On Suffering (for Ellen)

My mom used to say I could bring anyone home except a Republican or a born-again Christian (by which she actually meant fundamentalist Christian). And the truth is that she would have very much welcomed both, if they were one of the many college friends I used take home with me for the weekend, because extravagant hospitality was kind of the basic organizing principle of my family. She would have given them a hard time – all in good fun, of course – but she would have welcomed them, and they would have loved her, because everyone loved my mom. She got along with everyone except idiots. (She really couldn’t abide idiots).

But as it turns out, I didn’t have any born-again or even Republican friends in college, and what my mom really meant, anyway, was that she’d rather I didn’t fall in love with one. But anyone else? That would be just fine. And she really meant it. I think she loved reliving her own youthful exuberance vicariously through me. Having come of age in the 60’s, she understood perfectly the sort of ardent conversion experience young adulthood can be – even if, as in my case, you’re not converting away from anything, but just passionately embracing your world and your values as your own, and not just as an inheritance, even if a welcome one.

So when I announced, after taking Intro to Philosophy: Food Ethics, that I was a vegetarian, Mom thought that was fine, especially since I could explain why. I got her a copy of The Moosewood Cookbook, and she discovered that you don’t really need meat at every meal. And when I brought home a black boyfriend, she loved him (he was pretty lovable, I’ll admit). Next was the Cuban girlfriend – she didn’t blink. Then the Methodist minister’s daughter (not Julie, the one before Julie) – even that didn’t phase her (but only because she was not a fundamentalist).

So when I announced that I was going to be majoring in Peace and Global Studies, I wasn’t anxious that my parents might suggest that I get a real degree, for all the money they were spending to send me to the most expensive liberal arts college in the state, for heaven’s sake. And I was right. My mom thought Peace and Global Studies was a splendid thing to major in, and she even got sort of intrigued. My mom had, among many other wonderful qualities, one of the sharpest intellects of anyone I’ve ever known, and a deeply curious mind, so there wasn’t much she wasn’t intrigued by. Everything I was studying was fair game for long conversations on the green couch by the wood stove in our big farmhouse kitchen.

I remember in particular a conversation on the couch about the concept of “structural violence.” I used the phrase and mom immediately perked up: “What does that mean, ‘structural violence’?” I started to explain, but she already had it figured out. “That’s the way oppressive structures – like racism, or poverty – do violence to people, right? And it can be really explicit violence, like lynching, but it can also be slower, or less direct violence, like the way a child’s mind and spirit and opportunities get more and more and more hemmed in by living in poverty.”

Exactly. Yeah, she was pretty awesome.

I’ve been thinking about that conversation with my mom a lot lately, in part because I’ve been thinking about suffering a lot lately. I’m thinking about suffering these days because I’m holding several friends in prayer who are suffering a lot right now. I’m also thinking about suffering these days because when I solicited topics for my daily Advent blogging (what was I thinking?), Ellen suggested I tackle the question, “Why is there suffering?” Ellen knows too much of suffering lately. I am quite sure I am entirely inadequate to the task of explaining suffering to her or anyone else. Indeed, the only sort of cosmic answer I know to that question is, “I have no idea.”

But still, I know a little bit about suffering, especially of the sort Ellen is experiencing right now, the suffering of losing someone very dear to you, way too young. For Ellen it was her brother, who died just a couple of weeks ago; for me it was my mom, who died almost twenty years ago.

I used to think there was a pretty clear distinction between the sort of suffering that stems from, well, life, you know? And the sort of suffering that stems from structural violence. I remember making this distinction to my mom in that conversation on the green couch, when she immediately got it about structural violence: “Yeah, and you know, it’s not like the world would be without suffering if we ended structural violence. People would still leave their lovers, and break each other’s hearts, and there would still be earthquakes and people would still die of natural causes. But war and poverty and racism? Seems like that sort of suffering is worth fighting against.” My mom, of course, entirely agreed, and enthusiastically endorsed my plan to be a Peacemaker (“A Profession for the Future,” remember Earlham friends?)

The more I learn of the world, though, and the ugly horrible ways that human structures work on it, the less I am convinced that such a stark distinction is meaningful. Cancer may not be a violent human structure, but industrialized agriculture certainly is, and so is toxic waste, and probably both contribute in ways known and unknown to many cancers. Hurricanes may not be violent human structures, but if they ramp up because of our addiction to fossil fuels, is the suffering in their wake an act of God, or the result of human structural violence? And if they wreak greatest havoc on the poorest and most wretched of the earth, what is the cause of that suffering? Mental illness may not be a violent structure created by human society (though I could be convinced otherwise). But if a brilliant and talented young man suffers from mental illness and turns to drug use to cope, and if our society maintains an absurdly ineffective and vindictive public policy around the sale and use of certain drugs, then is his death by overdose at least in part a result of structural violence?

