Shaking Hands With Pain

Shaking Hands with Pain

By Maurice Malanes

Throngs of people filled the University of the Philippines-Baguio auditorium late afternoon last June 1. Coming from all walks of life and ages, the people trooped to the UP-Baguio campus to listen to Denise Lawrence or Sister Denise, a traveling spiritual teacher of the Brahma Kumaris World Spiritual University.

The topic assigned to Sister Denise was “shaking hands with pain, anxiety and fear.” She says pain comes in many forms and each of us experiences any of these pains in one way or another. There’s the physical pain of a toothache or headache or some other diseases or ailment. There’s emotional pain, which comes after we are betrayed, deceived or abandoned.

We also experience financial pain when we are heavily indebted and so it becomes a burden for us trying as much as we can to pay not only the principal but also the interests of a loan. So we try to get three jobs just so we can pay off our loans. But we are not super-beings so in getting three jobs we overstretch ourselves and end up not performing well as we become exhausted.

Although Sister Denise did not cite it, we might as well add the multi-billion foreign debts Third World countries like the Philippines have to pay to the World Bank or the International Monetary Fund. We, ordinary citizens, pay taxes and a bulk of our taxes is used to service just the interests of our foreign debts. Already burdened with taxes, we feel bigger pain when we eventually learn that our country’s multi-billion loans ended up in the pockets and secret bank accounts of some top officials.

A deeper pain, says Sister Denise, is philosophical pain. This happens, for example, when we couldn’t get answers as to why bad people rule the world and the good ones are sidetracked. So when bad people rule and prevail over the world, we tend to lose our hope and drop out from engaging with the world. Also as a result, our sense of right and wrong or our ethics gets blurred and we may end up joining the pack of bad people, which is more tragic and painful as we note how the world seems to be losing all the good people.

There are also the pains brought about by colonization, be it political or religious or a mix of both. As a result of colonization, for example, colonized people tend to lose their ability to operate with self-respect. Why? Colonizers, who had projected themselves as superior, had regarded the colonized as less inferior subjects to be subjugated and exploited, if not abused, or “heathens” to be “civilized” and “Christianized.” Suffering from such historical trauma, we Filipinos, for example, until now seem unable to get our acts together to efficiently and effectively govern our blessed country.

And there are the more damaging and more painful effects of war. Wars become damaging to human beings because under a war situation something illegal and abnormal becomes “normal.” So killing, maiming, rape and other forms of indignities become seemingly normal in a situation of war. All these leave deep psychological trauma, particularly for those who become orphans and widows.

To justify wars, both warring factions have to maintain some kind of propaganda that some people deserve to be killed because they are “pigs,” “crocodiles” or some other animal labels. We agree with Sister Denise that wars, be it the old world wars or the current “war against terror,” need some propaganda by both warring parties to justify all the killings. Governments would regard their perceived enemies as not only insurgents, subversives or rebels, but “enemies of democracy and the free world” or worse, “terrorists.” Those on other side of the fence also have their own labels to justify their wars.

But life is sacred. Human life, says Sister Denise, is a gift so not any of us has the right to extinguish it. She teaches that human life is a gift because it is only humans who have a sense of morality and ethics and who have thoughts on God. So to be human, she says, is to deeply regard another person as a spiritual being, and not an object to consume or exploit or some animal to slaughter. She says that each human being is in essence an immortal soul, who is by nature peaceful, loving and blissful.

As we have to deal with all our pains and traumas through some vital processes such as dialogue, we also have to finally realize that we are all spiritual beings or souls who are part and parcel of the Supreme Being, says Sister Denise. It is only through such realization that we begin to value and respect not only our own self-worth but also the self-worth of others.

That many trooped to the UP-Baguio campus to listen to Sister Denise apparently shows that many hunger for spiritual food amid the various levels and forms of pain we all experience in this mundane world.