Pain, Suffering, Refuge: Part 1
Thoughts about the hard times, by Jude.
My family didn’t have a whole lot of money growing up. Though we never wanted for any necessities – we always had food, clothing, shelter, and presents under the Christmas tree – I did sometimes long for things we didn’t have. I remember going to the grocery store baking aisle, where they have all the gear for your kitchen, and daydreaming about copper pots, wooden spoons, and fancy salt and pepper shakers.
Back at our old school, my siblings and I brought our lunch in brown paper bags. Without fail, lunch consisted of Oscar Meyer ham and Kraft cheese singles with a little Gulden’s mustard or, in extra lean times, just plain old peanut butter and jelly (which I preferred). I would look across the table and see so many kids with lunchboxes filled not only with sandwiches, but snacks, vegetables, and a drink. It always made me a little jealous.
In the late 1980s we moved out of the brick row home in northeast Philadelphia to the lush green suburbs of North Hills. It was only a couple miles past the city limits, but to my young eyes it might as well have been hundreds of miles deep in the boondocks. Our house seemed enormous (compared to a brick row home) and even had an attic. We had a side yard bigger than the footprint of the house itself with two large trees, one of which was a silver maple that had to be over two hundred years old. And to top it off, my dad bought a brand-new Chevy Corsica to park on our long, uphill driveway.
The first time I washed my hands at the kitchen sink in the new house, I knew we had moved up in the world. Back in our old house, we only ever washed our hands with Dawn dish detergent or a bar of Zest. But here, the previous owners had left a bottle of Soft Soap with a hand pump, something I had never seen before. When I rubbed my hands together and that scent hit my senses, I closed my eyes and inhaled, breathing it all in. I thought, “Wow, this is real rich people stuff.”
The lunchbox
One night, before my first day of sixth grade at the new school, I saw a display of lunchboxes while grocery shopping with my dad. They had so many with all kinds of designs on them - Transformers, GI Joe, My Little Pony, Strawberry Shortcake. They all seemed a bit too babyish for me, but I needed a lunchbox to finally fit in.
After a few minutes, I found one: bright red, a picture of two soldiers in high-tech suits, emblazoned with the logo for Laser Tag. By the late 80s, Laser Tag had lost its popularity, but as the least childish design in stock, I begged my dad to buy it. He obliged and got it for me.
On my first day of class I fought off the butterflies by thinking how it would be great to have my very own lunchbox like everyone else.
I arrived first at our designated table. I proudly set up my lunchbox including a Kool-Aid-filled thermos whose lid could be used as a cup (I thought this was so clever). I poured my drink, took my sandwich out of a Ziploc bag, and held it in both hands getting ready to take a bite.
Just then six boys sat in synchronized motion and set down their six crinkled paper bags, sneering.
And I never again brought my lunchbox to school.
The suffering is real
We are all lucky for having survived middle school, and none of us leaves unscathed. Bullying peaks, and with it so does stress and isolation. I remember sitting in the living room chair, feeling the crown of my head to find the hairs sticking straight up from my cowlick, and plucking them out, hating myself. I must have pulled out a lot because my dad got concerned about this bald spot that suddenly appeared. I don't think I told him I did it. I probably just shrugged and said, “I don't know.”
You would think since this all happened in a Catholic school there would be some refuge. They told us to love our enemy, pray for them, have compassion, and turn the other cheek. That all sounds right and logical, but there’s danger in teaching this to middle school kids without any context or without helping them build other skills. We say, “bear your cross” but they hear, “bury your pain.” Man, I bore that cross with dignity, but the pain I buried caused problems for years.
After a long time searching, it all clicked in my early thirties. I had been out of seminary for over a decade, floating around trying all manner of ways to ease the suffering, and ultimately found myself in San Diego listening to a podcast that blew my mind.
Here’s the short version: Siddhartha Gautama lived as a prince 2500 years ago, living a life of luxury inside his palace walls. As a young man, he went outside the palace for the first time and saw what Buddhism calls the Three Heavenly Messengers: sickness, old age, and death, the inevitable suffering of any life. Seeing the reality of the world, Siddhartha vowed to leave the palace and devote his life to ending suffering.
He explored every spiritual tradition in India and, after years of searching without success, he sat below the Bodhi Tree and resolved not to move until he learned how to end suffering. That night, Siddhartha attained enlightenment, became The Buddha, and got up to teach what he learned. And the first thing he taught was the Four Noble Truths: The truth of suffering, the truth of the cause of suffering, the truth of the end of suffering, and the truth of the path to the end of suffering.
I heard this and exclaimed, “Yes! This is it! Life sucks! Now tell me how to fix it!” I wanted to skip right over the first truth and get to the meat of it, to get the quick answers, become enlightened as soon as possible, and not deal with this crap anymore.
I mean, the First Noble Truth is pretty simple, like, “Life is hard, thanks.” But consider it. Yes, everyone suffers, and yes, you suffer. That means this is just the way things are, and there is nothing wrong with you. It is just a thing that happens. There’s nothing broken; there is nothing to fix. This truth is like validation from the cosmos that what you feel is real and universal, and you are not crazy. Suffering is not okay, but you are okay.
Isn’t that great?
We have control
This is where I usually lose people. I’ve often heard things like, “The Catholics are always talking about sin, and the Buddhists are always talking about suffering. You are such a drag.” I get why they think that, and if I’m being honest, sometimes it is a drag. However, all this talk of sin and suffering might just boil down to bad translation.
The earliest Buddhists teachings are written in the ancient language of Pali, a predecessor to Sanskrit, where the word often translated as “suffering” in English is dukkha. But this word dukkha has more of a connotation of a bad wheel, like an axel being off-center. So, it’s not “suffering” in a fire-and-brimstone-hellscape sort of way. It’s more about a feeling that something just ain’t right.
It’s also important to see there is a difference between pain and suffering. Pain is the hurtful thing that happens in the moment (the kids laughing at me because I had a Laser Tag lunchbox). Suffering is the story we carry with ourselves about the pain (believing myself to be a stupid loser for being so childish).
In other words, we oftentimes don't have much control over the circumstances that cause pain. But we do have control when it comes to our suffering. We can't choose our circumstances, but we can choose how we react to them. And you can only do that if you are aware you are suffering in the first place.
When we can’t tell the difference between pain and suffering – that is, the difference between circumstances and our reaction – we tend to live our lives from a script written into our minds years (or decades!) earlier. We wrote the first drafts of those scripts at a young age when we couldn’t understand what was happening or how we should respond. Over time, we unconsciously play them out, rehearsing the scripts over and over again until adaptive behaviors become dysfunctional habits. Those behaviors may have worked for us at six years old, but at forty-six, perhaps they’re not so beneficial.
Without awareness, we come to believe this is just who we are. Worse yet, as the suffering continues, we come to believe there is something wrong with us.
Experiencing pain is a condition of being alive. Acknowledging suffering is something we must learn. Once our eyes open to the truth that pain and suffering are two distinct things, we can hold them with tolerance and compassion rather than fear or aversion. And that’s when we begin to understand why we are suffering in the first place.
This is a work of fiction based on actual events.
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