i held an atlas in my lap
ran my fingers across the whole world
and whispered
where does it hurt?
it answered
everywhere
everywhere
everywhere.
Washan Shire
These are the last few lines of the poem, “What They Did Yesterday Afternoon,” a haunting poem by Washan Shire, a contemporary Somali British writer now living in Los Angeles. Sometimes art and poetry can say what cannot be said otherwise. This poem seems to emotionally connect us with the suffering in a way that an essay can’t. The suffering is too great for our rational understanding. We don’t know how to understand or even describe it, and so we focus on that which touches us.
Yet we know that such a focus is inadequate. The world is hurting and our love for the world and for each other must include more than that which directly affects us.
The different faith traditions all try to make sense of evil and suffering and each tradition has those that claim to have made sense of it all. But the better answer may be that there is no answer, no certainty, and no solution. We are thrown into a world of uncertainty and suffering and if there was an answer or a way to make sense of it we would have discovered it by now. Instead, it is the great unknown.
Our great temptation is to make sense of the world, and to do that we build narratives and belief systems. Yet these prevent us from seeing the uncertain world as it is. We assume that God must have given us the task of understanding the world but what if our task is not to understand the world but to love the world? Love requires that we see the world as it is, not as we believe it to be. That requires that we pay attention to the world so that the world can speak to us and we can hear its suffering, its joy, and its beauty.
