Our Real Spiritual Guides

Who wants Trouble and Suffering? I'd like to avoid them if possible, to have them visit the house next door, but never show up on my porch. If they do come to my address, I'm not likely to throw out the welcome mat. I don't want to show Trouble and Suffering even a glimmer of hospitality . . . they may find a room and stay!

Actually, my knee-jerk response to Trouble and Suffering is to mumble and moan and -- sometimes quietly and sometimes passive-aggressively -- groan about "my miserable lot in life."

I may come around to prayer about them, and my first prayer is most always, "God, get them out of here!" Sometimes Trouble and Suffering come as a situation, sometimes as people, sometimes as an expectation or obligation. Removing the situation or the people or the expectation/obligation to a far away place seems to hold promise for getting rid of my stew. "If the presenting problem is removed, the thing that is touching my sensitive spot, then I'll be better," the thinking goes.

And then I come to what is going on inside me when Trouble and Suffering come around. Why my extreme reactions? What has this pair touched off within me? What turf am I defending? What do I have at stake in this situation emotionally?

I cycle through these patterns often. The situation can be as small as a minor irritation on a given day at work or it can be as major as daily life with a terminal disease. Either way, it seems like removing Trouble and Suffering would make for a more pleasant existence.

Only it doesn't work that way. Even when Trouble and Suffering are sent packing, I'm still left with myself, my own inner landscape. I may be free of that which was pushing my emotional buttons, but I'm not free of my own interior. The wound within me lives on.

In fact, one of the huge fallacies in modern life is the thinking that goes something like this: "My life would be wonderful and put together if she were gone . . . or if this situation were better . . . or it he would treat me right . . . or if I had the right job." We act as if -- and may even believe! -- that our happiness is dependent upon everything being properly arranged in the outer world.

This isn't to excuse all the crud that happens around us, nor to excuse the perpetuators of the crud around us who take advantage, abuse, and live mindlessly. It is to say, though, that I'm not responsible for their crud, only for my own.

In my most aware moments I realize that Trouble and Suffering may be the best spiritual guides I have. They put a finger on my tender places, on the spots where I am still developing, the places where my stance toward life is immature and incomplete. They invite me to become more attentive to my own interior landscape, to become familiar with what lives inside me, to notice what jerks me around on the inside, to see myself as I really am, not as I want to be (or think I am).

It pains me to admit that Trouble and Suffering are my best spiritual guides; I know from experience, though, that it's true.