Placing Suffering in Context

I met Jesus yesterday. It was a touching experience. I was walking to school when I happened upon a woman. She stood up from the low sidewalk she had been sitting on when she saw me - not on a chair or anything, but on the gravel walk itself. She had an arm in a sling; indeed she looked like a bird that had broken a wing. I came face to face with her, and she opened her mouth, but could make only guttural sounds. She was dumb. She peered at me through her glasses, and made moaning sounds. She had a coat about her - the weather is beginning to cool - but it was not buttoned properly and, because her limb was in a sling, she couldn't fix it herself. She gestured to me, moaning, to help her secure her coat. In that unique combination of body signals and strained moaning, she communicated to me what ordinarily a person who could speak would say, "Please, help me secure my coat." I did. I pulled the warm dress over her, and secured a button. It was such a touching scene to me. And after I had helped the woman in that small way I felt happy. And yet not so happy that I couldn't do more, and that I had felt a bit afraid of her,  because she was different; looked and acted different. I had been afraid where I should have been compassionate. I had not understood; I had hesitated. Just like Simon of Cyrene who at first was reluctant to help Jesus carry his cross, because he did not know Jesus. He did not understand him, because the suffering servant of God did not look similar; did not look comely. But Simon did eventually help Jesus, just like I did the woman I met yesterday. "When did I see you, Lord, and minister to you?" "As long as you eventually helped that woman you met on your way to school yesterday, you ministered to me." (Matt. 25:31-46).

 

I still see the woman's face in my mind's eye. I still contemplate her suffering. I see her peering at me through her thick pair of glasses, squinting to better see me. I see her making those moaning sounds, the only way by which to communicate, since she was dumb. I see her with her arm in a sling, unable to secure her coat by herself; I see her in need and in pain, harangued by her condition: dumb, lame; challenged for sight; with several teeth misplaced; poor, and suffering, sitting helplessly on the gravel sidewalk waiting for someone to come along to help secure her coat. I remember her as I contemplate my own condition. I am not dumb; I am not lame - none of my limbs is in a sling - or in need of ambulatory assistance; I have all my teeth in place, and I never sit on the sidewalk asking for help from passers-by. Yet, I know I can say like others have in the past: "There go I but for the grace of God." And even the woman can say the same, with reference to other people, whose conditions are worse than hers. Because there are degrees of perfections of things, many people are worse off in terms of how they suffer than we are. This should be a reality we stay conscious of. When we are tempted to complain all the day long about how things aren't going well for us, we should recall that there are others who would rather have it the way we do. "I was complaining that I had no shoes, until I saw someone that had no legs."

 

It is important to place suffering in context. It seems to me that, for every awful situation we find ourselves in, there is always someone to be found whose situation is worse. Some of the relatively petty things we complain about - there are some people who wish that was all they had to gripe about. Sometimes we complain that we don't have enough on the menu from which to choose. We visit a restaurant for example, and all they have for entrees are: choices of lamb, beef, stake and lobster, and we're disappointed. Why don't they have duck? Why o why is there no crab for Pete's sake! And turkey burgers? Hey waiter - you mean to tell me you have no turkey burgers? Unbelievable! We forget there are some people who can't even afford to go to a restaurant, let alone begin to gripe about turkey burgers. [Don't even get me started on what Seth MacFarlane has to say about turkey burgers in his movie Ted.] The relatively inconsequential things we gripe about are scandalous to those that have real problems. We should just stop complaining all the time. Just. Stop.

 

Placing suffering in context helps us to know how blessed we are, even when we don't always realize it. It helps us to see the trees and the forest. It helps us to have reason enough, whatever condition we find ourselves in, to bless the Lord and praise him all our days. It helps us to have "an attitude of gratitude." And it helps us to let go of unwarranted expectations. We should always place our suffering in the context of greater sufferers'. You missed an appointment? Someone somewhere, sometime, has died trying to make it to an appointment - didn't see a speeding car coming while trying to cross the street to make it to see someone and - kpow! Dead, kaput - just like that! You lost your job? Someone somewhere, sometime, went bankrupt - was swindled for every penny they had; no savings, no insurance money - nothing; broke; penniless. Zilch! You lost a loved one? Hello! I've been orphan since I was twelve. And so on, and so forth. Whenever we think we've got it bad, there's someone that's got it worse; whenever we think we've got it real bad, there's someone that's got it real worse. We can never outdo the generality of human experience of evil.

