is the emblem of our helpless love, felt fully in every cell of the body; felt fully until it overflows, in a cry, in tears in words that try to negate, powerlessly, what is occurring. Anguish is our foundational cry against the unjust taking away of what we feel should be forever ours.
Anguish is a word that is a cry in itself: carrying the
sound of the body feeling at last what it has all along needed to feel: a
physical pain running right through our core and turned by the voice into the
sound of pain itself, a pain we often previously could not imagine, an agony
that is accompanied by the shock of absolute helplessness, a helplessness which
is perhaps the very hallmark of human vulnerability itself, and that separates
it from all the other manifold pains in a human life we have words to describe.
Anguish is a force that racks and inhabits a suddenly surprised and now fully
vulnerable, mind and body. But anguish fully felt is also the first stop on
the road to recovery and healing.
Helplessness and the pains of helplessness are abiding
companions to the experience of being human: the nurse by the dying child's
bedside, having exhausted all remedies; the parent witnessing a teenager's
first heartbreak, all of us in this world today, scrolling through the news,
seeing the bombed-out homes of innocent, everyday people. We are made to
experience both love and loss and an extraordinarily deep, bodily, everyday
level and it may be that without helplessness we cannot experience love or loss
fully and properly: Anguish is the last fully felt measure of our care.
Feeling real, helpless, emotional pain, is also an entrance
into the fully real and the fully felt and is an annunciation that we are
actually paying attention at last -- both to what is affecting us and the depth
to which we are so movingly affected --anguish means we have finally felt and
fully understood not only the true depth and foundational nature of our own
suffering but the heartbreak that lies in every other human life we have ever
touched or accompanied. Anguish is the doorway through which our personal
suffering meets all the griefs that are shared by the world.
Anguish is only entered fully through the door of powerlessness in the absolute physical sense of helplessness. Anguish cannot be simulated: it is not only a measure of our care for others but the inability to know how or when or if it is possible to help, anguish is the very physical incarnation of our sense of compassion brought to ground at last, in the suffering body of the world -- and in real anguish our body reciprocates -- refusing to eat, losing weight, sitting alone, refusing to go out the door, full of the tremors and vulnerabilities that have accompanied human beings since the beginning of conscious time, vulnerabilities that at times seemed to arise from nowhere.
Anguish tells us that our deep sense of care has entered the
timeless and the untouchable, that we have, for the moment, given up on
solutions; stopped offering easy answers and let go of our previous, false
sureties -- Anguish tells us we have finally decided to enter fully into the
pain of our loss, or the pain of another.
The helpless pain at the center of grief is the soul's annunciation
that we might have arrived at suffering's essential core, where there is no
ready way forward, no remedy for our suffering selves, no cure for a suffering
loved one, or it seems anything to be done about our distraught world.
Anguish is always waiting for us: beyond our refusing to
care, or our unwillingness to feel fully how helpless we often are to help
another, either those intimate to our lives or those suffering at a distance.
Anguish is one of the most difficult qualities for human beings to enter
because it is meant to be felt whether we have answers or not.
Anguish has its own sense of timing in both concentrating
and inviting us to experience its pain, at what feels like a cellular level and
then, soberingly, anguish stays longer than we would want and seems to have its
own incredibly slow way of moving on. It seems not to move on in fact, until we
have fully imbibed its painful instruction of how much we feel and how much we
care.
Anguish is the act of finally allowing the transforming fire
of care in the heart to rage fully at last, our defenses burnt away by the
consuming flame of our helpless love, where, at the center of that fire, we
feel our grief and loss to its very core and where grief, in its own timeless,
unfathomable way, is allowed to slowly become its own cure.
Angish fully felt and fully articulated in its helplessness,
becomes in that articulation, the threshold where our private incurable,
unspoken grief turns to public, passionate remedy. Anguish is the true common
hidden, a priori foundation to our speaking out for others in this
world, even those who seem to have hurt us, anguish is the only true ground we
can stand upon to do any useful, charitable, philanthropic work.
Anguish is not debilitation: anguish fully felt, is a sign
that we are fully awake at last, through our own pain, to all the heartbreaking
losses and goodbyes involved in the drama of a human life, anguish tells us we
are getting ready to embrace, or are even now, against our will, willing to
embrace, what until now could never be embraced, that is: our ability to live
fully in this body despite its never ending griefs and wounds, as others live,
and have always lived, half helplessly, half trying to help, in the greater
body of the suffering world.
by David Whyte in
Consolations II, The Solace, Nourishment, and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words
Note: I don't put up Contemplative Moments so close together usually, but this had special meaning to me (not least that after a period of profound anguish I received and read this first article in Whyte's now book on Gaudete Sunday). It changed my entire perspective on "anguish" and colored my prayer at Mass that morning.
Also, of course, it calls attention to David Whyte's new book which is available for the holidays. It is a second volume of Consolations, David's incredibly beautiful and insightful reflections on the meanings of everyday words. These do indeed give nourishment and solace as they call attention to the deep mysteries words serve to mediate and open us to, ther mysteries we each are called to live if we are to be fully human to and for one another. All good wishes for a wonderful "Gaudete week" in immediate preparation for the Feast of the Nativity of Jesus, in whom God is Emmanuel.
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