Desire, spiritual pain and freedom
Noël Staples, during his training as a spiritual director some years ago, was stimulated by ideas raised in a study day. He reflects on the experience.
‘I want, therefore I am’
It could be said that without desire you would be dead. In a sense life inheres in the tension between desire and its attainment – or nonattainment, as the case may be. From the day we are born until the day we die we always want something. Desire makes us strive to achieve things. Failure to achieve our wants can result in pain – physical, emotional or spiritual.
Given strong desires, coupled with the free gift of a good brain, a healthy body and a loving, supportive and nurturing environment in which to develop, one may achieve a great deal in life. How we handle our desires in life – indeed, how we discern what we can and can’t achieve, and how we handle our achievements and failures, all this is a matter of balance and consideration for others. Some high achievers are kind and considerate to others around them, while we all know some who are not like that!
Likewise, we all know people who try hard all their lives to attain what they want, yet achieve modest or little success while still remaining kind and considerate to others. Some people may become sour and ill tempered at their inability to achieve what they believe they are able to achieve – or perhaps feel they have a right to achieve.
Coping with pain
Spiritual (or perhaps emotional) pain occurs when we lose, or fail to achieve, the kind of relationship with God that we want. Or it may be that we feel we should be able to achieve a relationship with God like others seem to have done throughout history.
There are two main categories of pain: acute, meaning it is both strong but not long lasting; and chronic, meaning it continues for a long time and could be strong or mild. The way society responds to chronic pain tends, sadly, to be rather less tolerant or understanding.
Pain, and the way we treat it, has a history as long as humankind, and humankind varies greatly in its capacity to tolerate and cope with it. Pain can be an important factor in growth. Until the development of anaesthesia in the 1850s, with ether and chloroform, physical pain was almost unavoidable. Indeed, surgical anaesthesia was slow to come into use even though the anaesthetic use of ether had been known since the 1750s and ‘ether and nitrous oxide (laughing gas) sniffing parties’ were popular social events for some. Surgeons at first thought physical pain was essential to the healing process. Others thought that if much blood was lost during an operation then the gas might have replaced the remaining oxygen in the blood and the patient would die. However, we do now have many ways of coping safely with pain – physical and even, perhaps, emotional or spiritual.
Grief, rejection, loss, or the lack of human love or the sense of divine love, all cause emotional or spiritual pain. Of course, people have tried and still do try to blot out emotional or spiritual pain with various forms of chemicals, but when the chemical effect wears off the emotional or spiritual pain may not have gone away, as physical pain mostly does. The opposite of spiritual pain is pleasure. They may, indeed, be mutually dependent. And where does freedom come into desire and spiritual pain?
Being free
The Oxford English Dictionary notes that the origin of the word free comes from a Sanskrit word pri meaning to love. (Sanskrit pri to delight, endear; Old Slavonic prijateli friend, Gothic frijôn, Old English fréon to love, whence Friend). The primary sense of the adjective is ‘dear’; the Germanic and Celtic sense comes from its having been applied as the distinctive epithet of those members of the household who were connected by ties of kindred with the head, as opposed to the slaves. The converse process of sense-development appears in Latin liberi ‘children’, literally as the ‘free’ members of the household. We have a sense here of free meaning loved.
But what do free and freedom mean in relation to God? If nobody ever told you about God would you acquire that knowledge directly so you could be free to think about whatever it is? It may be that one has to have an idea or image of something in order to be free to think about it. Are we free to have an image of God or can we even have an image of God? If we could not have an image of God we would presumably not be free to think about God.
The idea of freedom and thinking about it has a long and complex history in both political and personal terms. We couldn’t live together in society without creating a government and laws, yet their existence imposes limits on freedom. It could be that freedom consists in compliance with the laws. Our laws depend on fear – fear of the consequences of noncompliance. Are we free if we live in fear? The Quaker philosopher John Macmurray observed in his 1965 Swarthmore Lecture that we could only live in a truly free society if it was ruled by love.
The limits on freedom
Freedom from all constraints is impossible and certainly not desirable in the present state of human nature! We are all constrained by the need to eat, drink, shelter, love and be loved by others. Are we even free to think or feel whatever we want? Before we can think or feel anything we are constrained by the need of a good brain, knowledge and experience.
On the face of it, there would seem to be no such thing as complete freedom. There are always limits. Everything we do, think, or feel seems determined by something that precedes it. Even though there is probably no such thing as real freedom of choice I still want to cherish the illusion that I have it! Perhaps the greatest freedom any human may experience occurs when we love and are loved.
The greatest of the Christian commandments is given in Matthew 22:37-40:
Jesus said unto him, Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.
The beating heart of what it is to be a Quaker is that mystical relationship at the centre of our Meetings for Worship – indeed, of our very lives. It may very well be within this mystical relationship that we can feel most beloved.
Our response to this mystical presence may be of feeling so loved, so unconditionally loved, that that love radiates to everything and everyone. Feeling loved may not remove the spiritual pain of frustrated desires but it can sustain us. Perhaps in being sustained by love we most nearly achieve true freedom. What do you think?
Comments
Please login to add a comment
