“If you really want to love Jesus, first learn to suffer, because suffering teaches you to love.”
St. Gemma Galgani
What does she mean— learn to suffer? Isn’t suffering something that just happens to us? I thought what we needed was to learn how not to suffer. And how does suffering teach us to love? Also, isn’t this supposed to be a blog about Zen practice and awakening?
St. Gemma Galgani (1878–1903) was a Christian mystic; she was famous for her deep meditations on the Passion of the Christ and her extraordinary love.
I can’t speak for St. Gemma, but I do get a sense of what she means. You can feel it in her eyes. Zen practice can also, with time, viscerally reveal the truth of what St. Gemma is saying. How does Zen practice do this?
One of the most basic moves in Zen is zazen (Zen meditation). Here we learn to sit still and settle into the actual experience of reality. We do this by not drifting into our thoughts and dreams, but staying present to what is actually going on: the sounds around us, what we are visually seeing (in Zen meditation we don’t close our eyes), what we are physically feeling, what we are experiencing emotionally; in short, we notice actual reality and stay here, instead of moving into our thoughts. The magical move we make in zazen is that we don’t push anything away: fear, sadness, anxiety, pain— the stuff that we call suffering.
After a while of consistently practicing zazen, something deep inside us shifts. We feel more grounded, freer to move in the way that our heart wants, and we are able to be more intimate. St. Gemma might call this learning to suffer.
Our increased capacity for intimacy opens up our ability to love more— those close to us and those not so close to us, and everything else we meet. For St. Gemma, Jesus.