A Play of Passion

As old Walter Raleigh said, our life is a play of passion. By "passion" he meant suffering, as in "a Passion play", a play that re-enacts the sufferings of Christ. Passion, if you consider its root "pathos", means suffering, and is not really the emotional and physical rapture we associate it with today. Perhaps it is true that life is really about suffering, and all other things are trivial compared to what we must suffer. Perhaps our successes are only marginal triumphs before the inevitable fact of death. To suffer is to live, and to live is to suffer. From the moment we are born, we are under the shadow of agony-- our mothers experience it through childbirth, and so do we. We cry out at the difficulty of having to go out into a new world, of having to leave the comfort of our mothers' wombs. Our mothers are pained by each new act of disobedience, of treachery, or else they leave us to ourselves in order to cope with their own private sorrows. There is really no such thing as absolute gratification in life. If so, one might question the need to achieve status, to accumulate wealth, to gain knowledge-- if all they do is increase our suffering with every loss. Indeed, to be wise is to suffer, to feel grief, as it is said in Ecclesiastes that the house of the wise is the house of mourning. And with each gain, with each loss, we become more aware of the inherent grief of our existence; death is not merely physical death, it is also made up of the small slow deaths that grip us while we are corporeally alive. Yet there is hope for us: in the Passion of Christ, he rises again after being crucified and entombed. We have hope in the word timshel, "Thou mayest", that we can defeat the clutches of death that so readily grasp us; we have hope in the salvation we gain by the sacrifice of Christ.