishes people or groups that they themselves disapprove of). But Jesus himself rejects that approach when he meets a man who is blind, in a story recounted in the Gospel of John: “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?” “Neither this man nor his parents sinned,” says Jesus. This is Jesus’s definitive rejection of the image of the monstrous Father. In Luke’s Gospel, Jesus responds to the story of a stone tower that fell and crushed a crowd of people: “Do you think that they were worse offenders than all the others living in Jerusalem? No, I tell you.”
The overall confusion for believers is encapsulated in what is called the “inconsistent triad,” which can be summarized as follows: God is all powerful, therefore God can prevent suffering. But God does not prevent suffering. Therefore, God is either not all powerful or not all loving.
In the end, the most honest answer to the question of why the Covid-19 virus is killing thousands of people, why infectious diseases ravage humanity and why there is suffering at all is: We don’t know. For me, this is the most honest and accurate answer. One could also suggest how viruses are part of the natural world and in some way contribute to life, but this approach fails abjectly when speaking to someone who has lost a friend or loved one. An important question for the believer in times of suffering is this: Can you believe in a God that you don’t understand?
But if the mystery of suffering is unanswerable, where can the believer go in times like this? For the Christian and perhaps even for others the answer is Jesus.
Christians believe that Jesus is fully divine and fully human. Yet we sometimes overlook the second part. Jesus of Nazareth was born into a world of illness. In her book “Stone and Dung, Oil and Spit,” about daily life in first-century Galilee, Jodi Magness, a scholar of early Judaism, calls the milieu in which Jesus lived “filthy, malodorous and unhealthy.” John Dominic Crossan and Jonathan L. Reed, scholars of the historical background of Jesus, sum up these conditions in a sobering sentence in “Excavating Jesus”: “A case of the flu, a bad cold, or an abscessed tooth could kill.” This was Jesus’s world.
Moreover, in his public ministry, Jesus continually sought out those who were sick. Most of his miracles were healings from illnesses and disabilities: debilitating skin conditions (under the rubric of “leprosy”), epilepsy, a woman’s “flow of blood,” a withered hand, “dropsy,” blindness, deafness, paralysis. In these frightening times, Christians may find comfort in knowing that when they pray to Jesus, they are praying to someone who understands them not only because he is divine and knows all things, but because he is human and experienced all things.
But those who are not Christian can also see him as a model for care of the sick. Needless to say, when caring for someone with coronavirus, one should take the necessary precautions in order not to pass on the infection. But for Jesus, the sick or dying person was not the “other,” not one to be blamed, but our brother and sister. When Jesus saw a person in need, the Gospels tell us that his heart was “moved with pity.” He is a model for how we are to care during this crisis: with hearts moved by pity.
Whenever I prayed in that church near 68th and York, I would pause before a statue of Jesus, his arms outstretched, his heart exposed. Just a plaster statue, it wasn’t great art, but it was meaningful to me. I don’t understand why people are dying, but I can follow the person who gives me a pattern for life.
James Martin is a Jesuit priest, editor at large of America magazine, consultor to the Vatican’s Dicastery for Communication and the author of “Jesus: A Pilgrimage.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/22/opin ... 0920200323
The Moral Meaning of the Plague
The virus is a test. We have the freedom to respond.
It can all seem so meaningless. Some random biological mutation sweeps across the globe, murdering thousands, lacerating families and pulverizing dreams.
Life and death can seem completely arbitrary. Religions and philosophies can seem like cruel jokes. The only thing that matters is survival. Without the inspiration of a higher meaning, selfishness takes over.
This mind-set is the temptation of the hour — but of course it’s wrong. We’ll look back on this as one of the most meaningful periods of our lives.
Viktor Frankl, writing from the madness of the Holocaust, reminded us that we don’t get to choose our difficulties, but we do have the freedom to select our responses. Meaning, he argued, comes from three things: the work we offer in times of crisis, the love we give and our ability to display courage in the face of suffering. The menace may be subhuman or superhuman, but we all have the option of asserting our own dignity, even to the end.
I’d add one other source of meaning. It’s the story we tell about this moment. It’s the way we tie our moment of suffering to a larger narrative of redemption. It’s the way we then go out and stubbornly live out that story. The plague today is an invisible monster, but it gives birth to a better world.
This particular plague hits us at exactly the spots where we are weakest and exposes exactly those ills we had lazily come to tolerate. We’re already a divided nation, and the plague makes us distance from one another. We define ourselves too much by our careers, and the plague threatens to sweep them away. We’re a morally inarticulate culture, and now the fundamental moral questions apply.
In this way the plague demands that we address our problems in ways we weren’t forced to before. The plague brings forth our creativity. It’s during economic and social depressions that the great organizations of the future are spawned.
Already, there’s a new energy coming into the world. The paradigmatic image of this crisis is all those online images of people finding ways to sing and dance together across distance.
Those videos call to mind that moment of Exodus when Miriam breaks into song. “It is the dance that generates the light,” Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg writes, “the women produce an energy in the light of which all participate equally in the presence of God.”
Already there’s a shift of values coming to the world. We’re forced to be intentional about keeping up our human connections. Relationships get forged tighter by the pressure of mutual dread. Everybody hungers for tighter bonds and deeper care.
Wouldn’t it be great to possess the quality that one biographer found in the novelist E.M. Forster: “To speak to him was to be seduced by an inverse charisma, a sense of being listened to with such intensity that you had to be your most honest, sharpest, and best self.”
There’s a new action coming into the world, too. I was on a Zoom call this week with 3,000 college students hosted by the Veritas Forum. One question was on all their minds: What can I do right now?
I was on another Zoom call with 30 Weavers, and each one of them had begun some new activity to serve their neighbors. One lady was passing out vegetable seeds so families could plant their own vegetable gardens. Others are turning those tiny front-yard libraries into front-yard pantries. Some people are putting the holiday lights back up on their houses just to spread some cheer. You can share your social innovation here.
There’s a new introspection coming into the world, as well. Everybody I talk to these days seems eager to have deeper conversations and ask more fundamental questions:
Are you ready to die? If your lungs filled with fluid a week from Tuesday would you be content with the life you’ve lived?
What would you do if a loved one died? Do you know where your most trusted spiritual and relational resources lie?
What role do you play in this crisis? What is the specific way you are situated to serve?
We are all assigned the task of confronting our own fear. I don’t know about you, but I’ve had a pit of fear in my stomach since this started that hasn’t gone away. But gradually you discover that you have the resources to cope as you fight the fear with conversation and direct action. A stronger self emerges out of the death throes of the anxiety.
Suffering can be redemptive. We learn more about ourselves in these hard periods. The differences between red and blue don’t seem as acute on the gurneys of the E.R., but the inequality in the world seems more obscene when the difference between rich and poor is life or death.
So, yes, this is a meaningful moment. And it is this very meaning that will inspire us and hold us together as things get worse. In situations like this, meaning is a vital medication for the soul.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/26/opin ... 778d3e6de3
The virus is a test. We have the freedom to respond.
It can all seem so meaningless. Some random biological mutation sweeps across the globe, murdering thousands, lacerating families and pulverizing dreams.
