I could not find a more appropriate title to this one.

Earlier this week, I was lost in thought after watching someone narrate their harrowing experience during a visit to Mauritania. There seemed to be so much poverty, so much suffering. I could almost smell death just watching the video. I mean, things felt ominous at the same time conclusive. Like, there was no possible way a place like that could ever blossom. But of course, this was me getting lost in my own thoughts and assumptions. Admittedly, this was also a video, one perspective, and from this person’s viewpoint. It got me thinking about my own experiences when I have visited slums and homeless shelters and environments where death felt real and lurking in the background. Oh, sometimes the ICU is another place to feel all of that.

In these moments, I realize how freaking easy it is to speak about God when the sky is soft and the music is blasting fast and hearty music, and the barbecue grill is lit and afrobeat dances with the rising smoke. It’s so easy to see God when a long-yearned-for promotion hits or when we see the view of a well-mowed meadow and small dandelions dance to the soft blowing wind. Oh, the sun needs to be golden in these moments and then, suddenly, we see God. Oh! It is so easy to see God when love feels close and it wraps our imaginations in warmth. In those moments, God feels like an explanation of beauty. We then point there and there and there and say that’s God.

But when suffering slaps us in the face and there’s no poetry, no comfort, no meaning in sight, then what happens? When struggles, real human struggles, hit us and we are confronted with our own humanity, confronted with the gore that life sometimes comes embodied as, then what next? Where then is the same God that showed up obviously in the blessings?

Well, I think this is usually where a lot of philosophical debates crash and the religious gymnastics that wrap up the Divine as a feel-good mechanism starts to crumble— the neat mold of goodness that we have ascribed as God. Oh, I am not doubting any goodness in all of this. I am just trying to shed light on a different perspective. And that perspective should start with a different type of question. Perhaps the question when we see or hit suffering should not be ‘where is God in all this’? Once again, a question like this presupposes an entity, a finite thing that sits outside of suffering. Or an entity who can snap his fingers and make all things beautiful but sits cowering in helplessness at our own helplessness. An entity that basks in careless undecidednesss or maybe even in a secretly silent pleasure picking and choosing who gets to enjoy their experience of living and which 2 year old dies of cancer.

My friend, if God is only what feels good, shows up when our oxytocin levels are up, then suffering is obviously a contradiction. Either God disappears or God becomes cruel in the midst of that suffering. But the question should evolve, our contemplation of what the Divine is, should really ask, “what do we even mean by God in the first place?”.

There’s another way to look at it. Another way to SEE it. To do so, we have to be brave enough to sit with what is actually present in suffering(not the story or the interpretation) but what is there in the suffering…the pain, the fear, the loss. We want to face it squarely. We want to look deep into its face. We want to bear the pain even if the result of that pain is total obliteration. I bet if anyone has come out of that tomb of death after staring into that void, you know you come out experiencing something so glaringly obvious. Oh only if you stare that death in the face till it dissolves. It becomes so obvious that the resultant is the revealing of Self, the unveiling of The Lover, the company of the Fourth, That which has been there all along. Oh, it becomes so obvious that there is nowhere one can go without THE KNOWING. That part, that Knowing, it turns out, is not touched by suffering. It is the part(and whole) that simply knows. Oh, that is Awareness Itself.

See, if God is excluded from suffering, then suffering sits outside of reality itself. That doesn’t make any sense(not like sense is needed for any exploration of reality). And no, suffering isn’t divine. Pain still freaking hurts. Suffering is not glamorous. But our relationship to suffering is what we eventually come to see. We may begin to understand how suffering is not something we can own. It is not personal. No one has ever created suffering, so how can one control suffering to turn it off? Instead, we can turn to it. Yikes! We SEE what it is made of.

In that exploration, we may also find that the Divine does not intervene in suffering(surprise surprise). The Divine is the ground of experience itself and suffering is part of experience. God is the field in which both beauty and suffering appear. How can this even be true? Well, you have to see it. If only we can allow ourselves to see it, then the same ground can allow both a child’s laughter and a battlefield. Sorry, there’s no clean resolution in this one! And maybe that’s the point. Any view of God that removes that tension too quickly tends to become comforting and then collapses in its shallowness. So maybe we don’t resolve it but stay with it, letting both truths stand side by side: suffering is unbearable and calls for response. At the same time, in the deepest layer of reality, it remains unchanged by it. From this standpoint, we don’t explain away suffering. We meet it more directly.

Something to think about: if the same awareness is here in both myself and the one who suffers, then separation must thin out. Compassion then, is no longer a moral rule but the obvious move. And in that, I feel compassion for those that suffer, I see my suffering in it, and the suffering of humanity. I see God in all of it.

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