Yesterday’s seminar included a statement by a Professor of Theology that a Bodhisattva postpones their own Enlightenment to absorb the “suffering, grievance, sickness” of the world.
I’m not sure that the various forms of Buddhism all agree with this definition. Rather, a Bodhisattva accepts their own suffering as an inevitable part of the quest to Enlightenment because of the duality in our own natures.
I was relieved that some of the speakers share my discomfort with the idea that the suffering of the innocent is required by God, or that God anthromorphically shares their suffering.
Jurgen Moltmann’s response to the nightmarish passage in Elie Wiesel’s Night on the botched hanging of a silent, angel-eyed child at Buna death camp was cited: “There cannot be any other Christian answer to the question of this torment. To speak here of a God who could not suffer would make God a demon. To speak here of an absolute God would make God an annihilating nothingness. To speak here of an indifferent God would condemn us all to indifference.”
The recounting of the murder of the child at Buna causes me no little anguish. The theological interpretation offered by supposedly enlightened and educated Westerners is altogether too similar to the Incan “capacocha” ceremonies, in which physically beautiful young children were drugged and either clubbed, suffocated or frozen to death, supposedly to mollify the mountain “gods”.
There have been times when I’ve been reckless with my own life, courage being as instinctive as breathing, maybe that fearlessness (or temporary lack of self-absorption) a gift from my Highland Scot ancestors.
So, I don’t understand how thousands of adults could stand around and watch a child being hideously murdered simply out of terror that they themselves would be killed for interference.
Nonetheless, I do understand how thousands of adults who have been deliberately starved, tortured and billeted in filthy, freezing barracks, were rendered so physically weak that they could not do – anything.
I don’t believe the old canard about “free will” being a reason for why both an omnipotent God and Evil can manifest themselves on Earth any more than I believe in the necessity of human sacrifice, whether the latter were the Inca children, the boy at Buna or Jesus.
I find no comfort in the fact that the murder of those people granted them immortality in the form of voyeristic object lessons for the rest of us, either.
In other words, I don’t see suffering as an end in itself. And if that makes me a bad person: well, sorry.
Fact of the matter is, I’ve lived long enough to see the results of institutional acceptance of suffering – especially when it’s inflicted on others, especially children, the poor and the weak. The rationale for suffering always, ALWAYS has a bad end, whether it’s the current wave of evangelical apocalyptic Protestantism in the US, or the sclerotic, corrupt Roman Catholic bishopric in Rome.
If suffering, either our own or that of others, doesn’t move us to resistance, then we are, as another speaker put it, mere “atrocity tourists”.
This is not to denegrate the role of “deliberative discussion”, in education or elsewhere. Rather, it’s to challenge despair or inaction as its result.