Life and death can seem completely arbitrary. Religions and philosophies can seem like cruel jokes. The only thing that matters is survival. Without the inspiration of a higher meaning, selfishness takes over.
This mind-set is the temptation of the hour — but of course it’s wrong. We’ll look back on this as one of the most meaningful periods of our lives.
Viktor Frankl, writing from the madness of the Holocaust, reminded us that we don’t get to choose our difficulties, but we do have the freedom to select our responses. Meaning, he argued, comes from three things: the work we offer in times of crisis, the love we give and our ability to display courage in the face of suffering. The menace may be subhuman or superhuman, but we all have the option of asserting our own dignity, even to the end.
I’d add one other source of meaning. It’s the story we tell about this moment. It’s the way we tie our moment of suffering to a larger narrative of redemption. It’s the way we then go out and stubbornly live out that story. The plague today is an invisible monster, but it gives birth to a better world.
This particular plague hits us at exactly the spots where we are weakest and exposes exactly those ills we had lazily come to tolerate. We’re already a divided nation, and the plague makes us distance from one another. We define ourselves too much by our careers, and the plague threatens to sweep them away. We’re a morally inarticulate culture, and now the fundamental moral questions apply.
In this way the plague demands that we address our problems in ways we weren’t forced to before. The plague brings forth our creativity. It’s during economic and social depressions that the great organizations of the future are spawned.
Already, there’s a new energy coming into the world. The paradigmatic image of this crisis is all those online images of people finding ways to sing and dance together across distance.
Those videos call to mind that moment of Exodus when Miriam breaks into song. “It is the dance that generates the light,” Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg writes, “the women produce an energy in the light of which all participate equally in the presence of God.”
Already there’s a shift of values coming to the world. We’re forced to be intentional about keeping up our human connections. Relationships get forged tighter by the pressure of mutual dread. Everybody hungers for tighter bonds and deeper care.
Wouldn’t it be great to possess the quality that one biographer found in the novelist E.M. Forster: “To speak to him was to be seduced by an inverse charisma, a sense of being listened to with such intensity that you had to be your most honest, sharpest, and best self.”
There’s a new action coming into the world, too. I was on a Zoom call this week with 3,000 college students hosted by the Veritas Forum. One question was on all their minds: What can I do right now?
I was on another Zoom call with 30 Weavers, and each one of them had begun some new activity to serve their neighbors. One lady was passing out vegetable seeds so families could plant their own vegetable gardens. Others are turning those tiny front-yard libraries into front-yard pantries. Some people are putting the holiday lights back up on their houses just to spread some cheer. You can share your social innovation here.
There’s a new introspection coming into the world, as well. Everybody I talk to these days seems eager to have deeper conversations and ask more fundamental questions:
Are you ready to die? If your lungs filled with fluid a week from Tuesday would you be content with the life you’ve lived?
What would you do if a loved one died? Do you know where your most trusted spiritual and relational resources lie?
What role do you play in this crisis? What is the specific way you are situated to serve?
We are all assigned the task of confronting our own fear. I don’t know about you, but I’ve had a pit of fear in my stomach since this started that hasn’t gone away. But gradually you discover that you have the resources to cope as you fight the fear with conversation and direct action. A stronger self emerges out of the death throes of the anxiety.
Suffering can be redemptive. We learn more about ourselves in these hard periods. The differences between red and blue don’t seem as acute on the gurneys of the E.R., but the inequality in the world seems more obscene when the difference between rich and poor is life or death.
So, yes, this is a meaningful moment. And it is this very meaning that will inspire us and hold us together as things get worse. In situations like this, meaning is a vital medication for the soul.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/26/opin ... 778d3e6de3
On Coronavirus Lockdown? Look for Meaning, Not Happiness
Why cultivating “tragic optimism” will help us weather this crisis — and even grow from it.
The coronavirus pandemic has not just threatened the physical health of millions but also wreaked havoc on the emotional and mental well-being of people around the world. Feelings of anxiety, helplessness and grief are rising as people face an increasingly uncertain future — and nearly everyone has been touched by loss. A nationally representative poll conducted by the Kaiser Family Foundation finds that nearly half of all Americans — 45 percent — feel that the coronavirus has negatively affected their mental health.
Which raises a question: Is there anything people can do to cope with the emotional fallout of this confusing and challenging time?
How people respond to adversity is a topic I’ve investigated for years as a journalist. Over the past decade, I’ve interviewed dozens of people about their experiences of extreme stress and have scoured the academic research in psychology on resilience to understand why some people are broken by crises while others emerge from stressful experiences even stronger than before.
What I’ve learned sheds light on how people can protect their mental health during the pandemic — and it upends some common ideas our culture carries about trauma and well-being. When researchers and clinicians look at who copes well in crisis and even grows through it, it’s not those who focus on pursuing happiness to feel better; it’s those who cultivate an attitude of tragic optimism.
The term was coined by Viktor Frankl, the Holocaust survivor and psychiatrist from Vienna. Tragic optimism is the ability to maintain hope and find meaning in life despite its inescapable pain, loss and suffering.
To understand how tragic optimism might serve us during the pandemic, it might help to recall how America responded to the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. People reported increased feelings of fear, anxiety and hopelessness. These emotions were more debilitating for some than for others. To learn why, a group of researchers, led by Barbara Fredrickson, a psychologist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, studied the well-being of young adults in the weeks after the attacks. None of the students had lost loved ones on Sept. 11, but like the population at large, they reported feeling distressed. And yet, some of them were less likely to become depressed than others. What set those resilient students apart was their ability to find the good. Unlike the less resilient students, the resilient reported experiencing more positive emotions, like love and gratitude.
But that didn’t mean they were Pollyannas. They did not deny the tragedy of what happened. In fact, they reported the same levels of sadness and stress as less resilient people. This finding comes up frequently in psychology research: In general, resilient people have intensely negative reactions to trauma. They experience despair and stress, and acknowledge the horror of what’s happening. But even in the darkest of places, they see glimmers of light, and this ultimately sustains them.
But even more than helping them cope, adopting the spirit of tragic optimism enables people to actually grow through adversity.
For a long time, many psychologists embraced a victim narrative about trauma, believing that severe stress causes long-lasting and perhaps irreparable damage to one’s psyche and health. In 1980, the American Psychiatric Association added post-traumatic stress disorder to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, and since then, PTSD has received a lot of attention in the media and among ordinary individuals trying to understand what happens to people in the wake of tragic life events.
Yet psychologists now know that only a small percentage of people develop the full-blown disorder while, on average, anywhere from one half to two-thirds of trauma survivors exhibit what’s known as post-traumatic growth. After a crisis, most people acquire a newfound sense of purpose, develop deeper relationships, have a greater appreciation of life and report other benefits.
It’s not the adversity itself that leads to growth. It’s how people respond to it. According to the psychologists Richard Tedeschi and Lawrence Calhoun of the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, who coined the term “post-traumatic growth” in the 1990s, the people who grow after a crisis spend a lot of time trying to make sense of what happened and understanding how it changed them. In other words, they search for and find positive meaning.
