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It is lonely to carry a burden. A burden is always heavy. If you learn how to carry it, you can lessen its weight and awkwardness. It takes time to learn this; you must experience the weight of the burden, and then you discover its secret. At home we had a garden up in the mountains. There was no water in the garden, and the well was quite distant. To keep blight away the potatoes had to be sprayed with bluestone. The water had to be carried in buckets to fill the barrel of spray. If you had only one bucket to carry, it was very awkward. Though two buckets of water were heavier, they were far easier to carry. The burden was heavier but each side balanced the other and could be endured in the long distance over rough ground. Similarly with the burden of suffering. When in patience and prayer we painstakingly manage to discover the point of equilibrium within our burdens, we are able to carry them more easily.

People who do physical labour know the secret of balanced endurance. One summer I worked as part of a construction crew in Connecticut. I was working with Swedish and Norwegian carpenters. My job was to carry long heavy planks of timber over to the new houses and then pull them up on to the roof so that the carpenters had them ready to hand. I will never forget my first day. It was pure slavery. Fifty times I promised myself silently that they would not see me tomorrow. However, by evening, I was beginning to manage the art of carrying huge planks twenty or thirty feet long on my shoulder. Once I learned to judge where the point of equilibrium at the centre of the plank was, I could carry the weight more easily. If you do not learn how to carry it, even a small burden can tread you into the ground. Only by listening to the burden that has come to you will you be able to discover its secret structure. No one else can help you here. This is something that you must find out for yourself. Each burden is different. You alone know what it is like from underneath. While you are suffering, you live each day in the harsh and bruising presence of your burden. You know its inner configuration. No burden is uniform, it is made up of many different strands and materials. If you attend to it, the point of equilibrium will gradually reveal itself.

When You Stand in the Place of Pain, You Are No One

Suffering is frightening. It unhouses and dislocates you. Suffering is the arrival of darkness from an angle you never expected. There are different kinds of darkness. There is the night when the darkness is evenly brushed. The sky is studded with the crystal light of stars and the moon casts mint light over the fields. Though you are in the darkness, your ways are guided by a gentle light. This is not the darkness of deep suffering. When real suffering comes, the light goes out completely. There is nothing but a forsaken darkness, frightening in its density and anonymity. The human face is the icon of creation. In this countenance creation becomes intimate. Here you are engaged by immediate presence. There is something in suffering that resents the human face. Suffering resents the shelter of intimacy. The dark squall of suffering dismantles belonging and darkens the mind. It rips the fragile net of meaning to shreds. Like a dark tide, it comes in a torrent over every shoreline of your inner world. Nothing can hold it back. When you endure such a night, you never forget it.

When you stand in the place of pain, you are no one. A poignant line from Virgil’s Aeneid describes one of the heroes found dead in anonymous circumstances: “corpe sine nomine,” i.e., a body without a name. Belonging is shredded. You are visited and claimed by a nothingness which has neither contour nor texture. Suffering is the harrowing and acidic force of anonymity. You are utterly unhoused. Now you know where Nowhere is. No one can reach you. Suffering seems to be a force of primal regression. It almost wipes away your signature as an individual and reduces you to faceless clay. Suffering is raw, relentless otherness coming alive around you and inside you.

Suffering’s Slow Teachings