To see how faith might be preserved, let us look at it closely. Faith's characteristics can be described symbolically in terms of three spiritual qualities: light, truth, and love. In practice these correspond to awareness, self-honesty, and compassion.
There is no spiritual life without awareness. Awareness is the ability to see one's own thoughts. It is the ability to know oneself as separate from others, which means seeing others' concerns as well as one's own. It is the knowledge of where one's own self ends and others begin. It is the capacity to sift reality from illusion, to recognize deception and self-deception, to tell the true from the false. It is consciousness of the world that exists beyond the boundaries of one's own self, one's own needs, sensations, interests, and desires. Without awareness the higher spiritual qualities, such as faith and love, could not be realized. If we were always in a state of sleep, or wrapped up in dreams and fantasies, we could not see the separate existence of others. We could not love them or have compassion for them. We could also have no knowledge of the deeper strength, presence, and love within ourselves and beyond ourselves that might witness God's presence to us.
Without awareness there could be no faith - and without suffering, there could be no awareness. Without suffering we would never come to know any reality outside ourselves. We would know nothing outside our own pleasant sensations. We begin life tied to another person, mother, whom at first we do not recognize as a separate being. If she could always perfectly fulfill every one of our needs, we would never come to know her as anything more than an extension of ourselves. Our "ego" in the strict psychological sense, which is our sense of ourselves in relation to others, develops precisely because mother cannot always satisfy our needs. The mother who is "good enough" (Winnicott) does fail to meet her child's needs, but gradually over a period of time, failing just enough to enable the child to grow but not so much as to destroy the child's faith (trust) in an orderly world. Eventually the child recognizes its mother as a separate person, with needs of her own. As the child grows older it learns to love her not just as someone who provides care but as an individual in her own right. Our very early experiences teach us to see others as separate from ourselves, showing us that their wills do not always coincide with our own. Without this elementary awareness we could not perceive the individuality of others, and for this very reason we would be unable to love them.
This awareness is born in suffering: the suffering of experiencing needs that are not met, of breaking the symbiotic tie with mother, of exploring the wider world and confronting the fear this separation produces, of experiencing a similar separation from others. Seeing others as separate individuals, with different wills and different needs, is both a cause of suffering and essential to love.
Any experience of suffering, even beyond these childhood separations, has the potential to increase our awareness. Suffering drives us out of our hiding places; it pries us loose from our most cherished illusions. It makes us question; it makes us search for a higher meaning in life that makes life worthwhile in spite of our pain. If we respond well to suffering, it makes us more aware of ourselves; it makes us examine and question ourselves, thus deepening our self-knowledge. It tests our limits, often revealing in us strengths we might otherwise never have discovered. All this is not to make excuses for suffering or even to call it good, but to point out the role it plays in our growth.
Only through suffering can we discover the strengths we really have. This does not come about, however, simply through the experience of having suffered. If we are willing to face our pain and the fears that surround it, without asking for immediate solace but seeking only to increase our awareness of ourselves and the meaning of our situation, then we have the possibility of self-discovery, growth, and even faith. To approach suffering without demands but only with a search for awareness is in fact a prayer. In this prayer we surrender our own will and become open to what the experience has to reveal to us.
Suffering produces endurance. Suffering makes us not only discover but practice our strengths, even if the only strength we possess at the moment is to endure what we are facing without trying to make it magically disappear. "Enduring" in this context does not mean passively feeling our pain with no sense of hope. It is a positive response to suffering that allows it to be, lives with it, tries neither to escape nor deny it, but does seek to become aware of all the hidden issues that extreme pain inevitably raises. This already is faith. It is an openness to revelation, even if there is no confidence that this revelation will come or that when it does come it will bring a redeeming message. This is dark faith, the deepest and most difficult kind of faith.
Dark faith does not try to strike bargains with God or seek the false solace of martyrdom. It just wants to see what is there to be seen, and waits for it to speak.
Endurance produces character. By not expecting immediate comfort, but through the willingness to live with our struggles, we discover our spiritual strengths.