In modern psychology research, this is known, a bit unfortunately, as “benefit finding.” Mr. Frankl called it “the human capacity to creatively turn life’s negative aspects into something positive or constructive.” Of course, some people are naturally more hopeful than others. But the success of psychological interventions like meaning-centered psychotherapy — developed by Dr. William Breitbart at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center and his colleagues to help terminal patients cope with death — reveals that even the most despairing individuals have the capacity to find meaning in a crisis.
It may seem inappropriate to call on people to seek the good in a crisis of this magnitude, but in study after study of tragedy and disaster, that’s what resilient people do. In a study of over a 1,000 people, 58 percent of respondents reported finding positive meaning in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks, such as a greater appreciation of life and a deeper sense of spirituality. Other research shows that benefit finders grow not only psychologically but also physically. Heart attack survivors, for example, who found meaning in the weeks after their crisis were, eight years later, more likely to be alive and in better health than those who didn’t.
This doesn’t mean that people should endure adversities with a smiling face. In fact, Mr. Frankl specifically said that tragic optimism is not the same thing as happiness. “To the European,” he wrote, “it is a characteristic of the American culture that, again and again, one is commanded and ordered to ‘be happy.’ But happiness cannot be pursued; it must ensue. One must have a reason to ‘be happy.’”
He was right: In American culture, when people are feeling depressed or anxious, they are often advised to do what makes them happy. Much of the pandemic-related mental-health advice channels that message, encouraging people to distract themselves from bad news and difficult feelings, to limit their time on social media and to exercise.
I’m not suggesting those aren’t worthy activities. But if the goal is coping, they do not penetrate into the psyche as deeply as meaning does. When people do things that make them happy, like playing games or sleeping in, they feel better — but those feelings fade fast, according to research by Veronika Huta of the University of Ottawa and Richard Ryan of the University of Rochester.
When people search for meaning, though, they often do not feel happy. The things that make our lives meaningful, like volunteering or working, are stressful and require effort. But months later, the meaning seekers not only reported fewer negative moods but also felt more “enriched,” “inspired” and “part of something greater than myself.”
Though it has been only a few weeks since the pandemic started affecting life in the United States, I see people embracing meaning during this crisis. On my community listservs, people are organizing “help groups” to run errands for immuno-compromised people. They are rallying around struggling small businesses with “virtual tip jars.” Many companies and businesses, nationally and locally, are offering their services free. I’ve noticed people also say they are experiencing deeper connections to others — and feel more grateful to the caregivers, teachers, service workers and health care professionals among us. This certainly won’t be remembered as a happy period in the history of the world, but it may be remembered as a time of redemptive meaning and hope.
Does any of this mean the pandemic is a good thing? Of course not. It would be far better had the pandemic never occurred. But that’s not the world we live in. Life is, as Buddhists say, 10,000 joys and 10,000 sorrows. As much as we might wish, none of us can avoid suffering. That’s why it’s important to learn to suffer well.
Emily Esfahani Smith is the author of “The Power of Meaning: Finding Fulfillment in a World Obsessed With Happiness.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/07/opin ... 778d3e6de3
Why cultivating “tragic optimism” will help us weather this crisis — and even grow from it.
The coronavirus pandemic has not just threatened the physical health of millions but also wreaked havoc on the emotional and mental well-being of people around the world. Feelings of anxiety, helplessness and grief are rising as people face an increasingly uncertain future — and nearly everyone has been touched by loss. A nationally representative poll conducted by the Kaiser Family Foundation finds that nearly half of all Americans — 45 percent — feel that the coronavirus has negatively affected their mental health.
Which raises a question: Is there anything people can do to cope with the emotional fallout of this confusing and challenging time?
How people respond to adversity is a topic I’ve investigated for years as a journalist. Over the past decade, I’ve interviewed dozens of people about their experiences of extreme stress and have scoured the academic research in psychology on resilience to understand why some people are broken by crises while others emerge from stressful experiences even stronger than before.
What I’ve learned sheds light on how people can protect their mental health during the pandemic — and it upends some common ideas our culture carries about trauma and well-being. When researchers and clinicians look at who copes well in crisis and even grows through it, it’s not those who focus on pursuing happiness to feel better; it’s those who cultivate an attitude of tragic optimism.
The term was coined by Viktor Frankl, the Holocaust survivor and psychiatrist from Vienna. Tragic optimism is the ability to maintain hope and find meaning in life despite its inescapable pain, loss and suffering.
To understand how tragic optimism might serve us during the pandemic, it might help to recall how America responded to the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. People reported increased feelings of fear, anxiety and hopelessness. These emotions were more debilitating for some than for others. To learn why, a group of researchers, led by Barbara Fredrickson, a psychologist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, studied the well-being of young adults in the weeks after the attacks. None of the students had lost loved ones on Sept. 11, but like the population at large, they reported feeling distressed. And yet, some of them were less likely to become depressed than others. What set those resilient students apart was their ability to find the good. Unlike the less resilient students, the resilient reported experiencing more positive emotions, like love and gratitude.
But that didn’t mean they were Pollyannas. They did not deny the tragedy of what happened. In fact, they reported the same levels of sadness and stress as less resilient people. This finding comes up frequently in psychology research: In general, resilient people have intensely negative reactions to trauma. They experience despair and stress, and acknowledge the horror of what’s happening. But even in the darkest of places, they see glimmers of light, and this ultimately sustains them.
But even more than helping them cope, adopting the spirit of tragic optimism enables people to actually grow through adversity.
For a long time, many psychologists embraced a victim narrative about trauma, believing that severe stress causes long-lasting and perhaps irreparable damage to one’s psyche and health. In 1980, the American Psychiatric Association added post-traumatic stress disorder to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, and since then, PTSD has received a lot of attention in the media and among ordinary individuals trying to understand what happens to people in the wake of tragic life events.
Yet psychologists now know that only a small percentage of people develop the full-blown disorder while, on average, anywhere from one half to two-thirds of trauma survivors exhibit what’s known as post-traumatic growth. After a crisis, most people acquire a newfound sense of purpose, develop deeper relationships, have a greater appreciation of life and report other benefits.
It’s not the adversity itself that leads to growth. It’s how people respond to it. According to the psychologists Richard Tedeschi and Lawrence Calhoun of the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, who coined the term “post-traumatic growth” in the 1990s, the people who grow after a crisis spend a lot of time trying to make sense of what happened and understanding how it changed them. In other words, they search for and find positive meaning.
In modern psychology research, this is known, a bit unfortunately, as “benefit finding.” Mr. Frankl called it “the human capacity to creatively turn life’s negative aspects into something positive or constructive.” Of course, some people are naturally more hopeful than others. But the success of psychological interventions like meaning-centered psychotherapy — developed by Dr. William Breitbart at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center and his colleagues to help terminal patients cope with death — reveals that even the most despairing individuals have the capacity to find meaning in a crisis.
It may seem inappropriate to call on people to seek the good in a crisis of this magnitude, but in study after study of tragedy and disaster, that’s what resilient people do. In a study of over a 1,000 people, 58 percent of respondents reported finding positive meaning in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks, such as a greater appreciation of life and a deeper sense of spirituality. Other research shows that benefit finders grow not only psychologically but also physically. Heart attack survivors, for example, who found meaning in the weeks after their crisis were, eight years later, more likely to be alive and in better health than those who didn’t.
