The path of descent is the path of transformation. Darkness, failure, relapse, death, and woundedness are our primary teachers, rather than ideas or doctrines.
Richard Rohr
Only masochists enjoy pain, I m not one but I think the idea is that for this group of people there’s some ‘wiring’ that causes them to get pleasure from pain. principally as I understand it they get sexual pleasure but like many terms Masochism these days seems to have generalised to mean getting any kind of pleasure from any kind of pain.
If there was one truth I could change so it was no longer true it would be the above quote from Richard Rohr, Franciscan Priest, Author and general trouble maker for Christians who are not keen on change.
I don’t like pain and suffering especially if it’s mine. I also don’t like other peoples pain and suffering and have spent a fair bit of my life trying to alleviate those things for other people. While as far as I can tell I honestly don’t like other people to experiences pain and suffering it is sadly also true that I am able to, and frequently do manage to block out from my consciousness the suffering of other people.
I still remember those old World Vision ads that featured starving children staring into the camera unable to speak and just days away from death through starvation. One such story in particular effected me deeply. It was on some kind of show like 60 minutes and was about the famine in Kampuchea (now called Cambodia). It showed a mother and daughter laying on a mat on the dusty ground in a tent without walls. The reporter attempted a question through an interpreter but neither mother or daughter could reply. Their eyes were sunken back into their heads, faces covered with flies and a look on their faces that was both blank and yet full of emotion. Sounds contradictory I know but that’s what I saw
The next day the same reporter and camera person came back to see the mother and daughter only to find the little girl had died during the night. The mother, still alive and powerless to help had lost her precious little one to nothing other than hunger. It may have been the plate of food I’d half eaten and planned to throw out while watching this tragedy but whatever it was I felt a wave grief wash through me from head to toe. Back and forth the wave continued unit I couldn’t bear any more. So I changed the channel, that’s how I chose to act, I just changed the channel.
Around that time I was also a bit of a singer songwriter performing at little coffee shops and festivals mostly writing songs a bit like this blog actually, just things that stuck in my mind. I guess changing channels didn’t erase the picture of that mother and her little girl from my mind as thoroughly as I’d hoped so the following day I penned a new song I called Kampuchean Baby. Truthfully I think I was just trying to make the images stop filling my mind and perhaps writing about it would make that happen. I so wanted that mother and daughter to be out of my thoughts, to stop effecting me and let me move on with my safe and privileged life. It didn’t work, not even now have those feelings gone and sitting in this cafe writing about it still causes a tear or two in my eyes. Just a couple, it’s not as intense as it once was but it’s still there and still effects me.
It’s been years since I’ve performed that or any song but I still remember the lyrics. The opening line of that song says:
A child’s eyes reach out to mine, it causes me to weep, not a tear runs down her face, she’s drained of energy. Starving child, gluttonous west, I can’t reconcile the two, it asks a vital question of me, does it do the same for you
Kampuchean Baby, RD
“It asks a vital question of me..” In retrospect that is the key thought in that song, it’s what I took away from that experience then and is still the thing that causes the emotional response in me decades later. The song finishes with the repeating refrain “Kampuchean Baby, you’re just a memory. I think I was wrong back then. When I wrote that lyric I meant that the little girl was ‘merely’ a memory as though she was now less than she was and as the memory of her faded the impact of her life and death also faded. It’s true that the emotion has faded, I am no longer haunted by it, I am not effected every day and in truth only rarely in times like this when I make the effort to remember her are my emotions stirred. The more I write about her, the more I think about her the more she takes over me. Decades after a little girl with no name, no home, no food and no hope she is still alive staring at me asking me a ‘vital question’. How is it possible that long after she disappeared I am still reaching for the serviette that came with my coffee to wipe my eyes and blow my nose. Why is her pain and suffering reaching across continents, culture and circumstances. How does a stranger to me who left no visible mark on the world still reach across time deep into my heart or soul or spirit or what ever it is that can’t stop crying in this bloody cafe drinking a bloody coffee the cost of which would have saved her life and her mothers life.
That question, the ‘vital question of me’ is how she reaches out and how in a very real way is still alive and it’s how she is leaving a mark on the world. The vital question she asked me then and continues to ask me now is as simple as it is devastating. ‘Do I matter?..’ I can hear my mind quickly answer ‘of course you..’ but I’m interrupted by her only to ask again “Do I matter?’. Again my mind try’s to answer in a millisecond but again she interrupts, “Do I matter?”
Now the lady at the table across from me is trying not to stare at this emotional wreck of a coffee drinker. I don’t care, she can stare, all I want to do is be allowed to answer the question so her face will go away and leave me be in my cafe, with my coffee, my family, my money, my friends and my own problems.
It’s taking a very long time to understand her question “Do I matter?..’ and even longer to understand why the answer will never be true and honest if it is given in words.
‘Do I matter?’ resonates through time and all the other barriers is has to pass through to get to me not because one little girl is asking it of herself. The most disturbing thing about that Kampuchean Baby is she isn’t asking for her self, she is long past being helped. Even with just hours of her life to go, a life that has only known suffering, even then she is reaching out to help me, a person with little suffering to perhaps consider not changing channels any more. Not coping with other peoples pain and suffering by blocking it out but letting it in, even welcoming it when it comes to the door. Even more difficult, she is also asking that question on my behalf, ‘Do I matter?’ and just as she won’t say “Of course you matter it turns out she won’t let me give some fast glib, social media “Self Care Meme’ kind of answer leading to signing up to some expensive weekend retreat to do a bit of ‘self care’.
I have nothing against those weekends, or my coffee and it isn’t about posting that quote, “Live Simply so others can Simply Live” although when Ghandi said that he had a point and I agree with his point and I think I should revisit it more than I do.
Thats not the thing that is ricocheting around my soul. The point is, the answer to the question, at least my answer is given through welcoming other people, their circumstances and struggles, their pain and suffering and yes their joy through my self protective front door an visit, perhaps even stay a while.
This morning something good happened to me as I welcomed her into into my life again. Instead of the judgement I feared from seeing her again I’ve found myself feeling glad to see her and remember her. Just as important she has once again helped me move forward and perhaps that’s the deepest lesson of all. I cannot move forward if I cannot welcome all that comes to my door, even the exquisitely painful memories that the ‘pursuit of happiness’ teaches us to block out.
“There are so many ways of being despicable it quite makes one’s head spin. But the way to be really despicable is to be contemptuous of other people’s pain.”
James Baldwin, Author and Civil Rights Activist
There is always a very delicate interplay between individual actions and institutional conditions. But there is no such thing as institutional conditions without any individual actions and no such thing as individual action without institutional conditions. So there is always personal responsibility.
Dr Cornell West