 

Placing suffering in context assures us that we are not alone in our suffering, and that is a good feeling. We draw strength from that in a different way than we do from celebrating in the success of others, but in no less a viable way. We realize that we, against the background of what others are going through or have gone through, have relative cause to celebrate. It makes us thankful. The bible enjoins us to visit houses of mourning more often than those of celebrating, so that we can avail ourselves of opportunities to understand human suffering; see the context there is to it. The value of this cannot be overemphasized. But then again, perhaps in our world today, with the way things are going, and the speed of media coverage of the macabre, we don't need to visit houses of mourning - we just need to turn on the television or the radio and become confronted with suffering, over and over again. It's all there: the horrors of human suffering.

 

Or read history books; watch historical films and documentaries - it's all there. Watch interviews and see, and remember some of the classic cases of historical human suffering: the Holocaust; the Rwandan Genocide; the Cambodian Genocide; the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade - need I go on? There are many cases of human suffering that are mind-boggling and grand scale. Sometimes I just try to imagine, to picture, how the inmates of say, Auschwitz must have felt. You're having dinner in your home one day and then you suddenly hear the door forced open; you and your family members are shepherded out into vehicles and transported many miles to a concentration camp. You are separated from your family members, undressed, shaved and tattooed with an identification number, and then you are worked till death, or summarily gassed and burnt. In a video I watched recently, a Holocaust survivor, in recounting her story, said that one of the torturers at Auschwitz told her, when she asked if she would ever see her separated family members again, "You see the black smoke oozing from the gas chambers?" (He pointed to it). "Those are your family members," he continued. "The only way out of here is through the chimneys." How can one even begin to comprehend how the lady must have felt to hear that? Can you even begin to picture in your mind's eye a long line of newcomers to the work camp who, while trudging along in sorrow, are separated into two groups by the mouthing of: "left, right; left, right," especially as one group would be herded straight to the gas chambers, and the other to the stacking of body on top of body in the cold shelf of bodies where human life became equated with sardines'? Some cases of human suffering simply stun.

 

Or is it the Rwandan Genocide, where dead bodies were piled so high on the motor roads that drivers were forced to drive on them for want of space to do otherwise. And don't even get me started on the throat-slashing deaths in Cambodia. What about the Martyrs of Uganda being slowly roasted to death? What about the many, many civil wars fought so far in our world? I could go on and on. Shall I say like in the nursery song: There is fire on the mountain, run, run, run? What shall I say? There is nothing we experience in our daily lives that even begins to compare for example to the discomfort of the many slaves crammed in ship holds and transported in stench and illness and chains from the Motherland to the New World. O God! I tell you, sometimes when you think of the suffering this world has witnessed, all you can do is sigh very deeply - you know those heaving, wracking sighs? Yes, those ones: your chest rises with the intake of air and, as you exhale, the slumping of your bosom is clearly remarkable. Save us O God, we trust in you. And the sad thing is that most of all this suffering is human-made. We do this to ourselves. By our greed, by our hatred, by our refusal to forgive; by our jealousy, by our insecurity, by our sheer stupidity. We keep doing this to ourselves. When will we learn! When will we stop the hate! When will we change!

 

People walk about our streets dejected, depressed, unwanted, unloved. There is an abundance of good in the world, but some people hug it all and refuse to share. Some people pay lip service to all the possibility of helping the less privileged. The hate goes on; the killing, the maiming - everything goes on, and we are seemingly powerless to stop it. And even when the suffering seems to go away, we re-invite it. We say, "Come, suffering; come!" And we stew in it, calling it by fanciful names: depression, melancholy, substance abuse, addiction. And we spend time nursing these conditions, dressed up as they are in fancy clothes - sophisticated suffering for the modern soul. The human story told through the eyes of pain. And suffering. The human story told as many know it to be. The human story told as we helplessly accept over and over again.

 

I met Jesus yesterday in the face of a woman I saw sitting on the sidewalk. Her suffering placed mine in context. In the moment of my encounter with her, I reminded myself of the fact that I have little justification in complaining of the relatively minor discomforts of my life, especially when viewed against the background of overwhelming human suffering the world has repeatedly known.