This doesn’t mean that people should endure adversities with a smiling face. In fact, Mr. Frankl specifically said that tragic optimism is not the same thing as happiness. “To the European,” he wrote, “it is a characteristic of the American culture that, again and again, one is commanded and ordered to ‘be happy.’ But happiness cannot be pursued; it must ensue. One must have a reason to ‘be happy.’”
He was right: In American culture, when people are feeling depressed or anxious, they are often advised to do what makes them happy. Much of the pandemic-related mental-health advice channels that message, encouraging people to distract themselves from bad news and difficult feelings, to limit their time on social media and to exercise.
I’m not suggesting those aren’t worthy activities. But if the goal is coping, they do not penetrate into the psyche as deeply as meaning does. When people do things that make them happy, like playing games or sleeping in, they feel better — but those feelings fade fast, according to research by Veronika Huta of the University of Ottawa and Richard Ryan of the University of Rochester.
When people search for meaning, though, they often do not feel happy. The things that make our lives meaningful, like volunteering or working, are stressful and require effort. But months later, the meaning seekers not only reported fewer negative moods but also felt more “enriched,” “inspired” and “part of something greater than myself.”
Though it has been only a few weeks since the pandemic started affecting life in the United States, I see people embracing meaning during this crisis. On my community listservs, people are organizing “help groups” to run errands for immuno-compromised people. They are rallying around struggling small businesses with “virtual tip jars.” Many companies and businesses, nationally and locally, are offering their services free. I’ve noticed people also say they are experiencing deeper connections to others — and feel more grateful to the caregivers, teachers, service workers and health care professionals among us. This certainly won’t be remembered as a happy period in the history of the world, but it may be remembered as a time of redemptive meaning and hope.
Does any of this mean the pandemic is a good thing? Of course not. It would be far better had the pandemic never occurred. But that’s not the world we live in. Life is, as Buddhists say, 10,000 joys and 10,000 sorrows. As much as we might wish, none of us can avoid suffering. That’s why it’s important to learn to suffer well.
Emily Esfahani Smith is the author of “The Power of Meaning: Finding Fulfillment in a World Obsessed With Happiness.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/07/opin ... 778d3e6de3
How a Cancer Diagnosis Makes Jesus’ Death and Resurrection Mean More
How a Cancer Diagnosis Makes Jesus’ Death and Resurrection Mean More
I’ve talked to Timothy Keller several times since he was diagnosed with Stage 4 pancreatic cancer almost two years ago. What strikes me each time is that it’s easy to forget he has a fatal disease. He is calm, sagelike, cheerful and still deeply curious about others and the world around him. He always asks me, genuinely, how I am doing and listens intently as I tell him. He offers advice, wisdom and even sympathy, though my complaints are all comparatively small compared to facing cancer. It’s hard to have a conversation with him without feeling more hopeful and buoyant.
Keller moved to New York City in 1989 with his wife, Kathy, and their three young sons to start a church from scratch. It was a risky move to plant a traditional, evangelical Presbyterian church in a secular, progressive city. But Redeemer grew, has become one of the best-known churches in the country and birthed City to City, a global church planting network.
Keller has also written over two dozen books, most recently “Hope in Times of Fear: The Resurrection and the Meaning of Easter.” David Brooks recently described Tim as having “one of the most impressive and important minds in the evangelical world.”
Tim said that when he received his cancer diagnosis, “The doctor looked at us and said, ‘I want you to realize that when it comes to pancreatic cancer, you’re going to die from this.’” The vast majority of patients live less than a year after diagnosis. Tim described that day itself as a kind of death.
“My wife, Kathy, and I spent much time in tears and disbelief,” Tim wrote in The Atlantic last year. He continued, “We expected some illness to come and take us when we felt really old. But not now, not yet. This couldn’t be; what was God doing to us? The Bible, and especially the Psalms, gave voice to our feelings: ‘Why, O Lord, do you stand far off?’ ‘Wake up, O Lord. Why are you sleeping?’ ‘How long, O Lord? Will you forget me forever?’”
As many Christians around the world begin Holy Week, I wanted to hear more about how Tim’s diagnosis changed how he thinks about life, death and this week leading up to Easter. In the midst of ongoing chemotherapy, he kindly agreed to this interview, which has been condensed and edited for length and clarity.
How has cancer and this encounter with your own mortality changed how you see your life and how you see death?
On an emotional level, we really do deny the fact that we’re mortal and our time is limited. The day after my diagnosis, one of the words I put down in my journal was “focus.” What are the most important things for you to be spending your time doing? I had not been focused.
The second change was you realize that there’s one sense in which if you believe in God, it’s a mental abstraction. You believe with your head. I came to realize that the experiential side of my faith really needed to strengthen or I wasn’t going to be able to handle this.
It’s one thing to believe God loves you, another thing to actually feel his love. It’s one thing to believe he’s present with you. It’s another to actually experience his presence. So the two things I wrote down in my journal: one was focus and the other one was “Know the Lord.” My experience of his presence and his love was going to have to double, triple, quintuple or I wouldn’t make it.
What are the things that you want to focus on? What comes to the top of the list for you?
My wife, Kathy, and I are fairly well known as being a team. In many ways, we are joined at the hip. Right after the cancer was diagnosed, we realized it wasn’t right to come to the end of our lives without improving our marriage in places where it could be better. There were some things that she felt that she could not talk to me about because I didn’t respond well and she had given up trying to do it. But now we’re finding breakthroughs and being able to talk about certain things and deal with them in a way we were never able to before.
You immediately look around at your children, your grandchildren and say, what are the things I want to say to them and do with them?
Then thirdly, writing. I’m asking, “What are some things I want to write about — notes in a bottle to the future church?”
The last thing is trying to encourage people. I want to be an encourager.
As a pastor, professor and author, when it comes to faith, you’ve used your head a lot. You’ve thought about faith. And now you’re talking about growing in an experience of faith. How have you gone about doing that?
Every Christian knows what the means are. It’s just a question of actually using them. The means are the Bible, prayer, meditation and corporate worship and the sacraments.
Meditation is not the same as either reading the Bible or prayer. If you want an example of meditation, go to Psalms 103, and you’ll see the Psalmist is not addressing God. And he’s not addressing his listeners. He says, Bless the Lord, oh my soul and all that is within me.” He’s addressing himself. And that’s not prayer, but that’s also not just reading the Bible. That is learning how to take what he’s read in the Bible and screw it down into his heart till it catches fire.
I pray more often, but I also do it more longingly. And what’s really amazing is that when you know you’ve got to have more of God — because there’s really no alternative — to our surprise, there is more of God to be gotten. And you say, why didn’t I find this before? And the answer is, you didn’t feel the same sense of need.
In your latest book, you wrote that our culture is experiencing a “crisis of hope.” Where do you find hope? What hope do you offer to others?
If the resurrection of Jesus Christ really happened, then ultimately, God is going to put everything right. Suffering is going to go away. Evil is going to go away. Death is going to go away. Aging is going to go away. Pancreatic cancer is going to go away. Now if the resurrection of Jesus Christ did not happen, then I guess all bets are off. But if it actually happened, then there’s all the hope in the world.