While awareness of ourselves and others is a prerequisite for love, it is never perfect. We all have illusions and ignorance carried over from our earliest years. If we are receptive, suffering makes us aware of them. It brings to the surface lost pieces of ourselves, memories, unresolved conflicts and grievances, archaic fears, that need reclamation and healing. The awareness that results from suffering, if we meet it without being destroyed by it, can make us more resilient, more resourceful, and more compassionate.
Character produces hope. The very fact that this process of awareness, self-discovery, and strengthening of our character takes place is evidence that our world is not total chaos, that a certain wisdom and guidance are available to us, and that perhaps there really is an Ultimate Order.
Awareness directed towards the self becomes self-honesty. Self-honesty is the practical application of the quality of truth. Truth is the correct perception of reality, including our own thoughts and experiences, and also the deeper spiritual qualities (awareness, inner strength and guidance, compassion and love) that give life its meaning.
Self-honesty is the cultivation of truth within oneself. It is the resolve to become aware of one's own self-deception. It is the willingness to question oneself when confronted by the possibility that one might be wrong. It is the willingness to examine oneself, to admit to oneself exactly what one may be thinking or feeling. It is a refusal to be comforted by platitudes or placated by clichés. It is an allegiance to the truth in all its forms.
Truth is not some abstract notion that God exists or that the universe would appear to us as perfect if only we understood it. If our ideas about God do not penetrate to the core of our experience as we live it, then they have no meaning. Truth is radical honesty with ourselves. Truth is the willingness to admit to ourselves that we are lacking in faith, if in fact we find our faith wanting when we need it most. Truth is the willingness to question any false idea of God we may have cherished but that has failed to save us. Truth is the refusal to rely on sources of authority we cannot verify for ourselves in our own daily experience and struggle for spiritual growth. Truth therefore implies courage, since it is a lack of courage that drives us toward false sources of consolation, ideas and objects that would console us by masking our awareness of the truth. As a spiritual quality, courage is the resolve to live with the truth, to face what must be faced, to accept our responsibilities, even if doing so means that for a while we must live with pain and fear rather than the easy consolation that comes from believing in our wishes.
Self-honesty makes prayer sincere, which in turn makes it effective. We find an instructive example in the life of the prophet Jeremiah, at a time when he was struggling with his own crisis of faith. It was Jeremiah's burden to deliver a message of warning to a corrupt people about whom he cared deeply. This was an act of love, but the people answered him with a deep, personal hatred. Rejection by his own people tore at Jeremiah's heart and threw him into despair. And so Jeremiah prays, a prayer that is rather astonishing:
Woe is me, my mother, that you ever bore me, a man of strife and contention to the whole land! I have not lent, nor have I borrowed, yet all of them curse me....
O Lord, you know; remember me and visit me, and bring down retribution for me on my persecutors. In your forbearance do not take me away; know that on your account I suffer insult.
Your words were found, and I ate them, and your words became to me a joy and the delight of my heart; for I am called by your name, O Lord, God of hosts.
I did not sit in the company of merrymakers, nor did I rejoice; under the weight of your hand I sat alone, for you had filled me with indignation.
Why is my pain unceasing, my wound incurable, refusing to be healed? Truly, you are to me like a deceitful brook, like waters that fail.
Therefore thus says the Lord: If you turn back, I will take you back, and you shall stand before me. If you utter what is precious, and not what is worthless, you shall serve as my mouth. It is they who will turn to you, not you who will turn to them.
And I will make you to this people a fortified wall of bronze; they will fight against you, but they shall not prevail over you, for I am with you to save you and deliver you, says the Lord.
Jeremiah 15:10, 15-20)
This prayer is worth a close look, because it is not the kind of prayer one would expect from an enlightened or holy man, and yet it receives an answer.
In this prayer Jeremiah complains. He is angry. He exhibits self-pity. He expresses hopelessness. He accuses God of betrayal. And God answers him!
