I'm an odd duck. My degrees are in chemistry, clinical psychology, and theology. The rational part of my brain always seems to be in conflict with my emotional and spiritual side. Although I've learned to live with this oftentimes uncomfortable dichotomy, I've never really been able to embrace it.
But that may be changing.
Recently, I've been working my way through an interesting book called "Without Buddha I Could Not Be a Christian" by Paul Knitter (who happens to be the Paul Tillich Professor of Theology, World Religions and Culture at Union Theological Seminary in NYC).
Because the book is so dense and the Buddhist concepts so unfamiliar to me (I was raised in the Jewish-Christian tradition), I find that I read and re-read just a single page at a time, and then need to go and do something else. I need the time to process and mull over the new insights that the book presents to me. Despite my natural tendency toward impatience, I am trying to honor the spirit and the teaching of the book in order to use what I can to better myself. And so, like Roethke, I "take my waking slow."
Anyway, early on, Knitter presents Buddha's first sermon, the contents of which are the "Four Noble Truths." The truths are as follows:
- Suffering comes up in everyone's life.
- This suffering is caused by craving.
- We can stop suffering by stopping craving.
- To stop craving, follow Buddha's 8-fold path (which basically consists of living a moral life by avoiding harm to others and following a spiritual path based on meditation).
So I tried to apply these truths -- or at least, the first three of them -- to my life as it exists with RA. And this is what I came up with:
- My suffering comes from the pain caused by RA.
- I crave/desire/want to be pain-free.
- I can stop my suffering by quashing my desire to be pain-free. I just have to figure out how to do this. Hopefully, the book will point me in the right direction.
At any rate, from what I've read so far, it seems to me that serenity and a lack of suffering might be possible through "simple" acceptance of what is. I find the idea appealing.
I've been in pain for 4 years and been diagnosed for just two. So RA is still relatively new for me. But I wonder if acceptance gets easier and if suffering somehow loses some of its prominence and focus over time. That's my hope, anyway.

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