In J.R.R. Tolkien’s essay “On Fairy-Stories,” he says there are indelible human longings that only fantasy, fairy tales or sci-fi can really speak to. He says that all human beings have a fascination with the idea of escaping time, escaping death, holding communion with other living things, being able to live long enough to achieve your artistic and creative dreams, being able to find a love that perfectly heals. Tolkien says: why do we have those longings? And as a Christian, he thinks the reason is that we were not originally created by God to die.
We all deep down kind of know that this is the way life ought to be, and if the resurrection of Jesus Christ happens, then all those things are literally going to come true for us.
That’s the reason you have this paradox. On the one hand, the resurrection is a kind of very concrete thing to talk about, like “What is the evidence for this historical event?” Probably the single best book on this subject in the last 100 years is N.T. Wright’s book “The Resurrection of the Son of God.”
Yet if we come to the place where we accept it, then suddenly there’s no limit to what kinds of things we can look forward to. I know some of your readers are thinking, “I can’t believe there’s a person with more than a third-grade education that actually believes that.” But I do. And these last few months, as we’ve gotten in touch with these great parts of our faith, Kathy and I would both say we’ve never been happier in our lives, even though I’m living under the shadow of cancer.
Today, most Christians are entering Holy Week, when we walk through the last week of Jesus’s earthly ministry, his Crucifixion and death, and then next Sunday we celebrate Easter. Can you reflect on how your suffering has changed how you think about the suffering of Jesus and also Easter?
Holy Week gives you both death and resurrection. They don’t make any sense apart. You can’t have the joy of resurrection unless you’ve gone through a death, and death without resurrection is just hopeless. Essentially, the death/resurrection motif or pattern is absolutely at the heart of what it means to live a Christian life. And actually everything in life is like that. With any kind of suffering, if I respond to it by looking to God in faith, suffering drives me like a nail deeper into God’s love, which is what cancer has done for me.
I do think that the great thing about cancer is that Easter does mean a whole lot more because I look at Easter and I say, “Because of this, I can face anything.” In the past, I thought of Easter as a kind of optimistic, upbeat way of thinking about life. And now I see that Easter is a universal solvent. It can eat through any fear, any anger and despair. I see it as more powerful than ever before.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/10/opin ... pe=Article
I’ve talked to Timothy Keller several times since he was diagnosed with Stage 4 pancreatic cancer almost two years ago. What strikes me each time is that it’s easy to forget he has a fatal disease. He is calm, sagelike, cheerful and still deeply curious about others and the world around him. He always asks me, genuinely, how I am doing and listens intently as I tell him. He offers advice, wisdom and even sympathy, though my complaints are all comparatively small compared to facing cancer. It’s hard to have a conversation with him without feeling more hopeful and buoyant.
Keller moved to New York City in 1989 with his wife, Kathy, and their three young sons to start a church from scratch. It was a risky move to plant a traditional, evangelical Presbyterian church in a secular, progressive city. But Redeemer grew, has become one of the best-known churches in the country and birthed City to City, a global church planting network.
Keller has also written over two dozen books, most recently “Hope in Times of Fear: The Resurrection and the Meaning of Easter.” David Brooks recently described Tim as having “one of the most impressive and important minds in the evangelical world.”
Tim said that when he received his cancer diagnosis, “The doctor looked at us and said, ‘I want you to realize that when it comes to pancreatic cancer, you’re going to die from this.’” The vast majority of patients live less than a year after diagnosis. Tim described that day itself as a kind of death.
“My wife, Kathy, and I spent much time in tears and disbelief,” Tim wrote in The Atlantic last year. He continued, “We expected some illness to come and take us when we felt really old. But not now, not yet. This couldn’t be; what was God doing to us? The Bible, and especially the Psalms, gave voice to our feelings: ‘Why, O Lord, do you stand far off?’ ‘Wake up, O Lord. Why are you sleeping?’ ‘How long, O Lord? Will you forget me forever?’”
As many Christians around the world begin Holy Week, I wanted to hear more about how Tim’s diagnosis changed how he thinks about life, death and this week leading up to Easter. In the midst of ongoing chemotherapy, he kindly agreed to this interview, which has been condensed and edited for length and clarity.
How has cancer and this encounter with your own mortality changed how you see your life and how you see death?
On an emotional level, we really do deny the fact that we’re mortal and our time is limited. The day after my diagnosis, one of the words I put down in my journal was “focus.” What are the most important things for you to be spending your time doing? I had not been focused.
The second change was you realize that there’s one sense in which if you believe in God, it’s a mental abstraction. You believe with your head. I came to realize that the experiential side of my faith really needed to strengthen or I wasn’t going to be able to handle this.
It’s one thing to believe God loves you, another thing to actually feel his love. It’s one thing to believe he’s present with you. It’s another to actually experience his presence. So the two things I wrote down in my journal: one was focus and the other one was “Know the Lord.” My experience of his presence and his love was going to have to double, triple, quintuple or I wouldn’t make it.
What are the things that you want to focus on? What comes to the top of the list for you?
My wife, Kathy, and I are fairly well known as being a team. In many ways, we are joined at the hip. Right after the cancer was diagnosed, we realized it wasn’t right to come to the end of our lives without improving our marriage in places where it could be better. There were some things that she felt that she could not talk to me about because I didn’t respond well and she had given up trying to do it. But now we’re finding breakthroughs and being able to talk about certain things and deal with them in a way we were never able to before.
You immediately look around at your children, your grandchildren and say, what are the things I want to say to them and do with them?
Then thirdly, writing. I’m asking, “What are some things I want to write about — notes in a bottle to the future church?”
The last thing is trying to encourage people. I want to be an encourager.
As a pastor, professor and author, when it comes to faith, you’ve used your head a lot. You’ve thought about faith. And now you’re talking about growing in an experience of faith. How have you gone about doing that?
Every Christian knows what the means are. It’s just a question of actually using them. The means are the Bible, prayer, meditation and corporate worship and the sacraments.
Meditation is not the same as either reading the Bible or prayer. If you want an example of meditation, go to Psalms 103, and you’ll see the Psalmist is not addressing God. And he’s not addressing his listeners. He says, Bless the Lord, oh my soul and all that is within me.” He’s addressing himself. And that’s not prayer, but that’s also not just reading the Bible. That is learning how to take what he’s read in the Bible and screw it down into his heart till it catches fire.
I pray more often, but I also do it more longingly. And what’s really amazing is that when you know you’ve got to have more of God — because there’s really no alternative — to our surprise, there is more of God to be gotten. And you say, why didn’t I find this before? And the answer is, you didn’t feel the same sense of need.
In your latest book, you wrote that our culture is experiencing a “crisis of hope.” Where do you find hope? What hope do you offer to others?
If the resurrection of Jesus Christ really happened, then ultimately, God is going to put everything right. Suffering is going to go away. Evil is going to go away. Death is going to go away. Aging is going to go away. Pancreatic cancer is going to go away. Now if the resurrection of Jesus Christ did not happen, then I guess all bets are off. But if it actually happened, then there’s all the hope in the world.
In J.R.R. Tolkien’s essay “On Fairy-Stories,” he says there are indelible human longings that only fantasy, fairy tales or sci-fi can really speak to. He says that all human beings have a fascination with the idea of escaping time, escaping death, holding communion with other living things, being able to live long enough to achieve your artistic and creative dreams, being able to find a love that perfectly heals. Tolkien says: why do we have those longings? And as a Christian, he thinks the reason is that we were not originally created by God to die.
