The Shepherd, April 2007
Orthodoxy: The Answer to a Suffering Heart, 3
Broadly speaking, we can categorise our approaches to addressing this suffering into three categories:-
1. Physical pursuits: we use things like drugs and alcohol, sexual perversions, comfort eating, over-indulgence in physical sports (“exercise freaks”), to try and quell this suffering inside of us. Whilst some of these approaches can have a constructive use, like exercise to relieve physical tension, they only address the physical symptoms that come with suffering, but do not remove the suffering itself. If these particular approaches did remove this sort of suffering altogether, then when we indulged in comfort eating, drugs, gambling, etc., these would only be needed for a short time, and then the suffering would disappear. Clearly, that does not happen, and in most cases, an addictive passion develops and deepens for these forms of indulgence, because the suffering always comes back, and we need more and more of whatever particular indulgence we have chosen to subsume the feelings of suffering that we have. This approach is not constructive and best avoided - With him whose eye was proud and his heart insatiate, I did not eat (Ps 100:5).
2. Intellectual pursuits: intellectual pursuits cover things like being a workaholic, losing ourselves in television programmes or videos or worse, playing computer games until they take over our lives, uncontrolled use of the Internet, etc. These try at least to satisfy the inner part of the man in terms of trying to distract them from the point of suffering. None of these are actually solutions though. They tend to distract us and captivate us for a period of time, but when we break away from them, the problems that caused the suffering are still there, they are still painful, and they are still going to have to be dealt with. All too often, these pursuits too are the object of addictions.
3. Spiritual pursuits: some individuals have enough insight to realise that the pain that they are experiencing is deeper than a physical or psychological level. This leads them to seek out a religious system that “works” for them. This is a most perilous course at the best of times, and is littered with spiritual corpses of those who have sought to allay their inner suffering with these systems, only to be spat out at the other end as a smoking husk. The problem is that people seek religion for the wrong reasons - to get “spiritual” experiences, to silence this inward restlessness that they are experiencing, to get “understanding” and “self-acceptance.” These are all the wrong reasons, because they are centred on our own selfwill and our own desires. The only legitimate reason to enter a religion is because it is the truth - nothing else. No more, no less. There is no other healthy reason to follow a religion. Any other motive will involve us in spiritual shipwreck, because the systems that are geared to “pleasing” us in this pursuit, are inevitably not bound up with what the truth is, but only bound up with pleasing the people who come to it. The religious / spiritual answer is the one that is most necessary, as we will see, but not on any other terms than what the truth is.
We must then find some other criteria to understand our suffering, its function, and why it is beneficial for us. We described the experience of this sort of pain and the three main aspects earlier:
(A) The object which our heart longs for.
(B) The desire itself which makes our heart want to get these objects.
(C) How we satisfy our heart by obtaining the object of our desire.
An examination of these aspects should reveal to us what we are seeking.
To begin with, we must consider with what sort of things our heart is satisfied. Martin Buber, a Jewish theologian, categorised all our relationships in life into two categories: “I-it” relationships, and “I-thou” relationships. All “I-it” relationships are to do with our relationship to objects - tables, chairs, food, houses, etc. The relationship we have with objects is purely utilitarian - we use that object for a purpose, but cannot have a reciprocal relationship with that object because it does not respond to us in a personal way. It is merely an object. Even computerised equipment, however “intelligent,” is the result of human construction and can therefore only respond within the bounds of it’s programming. It may respond within its programming, but it has no freedom - you cannot have a personal relationship with such things. Even animals, who have souls, cannot be engaged in a fully personal relationship, because they do not have rational souls and cannot respond in the same way - be ye not as the ox or the mule that hath no understanding (Ps 31:9).
The other sort of relationship is an “I-thou” relationship. This is a relationship between persons. You can only have this sort of relationship with another person, who is able to freely and equally respond to you. We cannot have this kind of relationship with objects. Indeed, however much we lie to ourselves sometimes, we never feel true fulfilment within an object-relationship. Likewise, we distort our relationship with people if we try to have an “I-it” relationship with another person - this sort of distortion underlies our pitiful use of others and ourselves to satisfy physical cravings through unnatural sexual relationships and other forms of abuse, where we see the other person as a thing, not another person on equal standing. For out of the heart proceed evil thoughts, murders, adulteries, fornications, thefts, false witness, blasphemies (Matt 15:19). This distortion of “I-thou” relationships with people into a utilitarian, “I-it” relationship of ownership and using, is what underpins both capitalist and atheistic communist regimes nowadays.
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