“Sometimes I think of how, at this moment, there is someone suffering somewhere in the world, who is malnourished, who is poor, who is being killed, who is far more hard up than I am in this moment; and it’s hard to bear it.”

Someone I know

As a kid I had this little wood carving of a man sitting cross-legged and weeping into his hands. He was leaning over, as though prostrate, and you couldn’t make out his face. I didn’t know what it was then, but now I do: it was a little icon of the weeping buddha. There are different accounts of what caused this buddha to weep, but years later as I was in a shop (to replace the one I lost), the clerk explained to me that while you usually see the buddha looking content while meditating, here he ceased to meditate and took a look at the world, and it brought him to tears.

Not long ago, I wrote a post entitled The God Who Weeps in reference to Christ’s agony in the garden. I once recall this mystery being described as Christ contemplating the sins of the world. I always liked that description, though I can’t perfectly explain why. Perhaps it’s because it’s something we all do now and again, as my friend did when he said those words to me.

After all, it’s so incredibly easily to get riled up or beaten down by what can seem like such a fucked up world that we live in. It’s true: there’s a lot of injustice in the world, even as I write this. It’s staggering to think about what might be afflicting some poor, sorry soul in some remote part of the world at any given moment. You don’t even need to go so far: there’s probably someone struggling even in your own city or town.

I’ll never forget, for instance, the first time I saw true poverty. I was in Cuba in the city of Moron (yes, the name is funny in English). I walked into a shop selling all sorts of trinkets, and had a look around. I could tell the man was really trying to sell me something, but not like some slick salesman. His look wasn’t suave or anything of the kind: he just looked desperate. As if he was scared shitless. So I bought something. And as I walked out of the shop, I saw a child staring at me in the back, which looked like their living room. He just stopped and stared, and to be fair to him, I kind of stared back at him. I thought, for whatever struggles I’ve had in life, I was born with a silver spoon in my mouth by comparison. There are perhaps things that will offer him consolation, but he will have none of the opportunities and wealth that was afforded to me in my life, and none of this is his own fault. My mistakes can be undone to a certain extent, but his will surely hurt him far more. It hardly seemed fair. I have no more right to a good life than he does. But of course, the kicker is that Cuba isn’t even that bad as far as third-world countries go: there are undoubtedly people far worse off in other parts of the world, and that’s a sobering and shocking fact. How do you bear it?

We are told to “pray without ceasing,” (1 Thes 5:17) but if that doesn’t take your fancy, let’s say “meditate”. It was only when the buddha stopped doing that that he was brought to tears. Is that the solution then? Meditation? Prayer? Certainly it can offer us consolation, but what happens when these higher mysteries really touch our lives and don’t seem so distant? Questions like “why is there suffering?” cannot and do not remain in the abstract: they hit us where we live because, to varying degrees, we suffer ourselves. “He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how,” (Nietzsche) so we consider the abstract if only to help us bear this weight of conscience or compassion.

I suppose I don’t really have a point in any of this. It’s simply a question I’ll ask myself. Perhaps, on some level, it’s the very question that interested me in the humanities in the first place: how can you make sense of this life? I doubt I’ll ever have the answer, but it’s worth thinking about it, if only for the hope it brings. But if I were to offer some reflection thus far, albeit after a mere 23 years in this “rich and frantic whirl” of a world, it would be that meditation, prayer, reflection should not remain in the temple or chapel or schoolroom: it must be lived.

Be a philosopher; but amidst all your philosophy, be still a man.

David Hume