We all deep down kind of know that this is the way life ought to be, and if the resurrection of Jesus Christ happens, then all those things are literally going to come true for us.
That’s the reason you have this paradox. On the one hand, the resurrection is a kind of very concrete thing to talk about, like “What is the evidence for this historical event?” Probably the single best book on this subject in the last 100 years is N.T. Wright’s book “The Resurrection of the Son of God.”
Yet if we come to the place where we accept it, then suddenly there’s no limit to what kinds of things we can look forward to. I know some of your readers are thinking, “I can’t believe there’s a person with more than a third-grade education that actually believes that.” But I do. And these last few months, as we’ve gotten in touch with these great parts of our faith, Kathy and I would both say we’ve never been happier in our lives, even though I’m living under the shadow of cancer.
Today, most Christians are entering Holy Week, when we walk through the last week of Jesus’s earthly ministry, his Crucifixion and death, and then next Sunday we celebrate Easter. Can you reflect on how your suffering has changed how you think about the suffering of Jesus and also Easter?
Holy Week gives you both death and resurrection. They don’t make any sense apart. You can’t have the joy of resurrection unless you’ve gone through a death, and death without resurrection is just hopeless. Essentially, the death/resurrection motif or pattern is absolutely at the heart of what it means to live a Christian life. And actually everything in life is like that. With any kind of suffering, if I respond to it by looking to God in faith, suffering drives me like a nail deeper into God’s love, which is what cancer has done for me.
I do think that the great thing about cancer is that Easter does mean a whole lot more because I look at Easter and I say, “Because of this, I can face anything.” In the past, I thought of Easter as a kind of optimistic, upbeat way of thinking about life. And now I see that Easter is a universal solvent. It can eat through any fear, any anger and despair. I see it as more powerful than ever before.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/10/opin ... pe=Article
Some People Turn Suffering Into Wisdom
Barbara Lazear Ascher’s husband gave her the news in the most straightforward way. “Looks like pancreatic cancer,” he told her matter-of-factly after the test results came back.
She and their friends gave him a wonderful death. They had theme parties with matching drinks. “Dying was intimate, and I drew close,” Ascher writes in her moving memoir, “Ghosting,” “We were single-minded, welded together in the process of this long leave-taking.”
The grieving right after he died was anarchic. “You’ll think you’re sane, but you’re not,” a widowed neighbor told her. Before long, she was begging CVS workers to turn off the sound system that was playing “I’ll Be Home for Christmas.” She began to fear bathing. She started giving her stuff away — later regretting it. She had visions of him on the street.
This kind of disorientation is brutal … and normal. Grief and suffering often shatter our assumptions about who we are and how life works. The social psychologist Ronnie Janoff-Bulman notes that many people assume that the world is benevolent, that life is controllable and that we are basically good people who deserve good things. Suffering and loss can blast that to smithereens.
“Trauma challenges our global meaning system,” the psychologist Stephen Joseph writes in “What Doesn’t Kill Us.” “It confronts us with existential truths about life that clash with this system. The more we try to hold on to our assumptive world, the more mired we are in denial of such truths.”
This process of post-traumatic growth is more like rewriting a novel than like solving a problem or healing a wound. It’s a process of reconsidering and reorganizing — crafting a different story. This is one of those tasks, which most of us have to perform a few times over a life, that nobody teaches you about in school.
The first phase is often slow and physical. The body is still in the savage grip of raw pain. It takes time for the body to experience enough new feelings of safety and connection — with other people — to contradict the shock of loss. When experts try to do grief counseling while people are still overwhelmed, they often only further implant the trauma.
Gradually the process of re-storying begins. This is taking a now fragmented life and slowly cohering it into a new narrative. The social psychologist James Pennebaker has people do free expressive writing, sometimes for just 20 minutes a day for four days. Don’t worry about spelling and grammar, he advises; just let it flow — for yourself. In the beginning, people who take part in expressive writing exercises sometimes have different voices and handwriting styles. Their stories are raw and disjointed. But their narratives grow more coherent and self-aware as the days go by. They try on different perspectives. Some studies show that people who go through this process emerge with lower blood pressure and healthier immune systems.
In “The Body Keeps the Score,” Bessel van der Kolk says getting people to move their eyes rapidly, by giving them something dynamic to look at, loosens their memories. They become more aware of connections among dispersed events.
Then there is the process of regaining control over your beliefs. The mind is a relentless meaning-making machine. After loss, the mind, often unconsciously, leaps to wildly inaccurate and unhelpful conclusions: I’m to blame for what happened. The whole world is unsafe. The pain hurts, so it’s best to avoid it. At moments like these, we don’t always have thoughts. Our thoughts are having us.
A lot of therapy involves hovering over beliefs and emotions, recognizing them one by one and putting the thoughts on trial by stepping back and interrogating them. Will my life really crash forever, or am I just catastrophizing again? We have to struggle to regain control.
People rewrite the story of their lives not only with words but also with new actions. Suffering is evil, but it can serve as a bridge to others in pain. After loss, many people make a moral leap: I may never understand what happened, but I can be more understanding toward others. When people see themselves behaving more compassionately, orienting their lives toward goodness instead of happiness, they revise their self-image and regain a sense of meaning.
Gradually, for some people, a new core narrative emerges answering the question, “What am I to do with this unexpected life?” It’s not that the facts are different, but a person can step back and see them differently. New frameworks are imposed, which reorganize the relationship between the events of a life. Spatial metaphors are helpful here: I was in a dark wood. This train is not turning around. I’m climbing a second mountain.
Scholars differ over how common post-traumatic growth is. But I’m often around people who have this unwanted wisdom, that attitude of “tragic optimism” that Viktor Frankl describes, who see their lives as redemption stories.
I just wish our society did a much better job of preparing people for these difficult tasks and accompanying them through them when the time comes.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/21/opin ... 778d3e6de3
She and their friends gave him a wonderful death. They had theme parties with matching drinks. “Dying was intimate, and I drew close,” Ascher writes in her moving memoir, “Ghosting,” “We were single-minded, welded together in the process of this long leave-taking.”
The grieving right after he died was anarchic. “You’ll think you’re sane, but you’re not,” a widowed neighbor told her. Before long, she was begging CVS workers to turn off the sound system that was playing “I’ll Be Home for Christmas.” She began to fear bathing. She started giving her stuff away — later regretting it. She had visions of him on the street.
This kind of disorientation is brutal … and normal. Grief and suffering often shatter our assumptions about who we are and how life works. The social psychologist Ronnie Janoff-Bulman notes that many people assume that the world is benevolent, that life is controllable and that we are basically good people who deserve good things. Suffering and loss can blast that to smithereens.
“Trauma challenges our global meaning system,” the psychologist Stephen Joseph writes in “What Doesn’t Kill Us.” “It confronts us with existential truths about life that clash with this system. The more we try to hold on to our assumptive world, the more mired we are in denial of such truths.”
