Weep, Scream, and Pray

   I’ve been to prison, institutionalized twice in the mental ward, been to rehab and halfway houses, so I’ve been around. Plus there’s more than a few demons glaring wickedly at me somewhere in the darkness from my childhood past. But the two real traumas both happened to me in the same year. I was 12. First I realized that I -me, specifically, jonathan- would die. The days became too precious - horribly fragile in its transience as I scrambled to note and suck dry every moment of sunshine and wonder. 

    Equally serious, I learned about suffering. Not my own, which was and still is, petty. I’m talking real suffering, real evil, the type that pokes ribs out and stretches them macabrely over the starving flesh of wide eyed children. Its the type of trauma that pitches into ones essence, cracks open a space, and lets a new person be born, after killing the first ‘you’.

    I remember rushing into my parents room, allowance money clenched in my fist, to tell my father this astonishing news. Laying in bed, watching tv, he laconically told me he knew. I waved the money at him, we have to do something! Without turning his bleary eyes from the tv he lazily told me its better to spend it on myself. “Buy something that will make you HAPPY.” Later my grandfather would tell me the same. Of course it’d simply warm the cockles of my heart if, say, children ceased bleeding to death, or drinking poisoned water, or had food in those terribly distended belly’s. It’s possible. Don’t cynically smile, like they did. If we fought the temptation to buy the new iphone, and pooled our resources, it can happen. Tomorrow the entire world could eat...but the new ipad has an app for indifference...

    So my youth was an attempt to accept this world of discord and bloody strife. Enter Buddhism. It preached acceptance and I studied it fervently. It didn't work. In fact it turned out to morally be a savagely monstrous philosophy. Suffering is an illusion they said. Not too long ago I counseled a 12 yr old boy. He had, in addition to the run of the mill sexual abuse, been raped by the large family pet for the amusement of his parents and a few neighbors. What soulless individual with a kind wise smile could possibly look into his savaged eyes and tell him it was all really a dream and that he only needed to realize it and wake up to the truth...

    And I gave the shoes right off my feet to a homeless man, and scrounged pennies off the street to send to Ethiopia hopefully extending a child’s life another day or two. And I marveled with horror that the people around me would rather spend ten bucks at the movies than save a child tormented by hunger and disease. So that, eventually, I had a nervous breakdown. One day I came home from work and saw the same diseased cat, hair falling out, trying to warm itself in the bitter cold. I burst into tears and found I could not stop crying.

    The solution was obvious - since I was unable to accept evil, I would simply have to learn to love evil. I read the self-acclaimed ‘metaphysician of evil’ Georges Bataille. I learned to laugh, with 

Comte de Lautréamont, at a tender babes slashed face. The nihilists taught me the joys of pushing an old lady down the stairs for sheer aesthetic enjoyment. The rush of pleasure at abandoning oneself to chaos and violence. No longer would my conscience interfere, I cut off my ties to that tyrant with the numbing comfort of drugs and alcohol. I loved pollution. The thought of entire species, miraculous marvels of evolution that had existed on this planet for hundreds of thousands of years being wiped off the face of the earth so people might have pretty furniture, thrilled me with it's astonishing narcissism. And with Sade, I too longed to construct a giant mirror to focus the sun’s rays on this miserable planet, and put an end to this criminal abomination called humanity.

      Eventually I cracked. Broken and soul-dead on a concrete prison floor I still disdained to ask His help. Besides, I didn’t want to live. I ended up in a 12 step program for my drug and alcohol problem. I was too far gone to resist. Mechanically, without hope, I did what they told me to. For two years I prayed every day and night without belief. I was open minded though. I stood defiant against the world and the big cruel world cracked me open just enough to let a little light in.

       Meanwhile I studied every religion, philosophy, and spirituality from Shinto to Shaman. It was good old Epictetus and the stoics who got me through prison life, but once again the wickedness of the world seeped in and I could no longer plug my ears to  the cries and lamentations of the suffering.

    What can I say? I didn’t work for it exactly. The only thing I did was clear away enough prejudice and crap in my soul to make a clean open patch just big enough for some new ways of thinking to alight upon and take root. I woke up one day and believed. It was gifted to me to know God, in my own imperfect flawed way.

   Today I am Orthodox Christian. I suppose it is a comfort, though one mean and strange, to think of God suffering with me, howling in outrage at the scandal of sickness, and even starving to death right beside all those masses of shivering hungry little bodies in Ethiopia. And yet.... 

     Thats not good enough. I’ve had an endless line of shrinks and friends tell me the purpose of life is to be happy! Sweet Lord what satanic hubris would it take for a human being to be happy in the midst of hundreds and hundreds of millions of men, women, children, tortured by the endless macabre parade of ills every second devouring their well being! A more thoroughly immoral philosophy I have yet to come across than the 'way of happiness'.

     Why am I a Christian? It is because I find it impossible to live intelligently and sensitively on this planet without recourse to the only three things a sensible person can do in the face of so much nightmarish horror : to live I need to weep, scream, and pray. It is with Christ that all three come most naturally. One day I hope to learn how to love.

    I’d like to end this essay on a wise, hopeful quote concerning evil and suffering, but I have none. One cannot be reconciled to evil in any sense and remain a morally acceptable person.