A Commitment to Suffering

How do we get there?

A few weeks ago I had the opportunity to teach a workshop entitled Tap Dance and Empathy Building at the National Museum of Asian Art, a part of the Smithsonian Institution. The participants were an eclectic gathering of museum directors, curators, and programmers who had convened for the Designing for Empathy Summit. In the workshop I used tap dance as a kinesthetic learning tool through which we could physically experience some of the ideas that come up around change. After all, empathy building has to do with change.

If you have a community, and there's no empathy, and you want empathy to be built, that community is going to have to change. There's going to be a big transformation and it's going to be wonderful, but there are some things that are going to happen along the way that might not feel so good. One of the ideas that I'm holding right now is how to walk through change in a way that's so excited about the possibilities of what is to come that any necessary suffering is considered a joy.

This is a big experiment on my part. I have had my fair share of hard things, as I suspect most people have. A friend and executive coach Michael Bungay Stanier likes to say we unlock our greatness by working on hard things. One of the things I'm trying to work out is if the hard things can still be joyful. Can there be such a clear vision of what's to come on the other side of whatever the hard thing is that joy overwhelms the hardness. Joy, as defined by Dallas Willard, is a pervasive sense of wellbeing. Could that be a thing that we experience while we're going through the hard thing?

I want so deeply to believe that that's possible.

There have been moments in my life where that was true but they weren't pervasive. Just glimpses of what going through the hard thing with joy could look like. I wonder if there are things that I can do in my life to help such experiences become more pervasive. If there are, what are they and how can I do them? Wouldn't it be wonderful to always experience a pervasive sense of wellbeing?

Imagine how that might reframe our experience of life, including the hard things. Hard things including the really hard things – like pain, sorrow, and suffering. Now, before I go any further, I need to pause and explain something. Speaking generally about really hard things needs to be done slowly and gently and with consideration for the hardness of those things on whomever may be listening. As we continue here, know that I do not mean to undermine any experience of pain, sorrow, or suffering. They are all hard. In the same note, I feel responsible to offer a vision of life that somehow has the opportunity to transform the pain, sorrow, and suffering that is so common in the world. A vision that sees the kind of pain and suffering experienced in the world as one without hope, or a kind that relies on the strength of individual will to work through it. A vision that can transform such pain and suffering too such a degree that it doesn't look or feel like what it once was. I think this is really possible, but we have to change.

I’m dancing with the participants of the workshop, and we begin to experience the resistance to change so common in kinesthetic learning. We begin to talk about change. If we want change – change that is so dramatic that the new person we become is unrecognizable in the best of ways from the old person that we used to be – there is a kind of death that we experience. What dies is the person we used to be. What goes away is the person who used to think in certain ways or feel certain things or do certain things by nature. They don’t exist anymore. When we start thinking in new ways and feeling in new ways and doing new things without conscious effort, our new person is showing.

To enter into this process we have to want it. It’s easier to kill off an old person that we think of as somehow bad, unhealthy, or evil. But that kind of thinking isn’t necessary to want something gone. There only has to be something better that we are aiming for. Once that something better captures our imagination we are all set. We will quickly learn all the things that are preventing us from experiencing whatever better thing we are aiming for. These things are what provide resistance to change. In Tap Dance Land it shows up in our bodies. Say I want to be able to execute a new step. This requires a formation of thinking and action that I may not have when I first approach the step. As I work out learning the new step there's a part of me that is dying and there's a part of me that is experiencing new life. Ultimately, the part of me that dies is the one that thought that this new step was impossible. The part of me that has new life is the part that has confidence in its ability to do this new thing.

Even deeper, the part of me that dies is the one that only remembers how to do the old things and doesn't think that any new thing is possible. This death is what undergirds the possibility of transformation in a fundamental sense. What is left is a person that banks on new things coming to life. This brings me to the question of a commitment to suffering. If I, for example, am going to commit to a life of transformation, a life that desires this kind of ongoing change, then what I'm actually committing to is a life that will have ongoing deaths, and the suffering that comes with that.

There are at least two roots of this suffering. There is an internal root on account of all the habits of thought and action within me that die hard. There is an external root on account of the fact that when I come to change it upsets the regularity – the habits of thoughts and actions – that others have, instigating cycles of transformation in them that might not have been willfully entered into.