I don’t know.

Why is there suffering? I just don’t know what the answer is. I’m pretty sure that even in a world entirely free of structural violence, my mom still would have collapsed one day while weeding the asparagus patch, and the aneurysm in her brain still would have killed her a couple of days later, just a few weeks short of her fifty-first birthday. I’m pretty sure that when I got around to trying to get pregnant at the ripe old age of thirty-four, my ovaries still would have been old souls that were no longer going to produce viable eggs, because in the law of averages, someone has to be an outlier, and that just happened to be me.

But I am also pretty sure that a whole lot of suffering in the world – so very much of it – is caused by structural violence. Which is another way of saying that a whole lot of the suffering in the world is caused by sin. That, of course, is a word which is sort of out of vogue these days, among progressive intellectuals at least. I think it’s a shame that it’s been so co-opted by the fundamentalist religious right-wing. Indeed, now that I think of it, “sin” has itself become a form of structural violence. But I’m comfortable reclaiming it, because I do think there is such a thing. I probably prefer Michael’s formulation (and I’m loosely paraphrasing here because I don’t know how to find this particular conversation on his Facebook page) – that sin is anything which takes us out of loving relationship with each other and God. Structural violence, sin, broken relationship …. however you want to define it, or whatever you want to call it, it seems to me that a whole lot of suffering is caused by it.

And where is God in all this? I think for a lot of folks that’s the hardest question when faced with inexplicable suffering. I know such suffering can cause some to lose their faith, or at least to question it. For me, actually, the opposite is true. For me, if sin is that which pulls us out of loving relationship, then God is that which puts us back together. And I know that even in the face of so much suffering in the world, there is also so much goodness and beauty and abundance. I know too, though I surely don’t understand the mystery of it, that somehow that goodness and beauty and abundance often flows right out of suffering, even the sort that results from sin. My God is the God of that goodness and beauty and abundance, even the kind that is forged in a crucible of suffering. Why God isn’t bigger than sin, why God can’t just vanquish sin and suffering in one fell swoop, I don’t know. Maybe God isn’t all-powerful in that way. Maybe God needs us as much as we need God. Maybe the more we’re in loving relationship with God – which is the same thing as saying the more we’re in loving relationship with each other -- the less power sin and suffering have over the world.

I surely could be wrong. But if faith is being sure of what we hope for*, then my faith in that God is like a rock, even in the face of inexplicable suffering.

edited to add: this is from Bart Campolo.

Plantar Fasciitis (for Melissa)

When I was a kid, I never ever thought of myself as an athlete. Running made me wheeze, and I hated team sports because I knew I was going to let everyone down. In elementary school, I was always in awe of the tomboys among my friends who actually choose to play kickball with the boys at recess; I only played kickball when forced to by my gym teacher, and I was always the proverbially last-kid-to-be-picked. Even worse than kickball was volleyball. I had a natural reflex to duck away from a ball hurtling itself right at my face. The pain of a volleyball hitting my glasses right on the bridge of my nose is still vivid, and I probably haven’t played volleyball in thirty years. I will be quite content if I die never having played volleyball again.

In high school, I found a small niche for myself in the drama program, and never gave a thought to sports. In middle school, the basketball coach had half-heartedly tried to recruit me, simply because I was tall. But I would no sooner have joined the basketball team than a Christian youth group. As an adolescent, I was not even agnostic, not about God, not about sports: I rejected both pretty much out of hand.

So at the age of thirty-five, two miscarriages behind me and facing the stark likelihood that I would never carry a pregnancy to term, I felt pretty alienated from my body. For years I had assumed that though I was soft and not particularly strong, I had a body just meant to grow and nurture a child. Though I didn’t – and still don’t – care much at all about having a biological connection to my children, I did very much yearn to experience pregnancy and childbirth. I was sure I was going to be really good at it. As it turns out I was wrong.

I was also as heavy and out-of-shape as I’ve ever been after a couple of years of low-tech yet grueling infertility treatments, two miscarriages, depression and a sedentary desk job. I was heavy, out-of-shape, alienated from my body, disappointed that I would not experience the physical challenge of childbirth – and totally without any resources to draw from in facing those challenges. The conventional wisdom was that I should exercise, but I was so convinced that I was not an athlete, I didn’t even know where to begin.