This process of post-traumatic growth is more like rewriting a novel than like solving a problem or healing a wound. It’s a process of reconsidering and reorganizing — crafting a different story. This is one of those tasks, which most of us have to perform a few times over a life, that nobody teaches you about in school.
The first phase is often slow and physical. The body is still in the savage grip of raw pain. It takes time for the body to experience enough new feelings of safety and connection — with other people — to contradict the shock of loss. When experts try to do grief counseling while people are still overwhelmed, they often only further implant the trauma.
Gradually the process of re-storying begins. This is taking a now fragmented life and slowly cohering it into a new narrative. The social psychologist James Pennebaker has people do free expressive writing, sometimes for just 20 minutes a day for four days. Don’t worry about spelling and grammar, he advises; just let it flow — for yourself. In the beginning, people who take part in expressive writing exercises sometimes have different voices and handwriting styles. Their stories are raw and disjointed. But their narratives grow more coherent and self-aware as the days go by. They try on different perspectives. Some studies show that people who go through this process emerge with lower blood pressure and healthier immune systems.
In “The Body Keeps the Score,” Bessel van der Kolk says getting people to move their eyes rapidly, by giving them something dynamic to look at, loosens their memories. They become more aware of connections among dispersed events.
Then there is the process of regaining control over your beliefs. The mind is a relentless meaning-making machine. After loss, the mind, often unconsciously, leaps to wildly inaccurate and unhelpful conclusions: I’m to blame for what happened. The whole world is unsafe. The pain hurts, so it’s best to avoid it. At moments like these, we don’t always have thoughts. Our thoughts are having us.
A lot of therapy involves hovering over beliefs and emotions, recognizing them one by one and putting the thoughts on trial by stepping back and interrogating them. Will my life really crash forever, or am I just catastrophizing again? We have to struggle to regain control.
People rewrite the story of their lives not only with words but also with new actions. Suffering is evil, but it can serve as a bridge to others in pain. After loss, many people make a moral leap: I may never understand what happened, but I can be more understanding toward others. When people see themselves behaving more compassionately, orienting their lives toward goodness instead of happiness, they revise their self-image and regain a sense of meaning.
Gradually, for some people, a new core narrative emerges answering the question, “What am I to do with this unexpected life?” It’s not that the facts are different, but a person can step back and see them differently. New frameworks are imposed, which reorganize the relationship between the events of a life. Spatial metaphors are helpful here: I was in a dark wood. This train is not turning around. I’m climbing a second mountain.
Scholars differ over how common post-traumatic growth is. But I’m often around people who have this unwanted wisdom, that attitude of “tragic optimism” that Viktor Frankl describes, who see their lives as redemption stories.
I just wish our society did a much better job of preparing people for these difficult tasks and accompanying them through them when the time comes.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/21/opin ... 778d3e6de3
Re: Pain, Suffering and Calamities
Ḥaz̤rat Mawlānā Imām Sulṭān Muḥammad Shāh has emphatically drawn attention to the blessed verse of "istirjāʿ" (i.e. to say innā li’llāhi wa-innā ilayhi rājiʿūn ["Verily, we belong to God and to Him we are returning"]). In this connection the three verses are:
"We shall surely try you with something of fear, and hunger, and loss of wealth, and lives and fruits: and give glad tidings to the patient ones, who when misfortune befalls them say: Verily, we are Allāh’s and to Him we return. Those are they on whom are blessings and mercy from their Lord, and they are those who are rightly guided" (Qurʾān 2:155-157).
Wisdom 1. For every muʾmin [believer] with high ambition, every trial is beneficial for the soul, for there is no ascension or elevation without trial.
Wisdom 2. According to God, the important trials which were necessary for extremely fruitful results were only these ones.
Wisdom 3. Fear is a state of the heart in which the soul abandons all worldly thoughts and adopts a humble and pitiable form. In such a condition man pays complete attention towards God.
Wisdom 4. The animal soul is reformed by hunger.
Wisdom 5. By loss of wealth and lives, a state of brokenness and annihilation pervades the heart.
Wisdom 6. By loss of fruits is meant the loss of spirituality.
In short, all these states help one to return to God both temporarily and permanently provided there is religious awareness.
Wisdom 7. Istirjāʿ means to say "Verily, we belong to Allāh and to Him is our return." But it is necessary to know that by this is meant that the original abode of man is the Divine Presence. He has come here by descending the ladder of God and is to return to the ocean of His light by ascending it.
ʿAllāmah Naṣīr al-Dīn Naṣīr Hunzai, Mīwah-yi Bihisht, tr. by Faquir and Rashida Hunzai as 𝘍𝘳𝘶𝘪𝘵 𝘰𝘧 𝘗𝘢𝘳𝘢𝘥𝘪𝘴𝘦, 54-55.
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In verses 75:22-23 [of the Qurʾān], it is mentioned: "That day some faces will be resplendent looking towards their Lord."
God will make such fortunate people extremely beautiful, because God Himself is beautiful and likes physical and spiritual beauty, as the holy Prophet says: "Indeed God is beautiful and loves beauty" (𝘔𝘶𝘴𝘭𝘪𝘮, I, 93).
ʿAllāmah Naṣīr al-Dīn Naṣīr Hunzai, (Hazār Ḥikmat, tr. by Faquir and Rashida Hunzai as 𝘛𝘩𝘰𝘶𝘴𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘞𝘪𝘴𝘥𝘰𝘮𝘴: 𝘈𝘯 𝘌𝘯𝘤𝘺𝘤𝘭𝘰𝘱𝘢𝘦𝘥𝘪𝘢 𝘰𝘧 𝘛𝘢ʾ𝘸𝘪𝘭, w. 879, p. 458.
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You said: The supreme meaning of 'muslim' is the one who merges in God. What is its example in the wise Qurʾān?
Answer: Sūrah-yi Nisāʾ: "And who is better in religion than he who has submitted his face (i.e., the face of his soul) entirely to God, and is righteous, and follows the way of Ibrāhīm [Abraham] who used to walk avoiding falsehood? And God took Ibrāhīm for a special friend" (4:125).
When the Lord of spiritual resurrection ushered Adam (a.s.) in the paradise of the Sacred Sanctuary, he was created in the Image of the Compassionate (Ṣūrat-i Raḥmān). This is the submission of the soul's face to God and it is said in a ḥadīth that whoever among the children of Adam (a.s.) will enter paradise, they will be in the image of their father Adam (a.s.).
ʿAllāmah Naṣīr al-Dīn Naṣīr Hunzai, Qurʾānī ʿIlm-ū Ḥikmat kē Jawāhir, tr. by Faquir and Rashida Hunzai as 𝘎𝘦𝘮𝘴 𝘰𝘧 𝘘𝘶𝘳ʾ𝘢𝘯𝘪𝘤 𝘒𝘯𝘰𝘸𝘭𝘦𝘥𝘨𝘦 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘞𝘪𝘴𝘥𝘰𝘮, Part 65.
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www.instagram.com/khayal.aly
www.instagram.com/ismaili.poetry
"We shall surely try you with something of fear, and hunger, and loss of wealth, and lives and fruits: and give glad tidings to the patient ones, who when misfortune befalls them say: Verily, we are Allāh’s and to Him we return. Those are they on whom are blessings and mercy from their Lord, and they are those who are rightly guided" (Qurʾān 2:155-157).
