The Suffering of the Christ

“One ship drives east and another drives west
With the selfsame winds that blow.
TIs the set of the sails
And not the gales
Which tells us the way to go.
Like the winds of the seas are the ways of fate,
As we voyage along through the life:
Tis the set of a soul
That decides its goal,
And not the calm or the strife.
~ Ella Wheeler Wilcox

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I'm not a preacher.  The gift of delivery of sermons belongs to those groomed and dedicated to this calling.  Christ, I will say, is a member of my healing circle in terms of spiritual understanding.  As I started to unravel in life, with all the symptomatic junk that PTSD wrought, there was a time when I wondered if I wasn't dealing with a devil.  Once I found the more useful scientific, medical explanations for my symptoms, I abandoned any thoughts of demon-possession, in favour of more helpful avenues of exploration into healing. 

I slowly learned to accept that the knowledge delivered to me, through prayer, wasn't the devil, tricking me away from God and I slowly accepted that my prayers we're actually finding answers.  My faith took a major turn.  The one person whose face never changed towards me in response to my illness and grief, was Christ.

Years ago, in 2000, as the pain was rising to the point inside of tearing my life completely apart, I was invited to portray Christ in an Easter celebration.  I was drawn to community theatre as an effort to find my purpose in life.  I'd always admired the acting community and even in childhood, I showed promise.  I seemed to always be chosen to lead in school productions.  For me, this portrayal was a significant highlight in my short-lived, acting career.

The significance of Christ's life, in terms of trauma, lies in the suffering he lived through his own short life.  In his community, as a man (I wish to remain focused on Christ's humanity) he stood out as different from the others.  He seemed wise beyond his years, speaking of things that truely amazed all who heard him speak.  As time passed and he came to his own place of growth towards his role, vocationally, as a Rabbi, he became a liability, a threat.

What did Christ threaten?  Frankly, he was a threat to power.  The  power held by the Roman Empire was threatened by Jesus.  Power in the church and a certain amount of power in the streets also came to ultimately bear-down upon the gentleness of the man.  

When power is threatened, I think we can all agree that it seems to resort to the same, incideous means of protection.  Power will always turn against the threat it perceives and kill the threat, to protect itself.  This is a very dark reality of our nature as human beings.  Sometimes, to ensure dominance, we are not that far removed from the animal we try so desperately to exclaim we are not.

Sounds very much like self-defense or a fight-or-flight response gone array, when we think about power and dominance taking it's fear out on the rest of humanity.  Whatever it is, I believe such a response is corrupted and rationalized, unconsciously, when we act out of our perceived need to defend our place. 

Those of us in recovery often feel what power must well have been feeling during this time in history.  We know what it is to feel threatened, without real reason, when our own symptoms of PTSD come rising to the surface out of the blue.

As you can possibly imagine, filling the sandals of such a role on stage as Christ, proved  impossible in the beginning of rehearsals.  My mind was already well-groomed to learn the lines written for me to speak.  The character of Jesus, I had no idea what to draw upon to represent a man of wisdom, gentlness, compassion and deep faith.  Through treatment, I've learned I was already knee-deep into the psychological demise of PTSD, the symptoms of which do a portrayl of Christ zero justice, as a means of coming to a sense of gentleness.

The one who was chosen to portray Christ's mother, came to me during one of these struggling times to perfect the character in the role.  She could see I was in pain.  She knew I wasn't pleased with how I was acting out the role.  Her words of advice, ring so true to me, even today, "Just let him in.  Get Darren out of the way".  

From here, I opened myself to experiencing the role, almost as an observer.  I stopped building from within the character of Jesus, his gentleness finally coming through during the eight final days of performances: Behold, The Man: A Passion Play, written by my dear friend, Mr. John Hopcraft.  This takes us to the suffering of the Christ. 

By allowing myself to observe the events of this man's life, I know fully, the suffering of Jesus.  PTSD, coming into full light, gave me what I needed to represent the real, human pain in the suffering of this gentle man.  Aside from the struggles to maintain a gentle character, when it came to portraying Christ's suffering, PTSD proved itself a gift.

Christ was, first and foremost, (for the purpose of this discussion) a man.  A human-being.  As a man, though gentle and humble of heart, with wisdom beyond anything anyone during his time had ever heard, he suffered extreme trauma in his living and dying.  

The systems around him, bullied him, publicly.  His church labeled him a blasphemer and heretic.  The people, so abused by the power structures of the church and state, didn't trust this man of the Jewish cloth, at least not everyone.  Over time, however, his sincere love for the broken, turned the people towards empowerment.  Jesus, sparked a revolution in the hearts of the lowest people in the rungs of society.  Power, simply could not allow this revolution to spark and set out to save itself.

Arrested first as a criminal, with no just charge to hold against him, the system manipulated the situation to enforce the decision it had already made.  The man, this threat, must die.  Power couldn't let this happen without the intense public display necessary to reverse the tide coming with the revolt.  Suffering was imposed to send a clear message to the people.  The suffering of the Christ we've seen repeated many times since.  We think of such things as this, whenever tyranny rules on earth.  

Christ's suffering was intense.  He was made a public spectacle.  He was beaten, tortured, in fact.  The whip used to deliver the blows, the flagrum (scourge) was the weapon of choice in Roman times.  A cat-of-nine, with shards of metal, ripped at Christ's flesh, repeatedly opening his body to bleed-out, massively, in response.  