Whatever else this prayer may express, it has one overriding quality: self-honesty. Jeremiah does not say what he thinks God wants to hear, what would make him sound pious, or what would conform to most expectations of a religious man. Nor does he petition God for favors. He says only what is in his heart. If he cannot praise God, he doesn't. If he is angry, so be it. He does not rush to be consoled. He asks, "Why is my pain unceasing?" He does not say, "Please take away my pain." Jeremiah chooses honesty over the appearance of spirituality - and the result is a surprisingly spiritual prayer!
What does it mean to say God answers? The answer is given as if it were a heavenly voice actually speaking to Jeremiah. Most likely, it was an inner sense of assurance that could take on words, and that Jeremiah knew came from beyond himself. That is how prayers are often answered. And if prayers have two qualities - honesty and love - they will be answered. Jeremiah was completely honest about what he thought and felt, and was torn by love for his people, who he saw were destroying themselves.
How can we understand this response to prayer, particularly when so many prayers that are phrased just right, with good, respectful, religious language, seem to go unanswered? A prayer that expresses divine qualities will draw a response from the divine. When God's nature is in any way reflected in us, it draws God's presence like a magnet. This is a spiritual principle: the Kingdom of God is neither "in heaven" nor simply "within you": it is both. When divine qualities become visible in our hearts and in our souls, God does also. And we know it.
The divine qualities Jeremiah expressed in his prayer are truth and love. When we are truthful with ourselves we come closer to God - even though we may hardly suspect it. By facing his despair honestly and by being willing to live with it, Jeremiah discovered within himself an endurance and courage that enabled him to become a source of strength to those few who were looking for someone like him to give them guidance in a time of crisis. Meanwhile Jeremiah knew that his guidance came from a source far greater than his own limited perception.
There is another great figure of the Bible who was saved by his allegiance to the truth. His name was Job, and he himself became a symbol for the problem of suffering. At the beginning of his story the devil's witnesses are very much in evidence, and they are powerful: Job, who was rich and prominent in his community, first loses his possessions, then his children, then finally his health. His body covered with painful sores, all he can do is sit among the ashes scraping himself to find relief. His wife represents the temptation to lose faith completely and give in to despair: she tells him to "Curse God, and die" (Job 2:9). And Job almost gives in. He curses the day of his birth, lamenting that it would have been better for him had he never left his mother's womb. He questions and doubts the God in whom he once fervently believed. He protests his innocence, but without hope of getting any response. He condemns God as cruel and immoral:
Though I am innocent, I cannot answer him;
I must appeal for mercy to my accuser.
If I summoned him and he answered me,
I do not believe that he would listen to my voice.
For he crushes me with a tempest,
and multiplies my wounds without cause;
he will not let me get my breath,
but fills me with bitterness.
If it is a contest of strength, he is the strong one!
If it is a matter of justice, who can summon him?
Though I am innocent, my own mouth would condemn me;
though I am blameless, he would prove me perverse.
I am blameless; I do not know myself;
I loathe my life.
It is all one; therefore I say,
he destroys both the blameless and the wicked.
When disaster brings sudden death,
he mocks at the calamity of the innocent.
The earth is given into the hand of the wicked;
he covers the eyes of its judges -
if it is not he, who then is it?
Job 9:15-24
Job's faith seems to disappear. God is no longer present for him:
Even when I cry out, 'Violence!' I am not answered;
I call aloud, but there is no justice.
He has walled up my way so that I cannot pass,
and he has set darkness upon my paths.
Job 19:7-8
There is an irony here, which makes Job's prayer unexpectedly effective. Job only seems to have lost his faith. Even in the moment of his deepest despair he continues to talk to God. Like Jeremiah, he tells God exactly what is in his heart. He is completely honest, and his prayer expresses truth. Job is in fact more honest than the friends who came to comfort him. They simply spout platitudes about God that they have never tested, but Job expresses the true concerns of his heart, even if they contradict the faith he once had. This in itself is an act of faith; it is an awareness of truth far deeper than any false religion or spirituality that one has not made nor can ever make one's own.
