THROUGH UNTRUE
Fr. Rolando V. dela Rosa, O.P.
Like most people, I seldom found joy and excitement in washing my clothes. The tedious and boring task wore me down. I would rather that someone did it for me. But I realized that avoiding important chores made them more difficult to accomplish.
So I found a way to do my laundry and enjoy it. How? Iritualize it. Ritualization is ceremonially doing an ordinary act and finding in it a meaning that transcends its ordinariness. So, during wash day, I carefully sort out the white from the non-white, soak these in the tub, rub these together vigorously with my hands, then rinse, wring, and hang the washed clothes one by one to dry.
Doing my laundry ritualistically opens up to me a wealth of meaning or significance that I never recognized before. For instance, washing my dirty clothes is the only time when I am in full control of the process and very sure of the results. It gives me a heightened sense of self-assurance, something I seldom experience during most days when I work hard but end up feeling uncertain about many things.
If ritualization can transform a dreary task into a meaningful endeavor, it can also do wonders for the daily afflictions that often make us miserable. All of us are allergic to pain, but if we learn the art of ritualizing it, we can derive from it the strength and the wisdom we need to move on.
How do we ritualize suffering? People who lost their family or their livelihood because of unexpected calamities would rather forget, than face squarely such horrible experiences. We all know, of course, that if we do not confront pain as we should, the unshed tears, the unfinished grieving, the pain of loss, and the emotional hurt that we bury alive in our memory will continue to haunt us, and later crawl out of our consciousness in monstrous forms.
We ritualize suffering by first accepting it as something we cannot always avoid or prevent. Joy and pain are inseparable because we cannot appreciate one without experiencing the other. With acceptance comes a broadening of our perspective. We learn to say: “The part is not the whole,” or "This too will pass." Ritualizing suffering is like leaping in the dark with the firm hope that someone will catch us as we fall. As Adam Hamilton writes in his book Half Truths:
"We will face adversity in our lives. We will face things that are more than we can handle. The promise of Scripture is not that we won’t go through hard times. What Scripture does promise is that at all times, good or bad, God wants to be our help and our strength. It’s not that God won’t give you more than you can handle, but that God will help you handle all that you’ve been given."
Authentic faith is born out of pain. It was when St. Paul was faced with insurmountable suffering that he realized God is not only in the depths of his pain. God is the depth of his being. This enabled him to say: “I have been crucified with Christ; it is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me. The life which I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God who loved me and gave Himself up for me” (Gal. 2:20).
Most of us continually rebel against any sort of pain. But Christianity is not a "feel-good" religion, as our Gospel reading today tells us (John 3:14-21). By being wounded, broken, and crucified on the cross, Jesus ritualized suffering and made it healing and redemptive.