It’s a ceremony that seemed very strange to me when I first learned about it. It was so different from anything with which I was familiar that it was difficult to understand. Several decades ago, I was told about a tradition among the Plains Indians called the Sun Dance. The Sun Dance originated among the Lakota people whose ancestral home is now reduced to a collection of reservations in the Dakotas. The core of this dance for men is that their chests are pierced with a length of bone. A tether is tied to the bone and secured to a tall pole. The “dance” in the hot sun is a movement that will eventually cause the bone to rip through the chest. While this process is clearly painful, it is accompanied by the intensity of fasting, hot sun, and dehydration. The purpose of the Sun Dance is for the healing of the Earth and the balance among all creatures living on Earth.
In the years I lived in Arizona and was close to various Indian communities, I got to know and was able to speak with a number of men who had participated in the Sun Dance. They spoke of their participation as a privilege and a duty. While the experience may be difficult for the dancer, it is embraced because of its purpose. It is meant as a kind of sacrifice – a gift that makes life whole and holy. It unites the dancer with the pain of the world but also is seen as a way to restore balance. The imbalance is caused by the way human beings take more than their share from the Earth and the Sun Dance is a way to give back.
It’s important to note that traditionally only men participate in the Sun Dance. That’s because a women’s menstrual cycle is understood as holding the power of life that already offers balance in the world. As life-givers, women are understood to already have the capacity within themselves to sustain the balance of the world.
While I can only understand this experience as an outsider, based on my conversations with Sun Dancers, it seems that there is something profoundly redemptive about the suffering they experienced in the ceremony. They voluntarily embraced that suffering, seeing it as a noble act, not for themselves but for others and for the planet.
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The story of Siddhartha Gautama is a striking one. The young prince was raised in the palace, lavished with the finest life had to offer while also protected from all of life’s hardships. As he grew older, he wanted to know what was beyond the palace walls so he slipped away from his caretakers and began to explore. In doing so, he encountered people who suffered. It was overwhelming for him because suffering was outside of his experience. He learned that the world is full of suffering. He came to understand that the root cause of suffering was the desire for life to be different from how it is. If we are not attached to ideas and emotions of what our lives should be, then we would not suffer. He found that through a practice of right living and right thinking and by embracing a focused path for living, then these attachments would fall away, thus ending suffering. Embodying this path for himself, he became the Buddha and taught his followers the Eight-Fold Path.
I’ve had the opportunity to study with a Zen Roshi as well as a Tibetan monk. The lessons they shared with me are invaluable. I’ve read several contemporary books from various Buddhist traditions. Indeed, the core teaching of Buddhism has helped me let go of some of my unhealthy attachments as well as to embrace the impermanence of life. Buddhism has great insights for finding happiness in life and wisdom for appreciating what life has to offer in the present moment.
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In my explorations of religion and spirituality, I have learned from Native American people the importance of embracing the world’s pain in ceremonies like the Sun Dance or a ceremony that’s more common: the Sweat Lodge. These ceremonies evoke a chosen path of suffering that ushers us into the birth of something new that is healing and restores wholeness. I’ve also learned from my Buddhist teachers about letting go of desire and embracing impermanence to diminish my own suffering as well as the suffering in the world. As insightful as the lessons from these traditions are, and as much as I value them, I am a follower of the teachings of Jesus. Please be sure that I don’t consider my path better than the others, only that it is different.
The stories of Jesus conveyed to us in the Gospels bear witness to the importance of alleviating suffering in life. Yes, Jesus heals the sick, feeds thousands of people with a few loaves of bread and fish, and even makes wine from water so that a young couple would be saved from embarrassment at their wedding reception. Yet, when the time was right, Jesus embraced overwhelming suffering.
Many Christians believe that the suffering of Jesus and his death on a cross were part of God’s will: that God required it in exchange for human sinfulness. As common as that belief may be, I don’t share it. That’s because I don’t believe that a God who is described as love itself and as the Author of life would be sadistic enough to require the torture and death of anyone. Instead, Jesus was born to embrace every aspect of our life. In doing so, he touched people’s pain and offered wholeness. He enjoyed dinner parties and wedding receptions and I presume knew how to appreciate good wine. As is the case of prophets before him, who showed us how to embrace each other as sisters and brothers in one great human family, he, too, had to be killed.
The killing of the prophets of peace is not new. Jesus even quipped about it – that all the prophets of his tradition were killed in Jerusalem. In our era, we are well aware that prophets in the last century were gunned down: Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Harvey Milk – to name just a few. Consistently, the vision of humanity living as a beloved community threatens those who cling to power and privilege. Yet, the message of Jesus that the realm of God is in us and around us, that we are all sisters and brothers in one family, can’t be silenced. It has echoed through the ages.
My experience is that life brings us pain and suffering on its own. The rain falls on all of us at some time in life. We don’t need to seek suffering. We should probably do our best to minimize it. But there are days when pain and suffering will come into our lives. The Buddha is right: the world is full of suffering.
I believe that the way taught by Jesus is that God is present to us not only in the wonder of sunrise or the twinkle of the stars but also in those moments when we find ourselves hopeless, bereft, not sure where to turn, and finding no one who will stand with us. That is the story of Jesus of Nazareth conveyed in painful detail in each of the Gospel narratives.
As a follower of the teachings of Jesus, what’s important to me in the way of life led by Jesus is that Jesus demonstrated that God is one who suffers with us. He willingly suffered, not because it was necessary but because it was part of the human condition. By embracing suffering, he demonstrated that God is with us (Emmanuel) even in our pain.
As Christians retell familiar stories during the week that is called holy, perhaps we can learn something from our Buddhist friends and let go of our attachments to the way we think things should be, and embrace the impermanence of life. That will help us let go of the suffering we cause ourselves. Perhaps we can also learn from our Native American friends that suffering can indeed be redemptive and draw us more deeply into life. But recognizing that pain and hardship come our way, as followers of the way of Jesus, we need to hold on to the sacred truth that God is with us, no matter how difficult our days may be. That God is with us in our pain and suffers beside us. Our faith affirms that this Divine Presence will lead us out to the other side to new and renewed life in the Resurrection.
Photo by Alex Green from Pexels
Lou, as always, your perspective refreshes my own, which is very similar. That Jesus suffered because he was one of us is a thought that allows me to let go of my embrace of my own pain in favor of recognizing its universality. Thank you.