Liza Field

Liza Field's column appears twice a month in Extra.

Recent columns

• Recalling the start of a movement on the retail front lines
• Don't lose sight of the unseen 'big picture'
• Remember: There's more to life than what we see

Weeping tarries for the night, but joy comes in the morning.

-- Psalm 30

Recently, a friend who is a plumber described his difficulty retaining a helper. Three people he had hired recently, it emerged, were addicted to prescription painkillers.

Not that they'd had any physical pain. But just being alive brings other pain, which drugs seem bluntly to dull, so now these guys had a painful addiction. Their unreliability at work, moreover, had brought pain to this plumber -- plus economic distress to their families.

It seems there's no way around it. Life is painful, whether we accept pain or spend all our energy trying to avoid it.

Kenneth Rexroth's poem, "Two Foxes," makes this piercing point. Two foxes get caught in a leg trap. One lies captive, leg ensnared. The other fox goes free, hobbling on three legs, holding up his bloody, chewed-off stump, painfully and proudly "as if to say, 'It hurts, it hurts -- either way.' "

The plumber who squarely met his pain, facing the anger of let-down customers, having to go back and fix the mistakes of his helpers, made me think.

If we could begin honoring the nobility of life's pain and trouble again, might there be less cause for addictions, avoidance and all the consumer traps that promise to remove life's difficulties?

Improving human health and happiness are great endeavors. But, it occurred to me, returning to a respect for the sadder underside of life might restore some genuinely good medicine to us -- and the ravaged planet we keep plundering in search of happiness.

Tapping deep waters

That's why I began a column series on suffering. I'd also seen good soul growth emerge from trouble and grief. So it puzzled me that even some forms of contemporary Christianity implied that suffering indicated religious error -- that if only one had the right faith, God would offer instant "prosperity" and physical healing.

Such a message differs little from that of the commercial world, which now trains us to run from trouble, grief, compunction and sadness. Isn't this self-defeating, if trouble can activate qualities such as mercy, kindness, patience, integrity, gratitude -- even joy?

But here we step into "paradox land," where things that look one way are also their complete opposite, taking us out of the realm of mental control, into an illogical vastness that is unsettling.

For instance, "Happy are they who mourn." This, like Jesus' other Beatitudes, is logically dislocating. We want things clearly either happy or sad, good or bad, to be chased or chasing. For the same reason, traditional tragedy can be hard for people of our time to value.

Who would call King Lear "happy," I wondered at age 18, pondering the old king's homelessness, remorse and devastation. My black-or-white mind could not comprehend any notion that the king's lot had improved after getting "cracked in the head," even if he had grown grateful, humble and kind.

But suffering cracks everyone in the head, eventually. It may seem a disaster, but perhaps only such cracking can open us to any realm of paradox -- not to mention the deep qualities that lie dormant within the soul, under the floorboards of our minds and how things appear.

A happy ending

I've heard it said that public mourning is largely absent from our society for a reason. Suffering is a soul activity, and can only be honored collectively by cultures that give as much value to the soul and the invisible world as to materialism.

Hence, the sackcloth and wailing, fasts and penitential days, nightlong watches and barefoot pilgrimages that gave vent to grief in other societies, are rare in the United States, where public life should have a glittery, upbeat visual appeal -- football, NASCAR, Christmas shopping, parades and good times. What kind of American wants to march around weeping and wearing a bag?

In a culture where sorrow indicates "mistake" and "something gone wrong," rather than our common humanity, suffering generally goes underground, where the sufferer's pain can be compounded by a sense of isolation, failure (at happiness) or some personal weirdness.

But "going underground" can be a balm, in a noisy, bright, high-speed world. The dark, silent subsoils of life can offer a sanctuary for the shocked or devastated person. And the good minerals he finds there, in his own depths, can resurface with him later and nourish the whole world.

University of Virginia psychology professor Jonathan Haidt cites much research on "post-traumatic growth." Sufferers of loss, grief and trauma often become stronger, kinder, more grateful and, ironically, joyful.

If this paradox hasn't cracked us in the head yet, no worries. A look even at the surface world today suggests that we all, like King Lear, will crack open soon enough.

Maybe it can help to trust the many ahead of us, who've suffered deeply and yet perceived that "joy comes in the morning."

Liza Field's column runs every other Saturday in Extra.