It's called Critical Concerns with Adolescents. I justified taking it because, hey, I work with adolescents, right?
It's a more interactive, feelingsy style class structure than I was anticipating or like, but it's been nice to get out from behind my desk.
For one of our recent meetings, we had to write our personal theology of suffering.
He wanted our answer to the question: "What do you believe about suffering?"
My definition of suffering.
I think of this a lot, as I have since I was small and trying to reconcile my own feelings of social isolation with the more "pertinent" suffering of my best friend with her rough neighborhood and her parents that yelled.
That struggle continues now, as I see the ways that I have "suffered", which seem so...insignificant in comparison to my friends and people I love a lot.
How do you bring something to the table if you don't believe in its validity while, at the same time, can't help but feel its effects?
I didn't know my answer when I started typing, but that's often how it is with me. Give me a pen, and I can tell me my thoughts. I swear my mind is trapped in ink.
What I came up with is this:
Suffering is anything that causes division, be that be division of self, division of mind, or division of emotion.
It is a felt, abstract concept, not one that can be put in a concrete way. Because of this, there is no empirical way to measure suffering on a straight measure.
What is suffering for one might be nothing for another. However, both of them get to “count.”
I come into contact with this word and my own struggles of literalism when I talk to my boyfriend.
Neither one of us have very clean stories. But they’re both messed up in different ways. And those differences affect us and our relationship strongly, as we struggle to work out our past hurts.
We have both suffered.
But when I come to the table with an area of woundedness, I feel as though my pain is insufficient compared to his and, therefore, doesn’t get to be counted as legitimate.
I was never married. I have never struggled with addiction.
I had some rough relationships. I was desperately lonely for a very long time. I know what it feels like to crawl into myself and die a little.
But those are not measurable to one another because we are different people. We have different stories.
I don’t know what it feels like to have a spouse leave or really anything else that he’s experienced.
But we both know what it feels like to have your heart divided. We both know what it feels like to be divided from those we love. We both know what it is to have our minds turn against us, to lose control, to feel a chasm open up between ourselves and the Lord.
For other people, it’s a literal division from body parts, division from the capacity to function “normally”, division from social spheres, division of parents, division from whole families, division of self. We feel it all. So, while we may not understand everyone’s exact point of “suffering”, we all know what it is to feel something less than whole.
No comments:
Post a Comment