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“I’ve got a small camcorder at the house, Doc, maybe we should just use that? It would be a little smaller,” I wish I would have said. Instead, the blood drained from my face and yes, from down there, and I shrunk as a man in every way I could have imagined. I wanted to escape into a hole and die, and so, apparently, did my special purpose.
As he went through the procedure, I longed for death. I hated it so much. I hated every single moment of it with my whole being. He asked me at one point if I’d like to look at the screen and see what he was seeing, and I got mad at him for even bothering to ask such a foolish question. He saw the look on my face and quickly said, “Looks like you just want me to finish up as fast as I can?”
I grunted in a way that I intended to mean, “Yes, doctor, that’s what I would prefer.”
I remember thinking afterward that if they found out I had cancer (I didn’t), and they needed to do that procedure again to save my life, that I would choose death. That’s how much I hated it.
But honestly, as I look back, I don’t know how painful it actually was. Probably not that painful. It certainly couldn’t have been as painful as almost breaking my nose on that glass wall after my mega-float, but the suffering was so much more intense in this second story. The suffering wasn’t limited to the procedure itself either. I remember going home afterward and just rolling around and moaning with the traumatic memory of it. So much suffering for what was probably a very small amount of actual pain.
• • • • •
So, what’s the difference between these two stories? How could less pain create more suffering? Because pain is not synonymous with suffering. Suffering, as the Buddha taught, is the result of clinging to desire and aversion, not simply pain. Suffering is what happens when we desire something to be other than what it is. A person feels the sensation of pain, but that sensation is not suffering in and of itself. It is the emotional response to the pain that becomes suffering. The clinging to the aversion of pain is what brings the mental suffering, not the pain by itself.
This truth makes many of us feel uncomfortable. Saying that suffering is the result of our own attachment to our desires can sound like a dangerous idea—one that people could use to put the blame of suffering on the sick rather than the sickness, victims rather than abusers, the oppressed rather than the oppressor. And unfortunately, that sort of abuse of this truth can and has happened for millennia. In India, for example, thoughts like these have been used to justify and support oppressive caste systems that favor certain people over others. “If you suffer, it’s your problem” is a potentially abusive and harmful justification of violence. The danger of a reframed and misused truth doesn’t make it any less true though. Atomic bombs are a potentially devastating and violent use of atoms. Waterboarding is an oppressive use of water. This doesn’t mean we can dispense with atoms or water.
The truth is that a person with no desire would have no capacity to suffer. One doesn’t suffer while unconscious under a general anesthetic as the state of consciousness that includes desire goes off-line. Sure, pain can be inflicted upon someone from the outside, but pain is not the same thing as suffering. Pain is a physical sensation, but suffering (at least in the Buddhist sense) is a subjective experience.
This explains why there is still so much suffering in the world in the early twenty-first century, despite all of our technological advances and pain management capacities. It also explains why humans tend to suffer more than other animals. Plants suffer. Animals suffer. But nothing (that we know of) suffers to the extent that humans do. For instance, while there are other mammal species like dolphins, whales, and chimps that have shown signs of being aware of their own mortality and even mourning their dead, there aren’t a whole lot of chimps out there wearing black for a year or going back to visit the graves of their deceased loved ones for decades. A dolphin suffers when her calf is killed by poachers, but a human can suffer by just worrying that someone might kill her child someday. Humans suffer more than other animals because humans cling to desire more than other animals. Not only do we desire to live but we desire to build, to conquer, to create, to imagine, to thrive. As Maslow’s hierarchy of needs demonstrates, humans tend to find a whole new set of desires to pursue once they have fulfilled their current ones. Our suffering doesn’t go away when our basic needs of food, shelter, or sex are met. Instead, we just find new things to desire. Relationships. Status. Power. Self-actualization. Spiritual enlightenment. Human desire is like a feedback loop. We want more and more and more, and as a result, we constantly find new ways to suffer.
Our penchant for suffering seems to be wired into our very DNA. We are all born into a cacophony of undifferentiated vibration and sensation. Before words, there is no way to box reality into conceptual categories like “somethings” or “someones” to be desired or to have aversions to. Here, before any distinctions can be made between a doctor or a nurse, a liberal or a conservative, black or white, rich or poor, naked or clothed, there is only the overwhelming and insignificant blur of sense without meaning. Still we cry. Why? Because even before desire becomes rooted in specific ideas and stories, desire still exists. We are born with and, in a way, as desire.
From the very beginning, we are unsatisfied with THIS, and so we imagine a that. Like the story of the Creator(s) in Genesis, we separate light from dark.9 Desiring to be like gods, we parse, name, and judge reality into something we can understand and therefore control. Warmth is distinguished from cold. Milk from mother. Good from evil. Physics from theology. This splintering universe of construct, memory, perception, and language is created from every word we speak and every thought we think.
Our divine fiat: “Let there be suffering!”
We want that, not THIS. It seems to be built into our DNA as a species.
Life is suffering.