To accuse God of faithlessness, as Job does, is still to search for God. This anger towards God is therefore the most paradoxical expression of faith. Job's faith is still very deep, in spite of his confession that he has lost all faith. Even in the moment of his deepest despair he continues to talk to God. Job's suffering reveals how deep his faith has always been.
Job's circumstances force him to abandon the false comforts of simple religion, but he does not abandon his allegiance to the truth - in this case, the truth about the falseness of his former faith. And so his dialogue with God remains unbroken. Indeed, Job's prayer expresses the second spiritual quality that makes prayer effective, and that is love. What Job still loves is goodness: he cries out for justice, and condemns God for not being good. But the God Job condemns is the God of religion. There is another God, the real God, beyond the God of religion, and that is Goodness Itself. And so to love goodness is to love God, even if it leads one to reject the God of religion. This explains how God - the real God - could eventually answer Job. Job never stopped loving God. The dialogue was never really broken.
But what kind of an answer does he get? Job never receives a response to his original question. God never does explain why the innocent suffer. Instead, God takes Job on a tour of the mysteries of the universe, showing him wonders beyond anything he has ever imagined. The one thing Job does learn is the limit of his own understanding.
God's answer to Job will not satisfy many of us. Some may even feel that God is being cruel and dismissive, as if to say, "Job, don't question me, for you know nothing." But we need to look deeply at the meaning of God's response to Job. Job himself is satisfied, for he says: "I had heard of you by the hearing of the ear, but now my eye sees you" (Job 42:5). What does Job see that we do not?
While Job never receives an answer to his question, he does find something much more important: God's presence. He realizes that in spite of his pain he can still devote himself to something greater than himself. His suffering has not taken that from him. Continuing to talk to God even in the darkness, when the answer doesn't come, is love, and love always draws a response from God. Job discovers God alive in the midst of dark faith.
Ironically, God vindicates Job: "After the Lord had spoken these words to Job, the Lord said to Eliphaz the Temanite: "My wrath is kindled against you and against your two friends; for you have not spoken of me what is right, as my servant Job has" (Job 42:7). These friends of Job defended God. Job blasphemed, he condemned God - and God stands up for Job! Job's religious God had to die so that Job could find the real God who is Absolute Goodness even in the midst of suffering. The God whom Job now knows is not the God of his spiritual infancy, but a God who dwells in truth and desires the expressions of the heart.
Many have objected to the book's ending, in which Job's fortunes are restored. Job does not find the same family he had before - that will forever remain an empty place in his life - but a new family and a new life of fulfillment. While this might look like a fairy-tale ending, it should not be seen that way. It is a symbolic statement that God does in some way always respond to those divine qualities present in the human heart: to awareness, truth, and love. The response may not come in the form of what we expect or what we want, or even as with Job, in the restoration of what one has lost. But it will come in the form of a sense of God's presence that, to the faithful heart, will be unmistakable.
Awareness and self-honesty ("light" and "truth") prepare us to approach the mystery of suffering. At the heart of this mystery we find the connection between suffering and love.
Suffering and love are joined in the word compassion. "Compassion" literally means "suffering with." It is the ability to be with another when that person is suffering; that is, to be present without flinching or hiding from that person's pain.
Our ability to understand and to feel for others' pain begins with our own knowledge of what it means to suffer. If we did not suffer ourselves, then the pain others feel would make no impression on us. Just by itself, suffering does not make us loving: we also need awareness. Without the awareness of others' separate individuality we could not know compassion but only identification with others' painful experiences. This would not be love; what we think we love would only be the image of ourselves that we see in others, not others as they really are. Their pain would become our pain, and their fear our fear. As a result we may become afraid to approach and comfort others who are suffering, or we may make false assumptions about them based only on our own experiences. We cannot truly love others until we can see clearly where we leave off and they begin.