He was delivered into the hands of bidding men of Roman honour, who tortured Christ further, beating him, spitting in his face, ripping at his hair and tearing beard and flesh from his body in the process.  The 'crown of thorns' depicted in his story, with thorns of nails, forced down upon his head, by those charged with carrying out the work on power's behalf, tore into Christ's face as the men drove the crown as deeply as they could into the heart, really, of this already dying man.  

These soldiers were well-versed in performing this bidding at the bequest of their masters.  They had no choice.  Fear of power, will drive us to do unspeakable things in our humanity.  Many now home from Iraq and Afghanistan, can testify to the brutality and suffrage soldiers are often ordered to inflict upon others in war.

Brought back towards the people, the message was clear, "This is what happens to anyone who threatens OUR REIGN".  With the message clear, the people no longer had a choice either.  When asked if they would like to see Jesus spared, the answer from the crowd gathered as witness was as loud and just as clear, "Crucify Him!"

Can you imagine what one must go through who is crucified?  Forced to lay, face down, nails driven into the body?  Some reading this, may well have been forced to kill another man, not out of vengeance, but as an act of duty.  The soldiers tasked to this act were no different than the soldiers of today.  They had a job to do, as much as this job might be detested within themselves at times, their duty was clear, and they carried this out, with no apology necessary.  

When it was done, they made light of the situation, to protect their psyche.  Dark humour and gambling for Christ's clothing was all they could do to pass the time waiting for the slow death of Christ to come.  As the story tells us, the death was a slow one.  

Those closest to Jesus, ran the other way in fear.  Many chose to betray the life of the man they once revered.  Some gathered to offer solace to the soul of a dear brother as he passed out of earthly existence.  Christ spoke to their hearts, even while dying, asking friends to care for his mother, and to love each other as he taught them was most important to do.  He granted forgiveness to the sinners beside him, thieves wondering for themselves what would come for them after their own public demise and execution was complete.  

The greatest act performed through Christ's suffering and death, the forgiveness of his oppressors and of those who carried out his execution, still rings in my theatrical ears:

          "Father, forgive them . . . For they do not know, what it is, that they are doing".  

To share the feelings of Christ's passing, I only have a single word to share: compassion.  Christ remained compassionate towards the ills of humanity to his last breath, or so the story goes.  The actor in me, would never come back to look at the world in the same way again.

Truth, delusion or myth, the story of the suffering of this man teaches us lessons of our human nature.  All of us can fall victim to the temptations of power and hatred.  We all can understand, especially those who have served in the military, the human virtues of duty and honour.  We know all too well, those of us fully in touch with the psychological traumas in our lives, the broken-ness that comes with betrayal.  Some of us, have suffered unimaginable abuses, physically, emotionally, and most tragic, sexually at the hands of other men.

As shared in the beginning, this isn't meant to be a sermon.  I have no business, none, dictating to anyone whom they should study along their intimate and personally unique avenues of recovery.  I can tell you, that prayer took me through this and other experiences, leading me to this story and also to the life of the Buddha, whom I now also cherish as as a welcome teacher as I continue on my journey of personal healing.

The greatest lesson of all, should we choose to allow the lesson to sink in, is that no matter what our trauma experience imposes upon us in terms of suffering, we are not alone.  Others, many others, have come before us, including as the Christ story suggests, God himself.  What do we do with the lesson of Jesus and of his suffering?

We learn through our own suffering that the real power of human existence is not as it might be displayed by the various institutions of church and state that we allow to govern our lives.  It's not in the suffering itself, that we learn the lessons of this story.  We can accept any betrayal we may have already lived through as an act of the darkness of our human nature, and we can learn to release, slowly, deliberately over our time in recovery to forgive.  How do we forgive others and most importantly, ourselves for not living up to the worlds expectations, as dictated to us through the influences we've discussed?

We do so, by coming back to the truth of this lesson.  We learn to readopt a sense of love towards ourselves and others, towards power, and I would suggest, even towards the suffering itself that comes with our trauma experience.  Love binds us up.  Love heals all the troubled wounds. 

Love opens doors, that PTSD, almost like a demon, wishes to nail shut.  Love breaks the shackles of our psychologically imposed prison sentence, and prepares us for a return to life.  We will never be the same as we once were, before trauma came into our being.  This doesn't need to be a bad thing.  If love, compassion and empathy for others who suffer as man can be the ultimate outcome for us as we heal?  Perhaps the lesson of Christ, for everyone, can help us to find the way. 

For if the story is, in fact, true?  We have Christ and many others who've walked the journey ahead of us to show us the way through our experience.  Remember, the ultimate lesson of the story is this: the world can do to us, whatever it chooses to do, in the end the efforts of the world of humanity to embrace power over the lives of others fails.  Even death itself, in this story, has no power over us, none at all. 

The true power of humanity comes with love.  We'll find our way back to this love, however we might   individually journey to do so.  Christ, and the story of his suffering, for me, has made a difference.  No sermon.  No demands of you to accept anything spiritual.  I share this, to  share this one aspect of my own journey, out of love for all who may read and need to know, they are not alone.  My prayer, for all visiting here remains:

Be Well . .  . . . . .

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