We move from the dark into the light, and we suffer because we miss the quiet peace of the dark. Then when the lights turn off, and it’s time to go to sleep, we suffer because we are afraid of what the dark may take away from us. We can’t wait to be older, and then we wish we were younger. We can’t wait to graduate so life can truly begin, but then we can’t wait to get a better job, a bigger house, or more free time. We want that, not THIS. That will finally make us happy. That will fill the existential void at the center of our being.
Riches.
Respect.
Fame.
Justice.
Security.
Heaven.
Nirvana.
A healthy, “typical” child.
Whatever it may be, it is always that. Not THIS. And even when we get that, it never quite satisfies like we want it to.
How is it possible for a being who lives on a sparkling blue planet with penguins and palm trees and trampolines to be anything but constantly overwhelmed with gratitude, love, and laughter? Why do we let so much life pass us by because we are coasting through its miracles on autopilot looking for something other than what is right in front of us? And what is it that we are looking for exactly? Something more interesting or wondrous than THIS? What could that possibly be? What do we think we would actually be satisfied with? Trees with blue leaves rather than green leaves? Money? For what? Fame? For who? Power? To do what exactly? Power to breathe more air? Hear something other than sound?
One need only look at the lives of the rich, famous, and powerful to see that the cycle of suffering is never externally solved. We’re all aware on some level of the fallacy of the idea that when a person finally makes X amounts of dollars, or buys that new car, or finally signs that record contract, or gets a million followers on Instagram, that she is finally going to be perfectly happy and content for the rest of her life. But we chase the futile promises of these phantoms anyway. Until we can’t anymore.
THE SPA
Part 2 (2012)
I turned the glorious shower off, wrapped my towel around my waist (well, a little higher than that so I wouldn’t have to confront the truth that my b
elly now extended a bit beyond the towel line), and sauntered over to the steam room. There was an old, naked guy in there, but I hoped he wouldn’t bother me if I kept my head down and kept quiet. I opened the door and was immediately inundated with that heavy, nostril-burning, eucalyptus-saturated air that is that prime steam room vibe I had been longing for. I disappeared into the steam, like an angsty gorilla in the mist. It felt good. I sat on that slippery, bacteria-ridden steam room bench, closed my eyes, and tried to pray. For the ten-thousandth time, I prayed that if God could hear me that He/She/It would help me. I was just so tired. Tired of the heaviness. Tired of the doubt. Tired of trying to create a god I could love.
How did I keep slipping back to this place in my head? After nearly losing my faith completely at that altar in 2009, I had experienced a bit of a personal revival. From the verge of a complete burnout in 2010 shortly after our first daughter, Amelie, was born, I had Googled “best spiritual retreats in the world” and found a silent meditation retreat in Assisi, Italy, the home of St. Francis of Assisi. In the hills that Francis used to preach to the animals, God came alive for me again. I had a mystical experience where God felt to me not to be a “something” to believe in or not believe in, but simply that which is. God became infinitely greater and more beautiful than any one religious tradition or people group could envision. He could not truly or accurately be thought of as a “he.” In fact, he could not be truly or accurately thought of at all. Any conception of God would be an object of thought, just as idolatrous as any graven image or golden calf. God, as Infinity itself, could only be experienced directly within THIS moment. The world brimmed with glory. The universe became the very Word of God. God did not limit “himself” to a single sacred text or exclusive group of people. He/She/They/It was the All in All. The infinite Ground of Love and Being.
But in the months that followed my Assisi trip, I slowly began to fall back into old patterns of thought and behavior. In the humdrum of the daily grind, I found that the mystical glory of the world began to slowly fade into “normal” again. This frustrated me, and I tried to up my meditation game in an attempt to fix it. But it seemed like the harder I tried, the worse the problem got.
Now, here I was, two years later trying to pray in a steam room, worse off spiritually than I had been before Assisi! It felt like the core of my being was a tightly wound ball of suffering and contradiction. I didn’t believe that God was a big scary “he” in the sky anymore, but for some reason, I still felt like I had to perform for him. I didn’t believe in hell or think that God would be so petty as to be angry at me for my “sin,” but I still found myself constantly repenting under my breath throughout the day. I wouldn’t have said that I wasn’t worthy of being loved, but I still didn’t feel worthy of being loved.
As I tried to pray, it felt so futile. If there was a God, and he actually answered my prayer, why would he have chosen to answer mine over someone else’s? If there really was some divine being out there that could hear and answer prayers, why would he only approve the request from the privileged, cisgender, fairly light-skinned, straight American dude having an existential crisis in a luxury spa and deny far more important petitions from Syria, Iraq, or one of the people chained up in some psychopath’s basement at that very moment?
Entropy. Death. That’s what really seemed to have the last word in this universe, not love. If God was as good as I had always believed and sang about, how could so much of his creation be so bad?
As I sat there, theologically homeless in that steam room, trying to pray to a God I wasn’t sure existed, I felt hope slipping away. This wasn’t working anymore. Oh well, I was feeling a bit overheated anyway after that long shower. I went to my locker, grabbed the plush, white robe and made my way to what would soon become the ground zero of the final deconstruction of my faith—the place where the most important that in my life would die to make room for THIS—otherwise known as the “relaxation lounge.”