Making a clear difference between what others suffer and what we experience does not mean that compassion for others is not painful for us as well. Becoming aware of others to the point of seeing their pain and feeling for it while taking no pleasure in it can be heartbreaking; at times it can hurt us even more than the pain of our own suffering. Perhaps this is why we can be so reluctant to respond to others who suffer. To be aware of the soul of a suffering individual can be overwhelmingly painful, but we need not be afraid of it. This is because responding to others through their pain but as separate individuals is a form of love. When we are conscious of sharing love with others, their pain may hurt us but will never harm us. (This is something professional caregivers need to understand, so that they can be truly present with their patients without suffering burnout.)
Compassionate love, while painful, strengthens us as long as we maintain our loving presence in spite of the awareness of otherness. The pain we feel at seeing the suffering of someone we love can tear the heart, but if it contains no fear, hate, or guilt it is a clean wound and will heal cleanly. Often the pain we feel for ourselves is not clean; full of self-pity and resentment it festers and burns. A wound free of such impurities, however, always heals cleanly, leaving one spiritually stronger.
"Compassion" is not to be confused with another word that sounds just like it: "sympathy." It is ironic that both words literally mean "with suffering"; one derives from Latin, the other from Greek. Sympathy, however, means "suffering with" in the sense of feeling sorry for people who are hurting, a condescending attitude that may even take secret pleasure in another's misfortune. Sympathy is not healing; it only confirms the low self-esteem and sense of inferiority of the person who is its object. Unlike compassion, sympathy is not based on the awareness of who and where the other person really is. Instead, it takes at face value the other's sense of victimization and gratifies those who offer sympathy with a feeling of superiority at their ability to help a person in need. When we are trying to be helpful it is important to be able to look at ourselves and know whether what we are feeling is compassion or sympathy.
Compassion is a form of love, and love is a form of awareness. If we are not aware of others as separate individuals with their own histories, interests, concerns, perceptions, needs, and fears - if we see them only in relation to ourselves - then we cannot love them. If we think that we love, most likely what we really love is a reflection or extension of our own self. If, however, we have the clarity and awareness that allow us to see others in all these dimensions of their individuality, then that awareness has a way of touching the heart. We discover an appreciation of others' separateness and uniqueness, a respect for their struggles, a desire for their well-being, a sense of warmth when we see them blessed, a sense of happiness when they are happy. Our capacity to respond to others in this way, from the heart, depends directly on our ability to become aware of them as full and separate individuals, without referring or comparing them to ourselves. Love is therefore the awareness of others' individuality. This love cannot be willed, but is a natural response to others when our awareness reaches beyond the limits of our own self-interest.
Without suffering we would never develop the capacity for love. We have already observed that through suffering we become aware of others as separate from ourselves. More than that, if we did not experience suffering ourselves, we would not know what it might mean for someone else. We would be unable to understand or even see whole aspects of others' lives. Of course this does not mean that we should or even can understand others' experience by referring them to our own, but only that our own struggle through life opens us up, broadens our perception, and sharpens our awareness of the struggles of others even though they may be very different from our own.
This kind of awareness, a special form of love, is what we mean by compassion. Compassion is the awareness and acceptance of the tragic aspects of human existence. It is seeing that weakness and suffering are part of the human experience, and that no one escapes them no matter how pure a life one tries to lead. Compassion is seeing the imperfections of the human will and the human heart, and consequently that we cannot perfect ourselves now matter how hard we may try - and that we may not even know how to try. It is seeing others' weaknesses without judging or resenting them, and even with a loving response toward them, a heartfelt response that sees others limited by their desires and fears, struggling as best they know how under conditions they barely understand. Compassion therefore is maintaining a presence with others, a respectful, nonintrusive presence. It is a refusal to abandon others even when they are at their worst.
Real love begins with compassion, and compassion begins with suffering: this is our greatest clue to unraveling the mystery. Without suffering we would have no reason to seek outside ourselves, or even to become conscious of anything besides our own pleasure. Suffering forces us out of our safe shelters and makes us question. We question God, we question life, we question others, we question ourselves. And if we are fortunate, we are driven to build a bridge from our own pain to the pain of others. We could not even see others if we didn't suffer. Suffering, used wisely, sheds its disguise to reveal itself not as the face of death but as the teacher of love.