For many of us in our twilight years, suffering becomes an unwanted companion. Declining health, illness, loss, loneliness, or regret, cause us pain and evoke suffering.
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Philosopher and poet, John O’Donohue’s, in his book, Eternal Echoes, describes how suffering can cause all we have known and depended upon to collapse:
“People who are sent onto the dark ground of suffering know how all the normal certainties collapse. Painstakingly, you have to begin again to reconstruct some minimal shelter for your burdened heart and your cleft soul. Pain breaks your innocence. It shatters your trust in the world you knew. Now you know how destructive and lonesome life can become…”
“Suffering seems to be a frightening totality. When it comes, it puts you in the place of unknowing. All of the old knowing of the conscious mind becomes redundant. “ Eternal Echoes, 160-161
O’Donohue also points to suffering as a powerful impetus to transformation:
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“The leave-taking of your surface knowing often allows the deeper knowing within you to emerge. The experience of suffering can free a person to be in the world in a completely fresh and vital way. The intention of suffering may be to break the shell of ego with which each of us deftly surround ourselves…Suffering makes an incision in that shell and breaks it open, so that new hidden life within can actually emerge…suffering helps us break the shell of ego from within, enabling us to release a new dimension of ourselves which is now too large and too bright for the small darkness in which it has been growing; it could no longer breather and live. Real suffering breaks open the smallness within you and liberates you into larger and more hospitable places in life. It enlarges your belonging.” Eternal Echoes, 161
Suffering, particularly in our twilight years, invites us to let go of all we have clung to for security, significance, and status.
Suffering prepares us for the great letting go of death, when the closed fists we came into the world with open, letting go of all we have so ferociously clung to.
And when suffering causes us let go of security, significance, and status, our souls become fertile ground for the seed of resurrection into a new, more vibrant life, in time and eternity.
“Gentleness helps you to stop resisting the pain that is visiting you. When you stop resisting suffering, something else begins to happen. You begin slowly to allow suffering to follow its own logic…Suffering has its own reasoning. It wants to teach us something. When you stop resisting its dark work, you are open to learning what it wants to show you. Often, we learn most deeply and receive profoundly from the black, lonely tide of pain.” Eternal Echoes, 157-158
Are you suffering in your twilight? What might your suffering be seeking to transform?
Jim Cyr is a trained spiritual companion who helps older adults reflect on the meaning of their lives and how God has been present or absent as they face the challenges of aging and end of life.