I’m not sure what led me to my first lap around the track. That’s as far as I got that first time, one agonizing lap. A quarter mile. At the end I could barely breath and my thighs were burning. The next time I added half a lap, and the next time another, until very, very slowly-but-surely, I was up to two miles. I left the track out of sheer boredom, took to the trails in the woods, and – still the slowest runner in the park – I was, nonetheless, a RUNNER! An athlete. I would say to Julie regularly, “You know what, I think I’m actually a runner!” At first she was very encouraging, but eventually she began looking at me with a sort of “no duh!” kind of look on her face. But for the longest time I just never stopped being astonished. A runner! An athlete! Me!

Then I got a little cocky. Somewhere in the most secret recesses in my brain I began thinking that maybe I could really be a runner. Like run in races and stuff. I started looking into 5k’s, which seemed fairly reasonable, but my secret goal – unspoken to almost anyone, it seemed so absurd – was to run Broad Street, a ten mile race held every May in Philadelphia. In January, I started training in earnest.

You know what happens when athletes get cocky? They get injured. About a month before the Broad Street run, I was felled by a searing pain in my heel. I could barely walk. I had no idea at all what was wrong with me, but the pain was so excruciating and my devastation so dramatic, I feared my running career was over before it had really even begun. I was convinced that my body was never going to be my friend. Fortunately, I was wrong.

My friend Pete quickly diagnosed my malady as plantar fasciitis, and a little Googling suggested that this need not be the end of the world, though pretty clearly Broad Street was not in the cards that year (as it turns out, Broad Street has continued to elude me every year due to injuries). My Googling also suggested that if I had set out to inflame my plantar fascia, I could not have gone about it with a more targeted training program: I was running sprints, I was running up hills, I was running in sand. Oops.

It was a pretty major set-back. But confident that I would, indeed, run again, and with Pete as my coach, I set about healing my heel. First, I stopped running entirely for almost a month. I started wearing a brace at night that Pete loaned me, which kept my foot flexed. It was terribly uncomfortable, and usually I would kick it off before the night was over, but it really worked. I also got special inserts, again recommended by Pete, to put in my new gel-cushioned running shoes, which, for the first time, I actually spent some money on.

When I started running again, I started back at the beginning. Well, not all the way back, but I did go back to the track, which is soft and flat, and began with maybe a mile. I increased really slowly, and took it easy if the pain flared up. I’m not much of a stretcher, but I started taking care to do gentle stretches for the bottom of my feet. And eventually I was back up to my normal running routine, now with even bigger dreams in the secret recesses of my mind.

In my experience, plantar fasciitis is a permanent but manageable injury. My right foot flares up occasionally, usually when I get up to four miles several times a week. This just happened recently, but due to the genius of my friend and yoga instructor, Jen, I have recently had a bit of a breakthrough in my treatment. I’ve been doing private yoga once a week with Jen for several months, and because she knew I had suffered from plantar fasciitis in the past, she has been working very diligently at making sure my feet are planted very firmly and evenly on the ground, especially in my down dog.

“See that crease at your ankle when you’re bent forward?” she will ask. “Let’s make sure that’s even. Make sure your foot is evenly grounded, especially the big toe.” I knew this had something to do with my plantar fasciitis, and Jen really is a genius, so I trusted her implicitly and took care to be mindful of how my feet felt on the floor. But I wasn’t suffering from any heel pain – my running was great, though I was only going a couple of miles most of the fall – so I didn’t really get it.

Then just the other week, there it was, after just two four-mile runs, that familiar, stabbing pain in the ball of my heel. I prepared myself for a set-back, but didn’t despair. I don’t have Pete’s brace, but I started flexing my foot whenever I could. Started doing gentle foot stretches. And a new pair of shoes and new inserts are on my shopping list.

But the real key has been paying attention to my stride, both when walking and running. I tend to underpronate, especially on the right side. When I focus on making sure my foot is evenly planted on the ground, most of the pain in my heel just disappears. Since rolling to the outside of my foot feels natural for me, compensating means being especially mindful of planting my big toe firmly with each stride.

Soon I will be adding weekly Pilates sessions to my weekly yoga practice, and Jen and I continue to work on strengthening and re-orienting my legs to correct for the underpronation in my stride. And don’t tell anyone, but I think maybe I’m finally going to run Broad Street in 2010!