I can remember being ill with heart disease and wishing so much for my suffering to stop.
It was horrible: my heart beating uncontrollably fast, the sick feeling in the pit of my stomach, the weakness in my legs and knees, the all encompassing sense of terror.
If I've been able to pray at that time, I'm sure I would have prayed just the way Jesus does in the story: pray for the suffering to end.
I don't think I'd have been able to go on to say as he does: maybe the suffering is necessary. Maybe what I want is beside the point.
Maybe I have to accept my suffering.
It was only later, much much later, that I was able to accept my suffering at that time as necessary, and even be able to feel thankful for it.
Because it was that suffering that caused me to seek help. And it was that help that saved my life.
Otherwise, I guess I've just kept on going in my destructive way of life until it killed me.
I was remembering all this on my way to the tram stop this morning.
In the beautiful light of the new day…
When I had also just read the usual disastrous daily headline about human cruelty and human stupidity about their consequences in our tormented world.
This morning it was about the melting of glaciers due to global heating; and how this is endangering the food supply of billions.
And, of course, these findings, reported by the United Nations, are being ignored by governments all over the world.
Just as Western governments are so inexplicably ignoring the unimaginable cruelty the Israeli armed forces are inflicting on the people of Gaza.
Just as our contemptible UK government, which really should know better, is preparing to inflict poverty and suffering on the most vulnerable and those least able to defend themselves against it.
And it's no use praying for the glaciers to stop melting; or even for our politicians to start behaving as half decent human beings…
Just as it would've been of no use for me to pray for my sufferings to end.
Somehow I had to just accept what was happening, and try to do what I could to get myself better.
And later, when I was talking to my surgeon, and he told me that at a certain point he would give me an injection to stop my heart beating, I found myself feeling incredibly moved that after millennia and millennia in which we humans had been learning more and more effective and cruel ways to kill each other and to stop each other's hearts from beating out of hatred, here was someone assembling a group of highly skilled people to stop my heart beating in order to make me better.
I didn’t know how to make myself better then; and I don't know how to make the world better now.
All I know, then and now, is that it's important not to give up hope.
It's important to ally and align myself with the forces and energies that are working to heal the world.
Even in seemingly the tiniest ways…
Because each kind and compassionate act does have an effect on this interconnected world….
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