The Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius once said, "How ridiculous and how strange to be surprised at anything which happens in life!" And in many ways, this is how the Christian should approach life's tribulations. As Jesus tells us in Mark 9:49, "For everyone will be seasoned with fire, and every sacrifice will be seasoned with salt." All Christians will suffer at some point, and should not be surprised at this. But what Marcus Aurelius was speaking to was a deeper way of thinking, for he was one of the later students of the Greek school of Stoicism.
We have all heard of being "stoic," and what we generally interpret this to mean is a person who feels no pain, or at least does not reveal themselves to be suffering from pain. A stoic is able to take mental or physical discomfort and not show it. But this is not what the Stoics were really all about.
Stoicism is a school of philosophy begun by Zeno of Citium, who lived in Hellenistic Greece from around 334 to 262 B.C. He began teaching in the open Stoa Poikile or "front porch" of the Agora in Athens around 300 B.C., and it is from "Stoa" that we get "Stoicism." The Stoics had numerous beliefs about logic, physics, and their interpretation of god. Unfortunately, none of the early writings of the Stoics remain, and we can only piece together their early philosophy from fragments. The Stoic philosopy endured in influence until well into the middle of the first century A.D. Perhaps the most important and longest lasting portion of their philosophy was their beliefs about emotions.
The Stoics believed that peace of mind was obtained by reaching a state of apatheia. The Greek word pathos meant suffering, feeling, or emotion, and apatheia, from where we get our word apathy meant "without suffering." Stoics believed that through logic and reason the will was able to control the emotions, both good and bad. They felt that happiness or eudaimonia was achieved by avoiding or controlling the emotions of desire, fear, pleasure, and sorrow. The wise person would not allow themselves to be controlled by these emotions, and therefore, would not suffer.
The word passion comes from the Latin passio, which means, "suffering, enduring." So passion was ruled out by those on the Porch in Athens. You avoided suffering by using the will to control your emotions. In particular, you controlled the things you could, such as your feelings, and you did not allow things you could not control to affect you. It is this "indifference to externals," meaning not allowing external things to bother you that I think led Marcus Aurelius to his statement about letting things that happen to us in life to distress us.
You can see how the original Latin meaning of passion led to our description of Christ's sufferings. But in today's usage, passion has come to mean caring deeply about something, and apathy has come to mean not caring about anything. And I don't think God wants us to live our lives without caring deeply. He wants us to love Him passionately, as in Luke 10:27, "You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your strength, and with all your mind." A Christian is not to go around unfeeling, either. As D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones put it, "...the Christian is not someone who has become immune to what is happening round and about him... the absence of a feeling of grief in a Christian in certain circumstances is not a recommendation for the Christian faith. It is unnatural."
What the Stoics got right was that we are not to allow these normal and natural feelings to dominate us. We cannot avoid suffering by simply choosing to ignore our pain. And many people do choose to avoid pain by not caring deeply about things. What we are to do is, "...bring every thought into captivity to the obedience of Christ" (II Cor 10:5). We are to live life passionately. We are not to live our lives sitting on the front porch, unfeeling, letting the world pass us by so that we will never feel pain or suffering. But we are not to allow passion to rule us. That is the job of our Savior.
Tuesday, February 28, 2012
Monday, February 6, 2012
The Suffering Amplifier
When I was growing up in North Carolina my father worked at a radio station and my next-door neighbor was a television repairman. This led me to develop an interest in electronics, back in the days of tubes and resistors and capacitors, before the solid state printed circuits of today. I studied wiring diagrams and remember building my first single diode radio, and then later a one-tube radio, which required stringing enormous amounts of wire from tree to tree in our front yard to make an antenna. After working on this project for some time, it was amazing to finally connect the batteries and watch the little vacuum tube begin to glow, and then begin recieving a radio broadcast from WOWO in Fort Wayne, Indiana. The electrical signal from this small radio was so tiny, however, that you could only hear the music when wearing a headset.
One of the concepts I learned in my study of electronics was that of amplification. Many times in working with electronics the source signal is too weak to really do anything with it. The current generated by sound waves striking a microphone generate a small electrical current, but not so large as to power a speaker. An amplifier is another electrically powered device that takes the small electrical signal and allows that signal to make large changes in its own voltage output, and these large changes are enough to then power speakers and so forth.
Another principle we learned about in electronics class was feedback. Feedback means that not all of the output voltage from the amplifier is used to power the speakers or other device, but is routed back to the source. In amplifiers, this voltage is often out of phase with the input voltage, and helps to dampen it. This helps to cancel out large swings in the system and add stability. This is negative feedback. Think of taking a marble and a bowl, and releasing the marble from one side of the bowl. The marble goes back and forth several times before settling at the bottom.
However, much of what we commonly call feedback is unintentional positive feedback. This typically occurs outside the amplifier when a microphone is placed near a speaker. Sound generated by the microphone creates sound from the speaker, which is then picked up by the microphone and so on until a loud squeal results and everyone covers their ears. The sound has gotten out of control. Think about our bowl and marble, but this time, the bowl is upside down. If you place the marble on top of the inverted bowl, it runs off out of control onto the floor.
Rarely does anyone feel your pain and suffering as acutely as you do. You may not actually be the one afflicted with a particular problem, but your loved one is, and sometimes watching them suffer generates enormous pain for us. In fact, I have seen many cases where the family members of ill patients were suffering far more than the patient, because the patient was medicated or unconscious. Most of the time, however, when we are not actually involved in the suffering process, we do not experience the same degree of distress.