I was sharing this with the participants of my workshop just as they were experiencing the kind of battle that happens as we attempt to get our body to do a new thing. Something that we would like it to do, but it doesn't necessarily want to yet. We began to observe our current context. While some were being challenged by the dancing, no one seemed to be suffering. There were even moments of laughter. The idea came up that we, as a group taking the same workshop, hadn't only entered into a communal commitment to explore or learn something new, we had entered into a commitment to navigate the suffering that comes up when we are trying to change together.

Now, here we were talking about tap dancing so nobody was going to get really hurt, except maybe some bruised pride or ego. The deeper thing that undergirds this communal commitment to navigate suffering is the idea that nothing is going to change unless something passes away. If we want entire communities to transform, to change, to become new, there is need for a deep communal commitment to be willing to walk through the suffering that will happen. To do it together and support one another for the sake of whatever the new thing might be.

Jesus

In a way Jesus models this for us. It took me a long time before I began to see some of the important aspects of the way that Jesus models transformation. In times of old the language of death around Christian transformation was much more common than it is today. On my bookshelf I have a book called the Mortification of Sin by John Owen. It seems like the old cats weren't afraid of going to battle and desiring to kill the things that were identified with the bad tree in their person.

The story of Jesus embodies one of suffering in the imagery and reality of the cross. The cross is a symbol of death, and yet central to the proposition of life that Jesus calls his followers to. Theologically the cross has taken on many meanings, but its relationship to death is undebatable. The cross isn’t just something that happened to Jesus either. Jesus, himself, proposes that each one of us are to take up our own cross and follow him. What I think Jesus is asking us to do is to take up the things in us that need to die and follow him. When we follow Jesus, where are we going? Of course, there is heaven. The new life. Eternal communion with God. What about now? The new birth. The birth from above. Resurrection life. With God here and now.

I believe there is a real possibility of experiencing the with God life here and now. I also think the process is pretty clear. Before resurrection life there is the cross. That means that part of our journey toward a fullness of life with God is being willing to consciously do what is necessary for us to get to our cross. Now, the cross brings with it pain, sorrow, and suffering. And yet, we are called towards it. There are those who would say that the cross is beautiful. They lean on the expression of love it embodies. They are not wrong, but portraying the cross as beautiful risks the romanticization of death. There is little to romanticize about death unless our vision for what comes after is clear.

What kind of vision of life do we need to have for us to willingly go to our cross? The answer to these kinds of questions are quite personal, and may be specifically designed for the ears of each one of us. Our visions of what happens after parts of the evil within us is put death can literally inspire us to take up our crosses and follow Jesus. I’m the kind of person that would much rather sleep all day than do the hard things, but I would not have become the tap dancer that I am without doing some really hard things. How much more true should that be for the shaping of my person?

To be sure, the way with which we pursue a vision of a life with God here and now is not the same as training to become a high performance athlete or performing artists. While the amount of effort and discipline might be similar, it is qualitatively different. Functionally because we can't change who we are through direct effort. There is an inner work that only God can do through grace. We can position ourselves in ways that allow us to be more available to be worked on by our maker. Again, we don't do this in a way to say, “Well I'm doing more my part, God, why aren't you doing yours?” We do this in a way with God. We do this in a way that honors our position as a child in some very real senses, and as an adult in some very real senses. As a child in our limited abilities and in our desire for the fulfillment of real needs that only God provide. As an adult as someone who is capable and able to respond to the desires of our heart in ways that draw us closer to God. But coming to honor and live in these positions in a consistent way may be a change for us. Maybe even a transformation from someone who thinks and acts inordinately to someone who listens closely to the still small voice. Someone who enters into the sacrifice of communication – with God and others – that brings with it vulnerability and exposure for the sake of the formative relationship that may come of it.

All of this is change. All of this is learning. All of this can be undergirded by a joy for what’s to come. And that, just that, might change the way we experience the pains, sorrows, and sufferings that accompany many a transformation.

This is admittedly a more focused Note than I've had in the past. I honestly don't know how else to address the ideas of transformation appropriately without bringing up the ideas proposed by Jesus. Even then, doing what I can to just restate the case Jesus presents. My hope in doing this is not to undermine or set aside anyone else's spirituality. It is rather to give voice to the spirituality that has most deeply shaped me – and continues to.

If you’d like to continue the conversation, become a paying subscriber, and join me in this week’s installment of Asking the Questions.