Harvesting Your Suffering

The harvest of suffering cannot be reaped until it has been eaten, burnt, digested. If the suffering is accepted and lived through, not fought against and refused, then it is completed and becomes transmuted. It is absorbed, and having accomplished its work, it ceases to exist as suffering, and becomes part of our growing self. 

(from Elizabeth O'Connor's Our Many Selves).

"What do I do with all this pain except stuff it?" she asked on Day 1 of our five days of intensive counseling together. She'd been a hard-working executive for years, but burnout caught up with her, and now the old sadness rushed forward demanding its day in the court of her psyche. It all felt like too much to hold.

"I hardly recognize myself anymore," he told me, hours into our intensive. A Wendell Berry poem captured the sense of the moment:

It may be that when we no longer know what to do we have come to our real work, and that when we no longer know which way to go we have come to our real journey. 

A pastor for 15 years, he'd come to his midlife moment of crisis, of paralysis, of confusion. He recalled a moment when he'd been preaching and felt himself pulling back from his own body, the sermon's words still coming from his lips, but aware that he was viewing himself from behind, stunned and surprised by his own question: "Who is this guy? Does he even believe what he's saying?" He wept that whole afternoon after, and many days after still, until he recognized that this suffering would need to be harvested.

There are moments when we realize that the questions we've dodged, the pain we've avoided, the sadness we've bypassed, even the anger we've shoved down, must be faced. We must take it and eat it, as if coming to the communion table. Regardless of the urge to run from it, we must take it in, digest it, metabolize it. Undigested pain only results in spiritual and emotional constipation, and some of us remain constipated for years, if not decades. This we call trauma.

Harvest your suffering. Take yourself, your story, and your pain seriously enough to acknowledge that it hurts. Take those you love seriously enough to acknowledge the residual cost on others of not harvesting it. Take God seriously enough to speak like a Psalmist - bold, honest, trusting that God can hold it all, and then some.

And find your way into a space where someone can aid in the holy harvesting.