With just a few weeks to go before the release of Love and Suffering, I wanted to continue exploring the theme of what it means to love this world with a wide-open heart. On the path of loving everything, it is easy to love the good stuff. Who doesn’t love the sound of the morning bird song and the movement of the stars? We all enjoy the pleasant and pleasurable things in life.
So the biggest challenge is to love the painful things too. This will strengthen the heart the most. Just as lifting a 50-pound weight will make us stronger than lifting a 5-pound weight, nothing will grow the heart more than keeping it open in the face of injustice and suffering.
Learning how to love the suffering of the world becomes even more challenging when we add God to the equation. After all, why would an infinitely loving and compassionate God allow intense suffering to continue? Whether it is childhood cancer or floods taking out innocent towns, one has to ask why God, in His all-knowing omnipotence, created this specific world and allows terrible events to happen.
For some guidance, we can turn to the brilliant 13th-century philosopher and theologian, St. Thomas Aquinas, who devoted his life to understanding the divine through reason and faith. Through works like the Summa Theologica, he sought to reconcile human intellect with divine mystery, believing that even the darkest corners of existence could reflect God’s hidden wisdom.
The poem below perfectly encapsulates St. Thomas’ approach. I wanted to add it to Love and Suffering, but it was too long for the book and too elegant to be paraphrased.
Before you read it, I should also add a small caveat. This poem appears in Daniel Ladinsky’s collection titled Love Poems from God: Twelve Sacred Voices from the East and West (2002). Ladinsky is a challenging figure, as he is an incredible writer, but takes very liberal interpretations of his source material. It is perhaps more correct to say this is written by Daniel Ladinsky and inspired by the work of St. Thomas.
I said to God, “Let me love you.”
And he replied, “Which part?”
“All of you, all of you.” I said.
“Dear,” God spoke, “You are as a mouse wanting to impregnate
a tiger who is not even in heat. It is a feat way
beyond your courage and strength.
You would run from me
if I removed my
mask.”
I said to God again,
“Beloved I need to love you – every aspect, every pore.”
And this time God said,
“There is a hideous blemish on my body,
though it is such an infinitesimal part of my Being-
could you kiss that if it were revealed?”
“I will try, Lord, I will try.”
And then God said,
“That blemish is all the hatred and
cruelty in this
world.”
The poem represents a wonderful trick. In the practice of judo, the fighter waits for their opponent to lean in. At the moment their opponent becomes off balance, they pull them closer and force them to tumble over. In this poem, God sees the love of the narrator and pulls them in. When the narrator promises not to turn away, God reveals the blemish to be the hatred and cruelty of the world. Our human task is to see all of God’s goodness and learn to love the smallest of imperfections.
I wrote of a similar phenomenon about romantic relationships in Love and Suffering. Love pulls us into an intimate relationship with another human being with promises of eternal passion and happily ever afters. Then, when we are in too deep, our stuff comes up. All of our parental conditioning and emotional imprints come to the surface, and we are asked to do the real work of love, which is the healing of these wounds.
May we all learn to kiss our own blemishes and kiss the blemishes of each other. May we all see unconditional love as an endless ocean, with our judgmental thoughts as turbulence on top. May we learn to calm the mind, open the heart, and float freely in the love that is inside, throughout, and all around us. May we learn to kiss God’s blemish, which is the smallest fraction of God’s entire entity, but represents all the pain and suffering in the world.