As I entered the relaxation lounge, I was greeted with the faint scent of essential oils and the soothing sounds of spa-appropriate radio. There were four beige leather lounge chairs lined against the wall, all empty. On the left side of the room was a small table topped with packets of herbal tea and a clear plastic liquid dispenser filled with ice water and cucumber slices. I collapsed in one of the beige recliners, closed my eyes, and started to meditate. Meditation had been a big help for me through the last couple of years.
So I sat in that lounge chair focusing on my breath, hoping to feel something again. I don’t know what I was hoping for exactly. Just something. Anything other than this. Nothing changed, though. The angst remained. I pulled my phone out of the pocket of the plush, white bathrobe, not feeling like meditating after all. Perhaps reading something inspiring might help.
Henri Nouwen? Richard Rohr? Eh, too Christian for my mood.
One way I’d recently been tinkering with that annoying theodicy equation in my head (Omnipotent + All good + Omniscient + Sovereign = the Holocaust? ) was through the “all powerful” assumption. I really had been into some of the ideas from the “radical” or “weak God” theologies that people like John D. Caputo, Slavoj Žižek, or Peter Rollins wrote about. In this theology, God is not found as an all-powerful divine king or “Big Other” out there somewhere but as the insistence of a radical, material, political, and love-based faith to be experienced within and for this world. Here, God is found born in a manger, not dwelling in a heavenly palace. The Son of God was not a Caesar, conquering nations with chariots and horses, but a poor man, from an oppressed group of people, who was nailed to a cross, only to say, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?!” The God of radical theology is a small and weak God who is not found, seen, understood, or directly experienced as an object, but rather “found” in the loss of the conceptual idols that would turn God into a something that could be found. It was great stuff.
But I wasn’t in the mood for that either. Honestly, something in all of this nuance and theological sophistication still just felt like some really good humanism trying to hold on to the word God for some reason. Humanism was great, but it couldn’t explain what the hell we are all doing here. It didn’t make sense of the universe for me. It may have given me some clever turns of phrase and a more interesting lens to interpret Bible stories through, but it didn’t give me a God to worship or believe in. But why did I need that?
I needed to know the truth. I needed to know whether reality was good or bad. I needed to know how I could be okay. As lovely as radical theology, or universalism, or mysticism, or any other open-minded, openhearted theology may have been, none of it satisfied my deepest need to understand THIS. What are we doing here? Where did all of this come from? I could use the word God to describe a human experience of love, sure, but that experience was based in what? A meaningless Big Bang followed by innumerable chance collisions? Why bother with all of the God talk then?
No, I didn’t feel like reading any theology. I didn’t think it would help, and it all felt made up anyway. I couldn’t meditate. I couldn’t pray. What else was there?
For some reason, I suddenly recalled a show I’d been watching called Homeland, where one of the main characters converts to Islam. I felt a prick of curiosity.
In my years of attempting to craft a god that could allow me to continue being a worshipper of “God,” I had learned many valuable lessons about spiritual practice and disciplines from various religions along the way. I learned how to wrestle with scriptures from the Jewish tradition; how to love my enemy from the Christian tradition; how to meditate from the Buddhists. I wondered if perhaps there might be some antidote to my individualistic, consumer-based, hyperrational American mind within the Islamic tradition.
As a Christian artist, I had traveled to countries where I had heard the calls to prayer and seen the devotion to righteousness and love of God that so many Islamic people have. I wondered if what I needed was a healthy dose of submission, of humility. Maybe there was som
e key in Islamic practice that could unlock something in my Western, reductionistic, individualistic mind. I tried to recall the words that the guy on Homeland had said while he knelt to the East to pray . . . It was something like, “Allahu achbar.” I wasn’t totally sure what that even meant, but I assumed it was some sort of praise to God. Hell, I’ve got nothing else. I’m desperate. Might as well give it a shot.
I got off the lounge chair and knelt down on the floor, too desperate to give a damn about who might come in and see me or what they might think.
I put my hands up to my ears, like the Caucasian TV actor had done, and bowed to the ground.
“Allahu achbar,” I awkwardly pronounced, really trying to get that back-of-the-throat sound right.
I came back up, hands still up around my ears.
Allahu achhhhbar.
Was I overdoing the phlegmy sound thing?
Back down.
I continued this for a bit, up and down, up and down, until suddenly, something shifted in my perspective. It was as if I could suddenly see what was happening from a different angle, as though I were floating above my body in the room and seeing myself from a third-person perspective.
There he was, that sad and hollow frame of a man on his knees, trying desperately to hold on to his beliefs. So afraid. I felt sorry for him. This poor guy who spends so much of his life talking, writing, and singing about faith, hope, and love, all while his heart is empty. He has tried so desperately to craft a god worth believing in so that he can say that he believes in God and maintain some semblance of his life, but ironically, this effort to hold on is killing him.
This sudden awareness of the absurdity of the situation stopped me in my tracks. I quit trying to appropriate Islam for a moment and just knelt there. What if I just stopped trying to believe in God?