Glad Gethsemane

I have been reading Robert Fitzgerald's The Soul of Sponsorship, The Friendship of Fr. Ed Dowling, S.J., and Bill Wilson in Letters. In discussing Bill W.'s depression Fitzgerald makes reference to Dowling's concept of a 'Glad Gethsemane', a joyful embracing of pain. The volume includes Dowling's magazine article How to Enjoy Being Miserable, which expounds on the idea.

Dowling says we have 3 possible attitudes toward the large and (especially) small miseries we encounter:

1. We can "be crushed by them and jump into the river or a movie or into a debauch of self-pity, profanity or resentment."

2. We can stoically accept them, cowboy up and carry on (presumably with a self satisfied nobility).

3. We can enjoy them. Not masochistically, certainly not in glorious theatrical martyrdom, but in a spirit of love and giving.

According to Dowling, this spirit of Glad Gethsemane, involves "the psychological trick of changing from resigned willing acceptance of suffering [option 2] to grateful wanting to take up and enjoy suffering". Citing the example of a parent giving her blanket to a cold child, Dowling emphasizes that the trick "consists in finding someone we love who will be helped by our sufferings."

Now there's the rub -- finding someone we love who will be helped by our sufferings.

I can accept Dowling's three possible reactions to suffering. I, for one, am deeply experienced and highly skilled at Option 1. I also have some experience with Option 2. In fact, I find that the Path of Spartan Nobility is especially seductive, since the feeling of being the Man of Moral Steel whom no long traffic light can disturb is quite pleasing. For me, at least, it inevitably leads to spiritual constipation. I strut about with a moral stick up my ass. Not a pretty sight.

Option 3 is a little hard for me to wrap my head around. How, when faced with one of life's hardships, big (illness, death) or little (the ill-timed telemarketer), do we go about finding someone we love who will be helped by our sufferings? For Dowling the answer is to unite our suffering with Christ's passion and thereby contribute to salvation. For me personally that marches into areas of Christian theology that I cannot accept. However, there may be a more secular version that I can handle.

If I think of the consequences of each of the three possible reactions to pain I get a clue. Options 1 and 2 cause more pain, both to ourselves and to those around us. In contemplating Option 3 I get some help if I think about consequences. I guess it was three or four years ago that a man (I think his name was Charlie) started coming to my home group, a small men's meeting. He was dying and simply said that the only goal he had left in life was to die a sober member of AA. A few months later he did. There were no histrionics, just an honest desire to do what was right because it was right. His pain gave hope and joy, both to himself and to those around them. He found the "someone we love who will be helped by our sufferings" in everyone he came into contact with. To be precise, we were not helped by his sufferings themselves but by the way he dealt with them.

It seems ridiculous to put a long traffic light or a telemarketer on that plane, but I spend most of my life in ridiculously small, rather silly situations. If I can, in my small way, in my small circumstances, emulate Charlie and willingly accept pain and loss as part of life and embrace them with joy simply because it is the the best option, the right thing to do, the thing that is most likely to help me and those I come into contact with, I may also generate some hope and joy and lessen the sum total of human suffering by just a little bit.