The questions of pain and suffering Part 1 -Robert Fullarton Copyright 2015

The questions of pain and suffering Part 1

-Robert Fullarton

Copyright 2015

The journey from agnosticism to Christianity had not been an easy one. It involved changes in mind, practice and belief. Previously held impossibilities were demolished. Terribly negative frames of mind had to be destroyed and replaced. The coarseness of reality will hit you with the responsibilities of adulthood; in this world friends will come and go, a family circus will be played out, the wants and unrequited fancies will go on in a sort of living drama that does not negate, but the idea that God loves us despite our sins and weaknesses is impressive, touching, infectious and romantic.

I had been angry with God for “letting me down” without fully understanding that perhaps God is not the fiction and limit of my imagination but greater than the circumstance and the fact, that we humans limit and create an archetype or stereotype of God from our mind’s construction. I had seen my sickness as an obvious “injustice” from God and it was the angriest and saddest period of my life so far, but I forgot that so many others go through their own private tribulations and sufferings and to each person the measure is different and the cross differs in size despite the proportion of courage that exists ready to meet the challenge. Despite a person’s belief or non-belief, the world and the physical existence is filled with pain and suffering. Pain is indeed a filter of experience that tells you like an aggressive alarm call that something is wrong, a crisis and perhaps a deep rooted trouble is brewing within the person. Our lives are to be constantly changed and renewed.

These are the times for friends and family to be there, these are the times for getting and going, living and trying to be made and mustered for the fragile and broken persons in the world. Suffering is partially caused by human vice but more so it is an ancient condition of the universe and part of the entropic process of the universe. A cry for meaning is great in these times, so great that it is like a tragic ballet playing out in the sound waves and the spectrums of the universe. Aesthetic and semantic questions are asked. We can ask ourselves “Are there any answers to questions that I ask, in my trials of grief?”  “Am I all alone or is there something greater than this suffering?”

We know that the sufferer will die, but is there any consolation? Is there any absolute standard, as we all see such in notions of conscience, altruism and moral practice that we see as inert and intrinsic practice that can come out from our choices? The crux is there, the kernel needs to be explored and the choice is for each person, to be made, but the world has pre-existed our own birth and these riddles and wonders have been here too for our forebears to ponder on, and some have chosen to hand their life and heart unto the God of eternity and others have merely looked through the window and never seen what all the fun and fuss was about. Could these revelations be something that speaks to one heart at a time within humanity?

In this life there is a depth of experience beyond the superficiality that consumes the surface where the surfaces dwellers never leave the beach, while the wave storming, explorers go deep, into caves, beyond human nature, searching for answers and for the love of God, they do deep and experience all the pains and tortures but they have an understanding that is unique, for it comes from the choices they made to keep at it and to never cease in their exploration for the heart of God and the heart of love. The surface dwellers laugh at the explorers for their apparent “foolish fortitude” and believe life is only about what I feel and what I see and nothing else. Both the explorers and the surface dwellers will suffer trials and test of character, but these choices and these beliefs have shaped them nonetheless to see things differently. The bellowing explorers will cut themselves upon the jagged rocks and exhaust their bodies in an apparently infinitesimal exhaustion, but learn that the moment one surrenders one’s body on the pyre is the second before infinitesimal reality and infinitesimal glory. This is the parody of Christ and this is what Christians believe, that the trial at Calvary brought darkness, the emotional storm of the God-man Jesus- this was his surrender to love- (that calls followers to emulate in some degree) but it nonetheless brought glory far greater than the dark hours of his' temporal suffering and after the willing sacrifice came the harvest.

Could we see ourselves as parts within this collective and single glory that carries us onward...is the Christian story of Christ relevant to the sufferings of men at all and every time...is it more noble than the contradictory and merely temporal philosophies of men? Regardless of these sufferings we will suffer...our pains are ancient, pre-existing calls to question the way we think and essentially live our life...to think is pain..incomplete despite what we feel? Is death the mere end of an age and the opening of another despite what we think and have been thought by our morbid and materialistic age?