Wisdom 1. For every muʾmin [believer] with high ambition, every trial is beneficial for the soul, for there is no ascension or elevation without trial.
Wisdom 2. According to God, the important trials which were necessary for extremely fruitful results were only these ones.
Wisdom 3. Fear is a state of the heart in which the soul abandons all worldly thoughts and adopts a humble and pitiable form. In such a condition man pays complete attention towards God.
Wisdom 4. The animal soul is reformed by hunger.
Wisdom 5. By loss of wealth and lives, a state of brokenness and annihilation pervades the heart.
Wisdom 6. By loss of fruits is meant the loss of spirituality.
In short, all these states help one to return to God both temporarily and permanently provided there is religious awareness.
Wisdom 7. Istirjāʿ means to say "Verily, we belong to Allāh and to Him is our return." But it is necessary to know that by this is meant that the original abode of man is the Divine Presence. He has come here by descending the ladder of God and is to return to the ocean of His light by ascending it.
ʿAllāmah Naṣīr al-Dīn Naṣīr Hunzai, Mīwah-yi Bihisht, tr. by Faquir and Rashida Hunzai as 𝘍𝘳𝘶𝘪𝘵 𝘰𝘧 𝘗𝘢𝘳𝘢𝘥𝘪𝘴𝘦, 54-55.
<><><>
In verses 75:22-23 [of the Qurʾān], it is mentioned: "That day some faces will be resplendent looking towards their Lord."
God will make such fortunate people extremely beautiful, because God Himself is beautiful and likes physical and spiritual beauty, as the holy Prophet says: "Indeed God is beautiful and loves beauty" (𝘔𝘶𝘴𝘭𝘪𝘮, I, 93).
ʿAllāmah Naṣīr al-Dīn Naṣīr Hunzai, (Hazār Ḥikmat, tr. by Faquir and Rashida Hunzai as 𝘛𝘩𝘰𝘶𝘴𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘞𝘪𝘴𝘥𝘰𝘮𝘴: 𝘈𝘯 𝘌𝘯𝘤𝘺𝘤𝘭𝘰𝘱𝘢𝘦𝘥𝘪𝘢 𝘰𝘧 𝘛𝘢ʾ𝘸𝘪𝘭, w. 879, p. 458.
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You said: The supreme meaning of 'muslim' is the one who merges in God. What is its example in the wise Qurʾān?
Answer: Sūrah-yi Nisāʾ: "And who is better in religion than he who has submitted his face (i.e., the face of his soul) entirely to God, and is righteous, and follows the way of Ibrāhīm [Abraham] who used to walk avoiding falsehood? And God took Ibrāhīm for a special friend" (4:125).
When the Lord of spiritual resurrection ushered Adam (a.s.) in the paradise of the Sacred Sanctuary, he was created in the Image of the Compassionate (Ṣūrat-i Raḥmān). This is the submission of the soul's face to God and it is said in a ḥadīth that whoever among the children of Adam (a.s.) will enter paradise, they will be in the image of their father Adam (a.s.).
ʿAllāmah Naṣīr al-Dīn Naṣīr Hunzai, Qurʾānī ʿIlm-ū Ḥikmat kē Jawāhir, tr. by Faquir and Rashida Hunzai as 𝘎𝘦𝘮𝘴 𝘰𝘧 𝘘𝘶𝘳ʾ𝘢𝘯𝘪𝘤 𝘒𝘯𝘰𝘸𝘭𝘦𝘥𝘨𝘦 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘞𝘪𝘴𝘥𝘰𝘮, Part 65.
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www.instagram.com/khayal.aly
www.instagram.com/ismaili.poetry
This Was a Terrible Year, and Also Maybe the Best One Yet for Humanity
As the year ends, civilians are dying at a staggering pace in Gaza and the genocide in Darfur may be resuming. A man charged with 91 felonies is leading in American presidential polls, and our carbon emissions risk cooking our planet.
But something else is also true: In some ways, 2023 may still have been the best year in the history of humanity.
How can that possibly be?
Just about the worst calamity that can befall a human is to lose a child, and historically, almost half of children worldwide died before they reached the age of 15. That share has declined steadily since the 19th century, and the United Nations Population Division projects that in 2023 a record low was reached in global child mortality, with just 3.6 percent of newborns dying by the age of 5.
That’s the lowest such figure in human history. It still means that about 4.9 million children died this year — but that’s a million fewer than died as recently as 2016.
Or consider extreme poverty. It too has reached a record low, affecting a bit more than 8 percent of humans worldwide, according to United Nations projections.
All these figures are rough, but it seems that about 100,000 people are now emerging from extreme poverty each day — so they are better able to access clean water, to feed and educate their children, to buy medicines.
None of this eases the pain of those who have lost their children in 2023, nor is it a balm for those caught in war or climate catastrophes. Yet at year-end, it’s worth acknowledging this backdrop of progress — not to distract anyone from all that is going wrong, but to offer a reminder that when we try hard enough, we can accomplish amazing things. Right now, looking at the anguish worldwide, I’d say we’re not trying hard enough.
I write a version of this column each year at around this time, and it upsets many readers. They believe it is offensive to hail progress when so many are dying unnecessarily from wars and disease, when the future seems so bleak to so many. I understand their point; my career has been dedicated to covering genocide, war and poverty. But one thing I learned long ago as a journalist is that when our coverage is unremittingly negative, people tune out and give up. If we want to tackle problems — from the war in Gaza to climate change — then it helps to know that progress is possible.
Other health news is also encouraging, a reflection of the way public health tools are behind many of the advances in well-being. Two horrifying diseases are close to eradication: polio and Guinea worm disease. Only 12 cases of wild poliovirus have been reported worldwide in 2023 (there were also small numbers of vaccine-derived polio, a secondary problem), and 2024 may be the last year in which wild polio is transmitted. (Shout-out to Rotary International for its heroic work against this disease.) Meanwhile, only 11 cases of Guinea worm disease were reported in humans in the first nine months of 2023. (The hat-tip here goes to former President Jimmy Carter for his extraordinary work against the parasite.)
Likewise, the United States government recently approved new CRISPR gene-editing techniques to treat sickle cell disease — and the hope is that similar approaches can transform the treatment of cancer and other ailments. Another landmark: New vaccines have been approved for R.S.V. and malaria, and both are expected to save children’s lives.
Blinding trachoma is also on its way out in several countries. A woman suffering from trachoma in Mali once told me that the worst part of the disease wasn’t the blindness but rather the excruciating pain, which she said was as bad as childbirth but lasted for years. So I’m thrilled that Mali and 16 other countries have eliminated trachoma.
Those who see 2023 as a notably grim year are also right, of course. My reporting in the Middle East late this year was personally depressing, and climate change threatens the gains in poor nations like Bangladesh and Madagascar. Yet despair is paralyzing, not empowering. It seems contradictory in a world brimming with pain, but the most important trend in the world in my lifetime may be the revolution in child mortality, the enormous decline in global poverty and the vast increase in literacy that many people seem unaware of.
I highlight this backdrop of progress so that it may fortify us in 2024 to tackle all the other suffering that persists.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/30/opin ... 778d3e6de3