Suffering

I was reading the book you see to your left--transcript of an interview by Bill Moyers of Joseph Campbell--and, as usual when I read Campbell, got my mind blown.

If you aren't familiar with Campbell, he was one of the world's foremost experts in mythology--its meaning, the common threads woven through myths from around the world and throughout time, and how they are still relevant in our daily lives.

Campbell always seems to provide food for thought. Many times when reading one of his books I'll encounter a paragraph or even just a sentence or two that will strike me as very profound, and lead to further thought outside of the context provided in the book itself. Many times he manages to add a missing piece to something I was working on.

Such was the case today, when I ran across the section where Moyers and Campbell talked about the significance of Christ's suffering on the cross in Christian mythology. Basically--and I'm terrible at explaining abstract concepts, I much prefer to demonstrate them in the context of a story or something--he said that the humanity in Christ and the deity became merged because of his suffering. That the yearning of god for man and man for god were unified in his agony.

For some reason I found that to be very profound, and I started thinking about love and suffering. It seems to me that love is not possible without pain, and the more deeply one loves, the more pain one feels. Also, the more pain one is willing to feel.

For example--I have a dear, dear friend who suffers from migraines, and another medical condition that causes her a great deal of pain. I love her, deeply and completely, and if I could I would take her pain away, even if it meant I had to experience it myself. I would not only do it, I would do it gladly--even as I felt the pain I would know it was pain that she was not feeling and my joy at giving her relief would offset any pain I felt. It's quite different from me experiencing my own pain--for example, the pain of this twisted ankle I've had for a week or so. That pain is personal and only involves me and I'd gladly get rid of it if I could--as long as getting rid of it didn't cause someone else to have to experience it. (Ankle's a lot better, btw, thanx for asking.)

This is, of course, really only part of it. Another part is the desire to consume and be consumed by the object of one's love. For example--imagine, if you worship some deity, that this deity is a sun, and its love for you is its heat. It's overpowering, inconceivable. It'll consume you. You'll experience intense agony while this happens. But it's an agony you crave, because while it consumes you, you are becoming one with it, experiencing its total and overwhelming love for you. Like a drop of water in an ocean--it merges and becomes mingled with the rest of the water until it is indistinguishible from all the other drops of water.

This is the missing piece for a story idea I've been struggling with for a while now. It fit into the hole in the puzzle with an almost audible click!

I do hope that makes some kind of sense---and if you were wondering, my atheism is still intact. It's just a fascinating and, I think, illuminating idea, especially when applied outside of the context of religion.

Anyway, if you haven't read Campbell I recommend you do so. He'll blow your mind, too.