As physicians, we are trained observers of others who suffer. We must assist others in their suffering, yet not yield to each and every pang, for if we did we would not be able to function and make some of the difficult decisions we must make and help others to make. Yet we must also not abandon all empathy. There has to be a middle ground, between cold-hearted dispassion on the one hand and hypersensitive blubbering on the other. We should not minimize the pain felt by others, for it is real. Yet sometimes the amplifiers get caught up with feedback and the whole system gets out of control.
What I am talking about is a loss of perspective. Sometimes when we suffer, the actual problem may not be so horrible, but by the time we finish worrying about it and obsessing over it and working out worst case scenarios we have allowed our problems and our minds to establish feedback to the point where we are escalating the problem to a loud squeal that drowns out what we need to hear from the Lord. I am very guilty of this myself with my own problems, yet perfectly capable of looking at someone else's difficulties and saying, "So what's the big deal?" We have different perspectives on our own problems compared to someone else's.
Still, when it is us who is suffering, I would encourage you try and stop the feedback loop that is amplifying your suffering and go to the Word of God, what He has done for you and His promises. One of my favorite writers, D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones, once said that we must take ourselves in hand. We must talk to ourselves instead of allowing "ourselves" to talk to us. As he put it, "Most of our unhappiness in life is due to listening to yourself rather than talking to yourself. " Go back to the things you know are true-- what Christ did for you on the cross, your assurance in salvation. Stop listening to the voice that is turning up the volume on your anxiety and worry and distress and tell yourself the truths God has given us. If our worst-case scenario is death, then the worst the Christian can expect is to spend eternity in Paradise. (Luke 23:43) Take the microphone away from the speakers, and break the feedback squeal that keeps getting louder.
Peace and equanimity should follow. And even if you have lost all your marbles save one, at least turn your bowl right side up so it will stop rolling around and settle to a stop.
One of the concepts I learned in my study of electronics was that of amplification. Many times in working with electronics the source signal is too weak to really do anything with it. The current generated by sound waves striking a microphone generate a small electrical current, but not so large as to power a speaker. An amplifier is another electrically powered device that takes the small electrical signal and allows that signal to make large changes in its own voltage output, and these large changes are enough to then power speakers and so forth.
Another principle we learned about in electronics class was feedback. Feedback means that not all of the output voltage from the amplifier is used to power the speakers or other device, but is routed back to the source. In amplifiers, this voltage is often out of phase with the input voltage, and helps to dampen it. This helps to cancel out large swings in the system and add stability. This is negative feedback. Think of taking a marble and a bowl, and releasing the marble from one side of the bowl. The marble goes back and forth several times before settling at the bottom.
However, much of what we commonly call feedback is unintentional positive feedback. This typically occurs outside the amplifier when a microphone is placed near a speaker. Sound generated by the microphone creates sound from the speaker, which is then picked up by the microphone and so on until a loud squeal results and everyone covers their ears. The sound has gotten out of control. Think about our bowl and marble, but this time, the bowl is upside down. If you place the marble on top of the inverted bowl, it runs off out of control onto the floor.
Rarely does anyone feel your pain and suffering as acutely as you do. You may not actually be the one afflicted with a particular problem, but your loved one is, and sometimes watching them suffer generates enormous pain for us. In fact, I have seen many cases where the family members of ill patients were suffering far more than the patient, because the patient was medicated or unconscious. Most of the time, however, when we are not actually involved in the suffering process, we do not experience the same degree of distress.
As physicians, we are trained observers of others who suffer. We must assist others in their suffering, yet not yield to each and every pang, for if we did we would not be able to function and make some of the difficult decisions we must make and help others to make. Yet we must also not abandon all empathy. There has to be a middle ground, between cold-hearted dispassion on the one hand and hypersensitive blubbering on the other. We should not minimize the pain felt by others, for it is real. Yet sometimes the amplifiers get caught up with feedback and the whole system gets out of control.
What I am talking about is a loss of perspective. Sometimes when we suffer, the actual problem may not be so horrible, but by the time we finish worrying about it and obsessing over it and working out worst case scenarios we have allowed our problems and our minds to establish feedback to the point where we are escalating the problem to a loud squeal that drowns out what we need to hear from the Lord. I am very guilty of this myself with my own problems, yet perfectly capable of looking at someone else's difficulties and saying, "So what's the big deal?" We have different perspectives on our own problems compared to someone else's.
Still, when it is us who is suffering, I would encourage you try and stop the feedback loop that is amplifying your suffering and go to the Word of God, what He has done for you and His promises. One of my favorite writers, D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones, once said that we must take ourselves in hand. We must talk to ourselves instead of allowing "ourselves" to talk to us. As he put it, "Most of our unhappiness in life is due to listening to yourself rather than talking to yourself. " Go back to the things you know are true-- what Christ did for you on the cross, your assurance in salvation. Stop listening to the voice that is turning up the volume on your anxiety and worry and distress and tell yourself the truths God has given us. If our worst-case scenario is death, then the worst the Christian can expect is to spend eternity in Paradise. (Luke 23:43) Take the microphone away from the speakers, and break the feedback squeal that keeps getting louder.
Peace and equanimity should follow. And even if you have lost all your marbles save one, at least turn your bowl right side up so it will stop rolling around and settle to a stop.
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