One man very dear to us often says things like, "The world is killing me," or "I'm gettin' smoked for other people's sins," or, "they're trying to set me up for things that I don't know nothin' about." Sometimes I think he is talking about something specific that has happened to him where he is literally getting blamed for something someone else has done. Sometimes perhaps that's the case. But more often he is talking about the "world" much more abstractly, and the experience of "gettin' smoked" is actually a physical pain that he feels in his torso, or an indescribable emotional state that seems to make it hard to think straight. I'm often astounded at just how close he comes his words come to the Servant Songs in Isa. 53.
He was despised and forsaken by men, a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief. And like one from whom men hide their face, he was despised and we did not esteem him. Surely our griefs he himself bore and our sorrows he carried....He was pierced for our transgressions and crushed for our iniquities.
Then I ran across one of Dorothy Day's description of her own suffering during one of the times she was in prison...
Solitude and hunger and weariness of spirit - these sharpened my perceptions so that I suffered not only my own sorrow but the sorrows of those about me. I was no longer myself.
I was mankind.
I was as no longer a young girl, part of a radical movement seeking justice for those oppressed; I was the oppressed. I was that drug addict, screaming and tossing in her cell, beating her head against the wall. I was that shoplifter who, for rebellion, was sentenced to solitary. I was that woman who had killed her children, who had murdered her lover. The blackness of hell was all about me. The sorrows of the world encompassed me. I was like one gone down into the pit. Hope had forsaken me. (From Dorothy Day: Selected Writings, p.5)
We are all parts, one of another.
