Facing Sufering. Roberto Badenas

Facing Sufering - Roberto Badenas


Скачать книгу
raise the question of the meaning of suffering, but they don’t really answer it. The heroes of the Iliad and the Odyssey live in an environment of fatalistic pessimism, enveloped in a permanent feeling of sadness. They believe that they will wander this earth for only a short time, and that later they will be taken to Hades, where an uncertain and gloomy fate awaits them. Their lives have no meaning. Not even the gods can alter the misfortunes of fate or chance. For the ancient Greeks, fate was a force greater than that of the gods themselves. Its power was especially feared, because it was believed to affect the human condition in an inexorable way. Both Greek mythology and literature taught the futility of trying to change the course of things, since destiny is predetermined before the birth of each individual, so that it can even be foretold by oracles and omens. This belief pervades Greco-Latin mentality to such an extent that Greek tragedy consists of describing how anyone who dares to defy his destiny or social order is punished with madness or death.

      Denial of Pain

      There is a lot that is positive about some self-control techniques. However, while some serenity practices can relieve certain kinds of pain, mostly physical pain, it doesn’t always work for emotional suffering, others’ or our own. Denying its existence does not eliminate it. Some practices of “diversion of attention” remind me of the case of a smoker that a doctor friend of mine told me about: He was so terrified about what he had read in a newspaper article about the harmful effects of tobacco, that from that day on he stopped reading the newspaper…. And one asks oneself if, long-term, it is beneficial for the human being to become insensitive, particularly to the suffering of others.

      Resignation to Fate

      Various traditions teach their followers not to rebel against misfortune. They believe that it is always a result of personal faults or divine will. As an example, they often use individuals affected by sexually transmitted diseases due to lifestyle choices. For them, suffering is a direct result of specific transgressions, although the guilty person may not be aware of them. In a way, it is the fatalistic idea of Insha’Allah, which in many cultures is rooted in a religious education of blame. If a child falls trying to reach a jar of jam in the kitchen cupboard, there are parents who will say: “It is God’s punishment. You have disobeyed your mother and that is your punishment. You deserve it.” And so the child ends up believing that every form of suffering comes from direct—and divine—sanction of their faults.

      Rebellion

      But the idea that human suffering is due to divine punishment makes us rebel. As a neighbor of mine once said: “They say that God makes those who He loves the most suffer, but I’d rather He left me alone. What could I have done to Him so that He would give me such a difficult daughter?”

      In my pastoral ministry, I have heard many reactions to painful situations:

      “How can God allow my baby to suffer?”

      “What wrong have I done to have cancer? I’ve always attended church…. I don’t think I’m any worse than my friends, but everything is going well for them.”

      “Why does God allow children to die in wars?”

      “How am I going to have an operation to remove this tumor if maybe God sent it to me?”

      In secular societies, loss of faith, trust in medicine as the solution for everything, and the utopian dream of a world in which science one day eradicates pain, have led many people to stop looking for answers in philosophy and religion to the problem of suffering. Most end up ignoring the enigmatic dimension of the issue and look elsewhere.

      Emotional Suffering

      From the point of view of bioethics, pain is usually distinguished—with reason—from suffering. If pain can be fought at all costs, suffering does not have the same possibilities for therapeutic treatment because the circumstances that produce it cannot be modified with concrete formulas. The doctor may not know the suffering that a given situation causes for a particular patient and may limit the treatments to merely symptomatic ones. And the patient may make incorrect personal decisions that counter the effects of any therapy.

      Given the complexity of the task, medicine continues to seek out new resources for fighting or relieving different kinds of pain. Among other things, it has been found that a number of physical ailments proceed, at least in part, from unhealthy attitudes about life and, in particular, from unresolved emotional problems. Unlike physical pain, mental suffering does not come from accidents or disease states. It arises, most of the time, from the conflict between our desires and reality: the death of a loved one; the loss of a job; reduced faculties due to an illness, accident or decrepitude; emotional wounds due to a divorce or a breakup; etc. This kind of suffering is caused by our physical limitations (we find ourselves deformed, diminished, or elderly), our social disadvantages (we feel excluded because of our gender, race, nationality, marital status…

      ), our financial difficulties (debts or troubles), our emotional problems (a betrayal or rejection), and so on.

      This anxiety grows when we are faced with barriers, sometimes insurmountable, that are between us and our hopes and dreams. As John Lennon used to sing in Beautiful Boy, “life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans.” Emotional suffering emerges from painful situations for which we cannot find a solution: guilt from wrongs that cannot be righted; unrequited love; feeling hopeless because it is too late to change a fault; feeling powerless at the death of a loved one; feeling despair at the proximity of one’s own death; etc.

      Emotional suffering is inevitable in an unjust world. And deeply human. We could almost say that it is sane and positive to feel it, because it comes from some of the best abilities of a person: sensitivity and compassion. It is part of our humanity. It would be inhuman to remain insensitive to injustices or misfortunes, whether they are others’ or ours own.

      Anxiety, stress, and depression


Скачать книгу