Towards Road to Recovery: Accepting and Acknowledging Tragedy and Suffering as Part of Life in Partnership with God
11-09-2022
By Dhanushka Dilshan
In his memoir Night, Elie Wiesel describes an execution by hanging. A child, too small for the noose to tighten around his neck, struggles for a long time before succumbing to death. Wiesel’s fellow prisoners are forced to watch this, and they weepingly ask, “Why is this happening to us?” One of them asks, “Where is God now?” Wiesel’s bitter response is, “Where is He/She? Here He/She is – He/She is hanging on the gallows.”
That all of us struggle at one time or another in life, with the question of why evil happens to us, our families, our friends, and our nations. We ask the same question when we go through nasty experiences of life like Covid 19 or even after hearing some particularly disturbing instances in the news. In all these, all people fight for human dignity. The majority of people in my country of Sri Lanka, including myself, are suffering because of cyclical poverty. The majority of Islanders are crying for food, shelter, and a host of other basic human rights.
Thich Nhat Hanh in his book No Mud, No Lotus: The Art of Transforming Suffering,emphasizes that, “without mud, the beautiful lotus flower could not grow, without suffering, there cannot be happiness.” According to Hanh, both suffering and happiness are of an organic nature, which means they are both transitory because they are always changing. When a flower wilts, it becomes compost. The compost can help grow a flower again. Happiness is also organic and impermanent by nature. It can become suffering and suffering can become happiness again.
One of the crucial shifts we need to make, is going from 'Why did it happen?' to 'What do I do now that it has happened?' In the process of our evolution, we have been given moral choices. When we respond to the question of Wiesel’s fellow prisoner, “Where is God?” we need to remember that, the awful things that happen in life, should help us learn and see tragedy and suffering in the context of a life that is balanced more in favor of good than bad. This understanding helps us to see what has enriched us, as well as what we have lost.
As such, to find a road of recovery, we must willingly acknowledge and accept that chaos and randomness exist in our lives. We also need to understand that pain and suffering are not entirely useless, since they teach us to find a road to recover ourselves. As a result, I believe that the secret to happiness is to acknowledge and transform our suffering, not to run away from it.
Dhanushka Dilshan is a McCormick Alumni 2021.