When I 'suffer the sins of the world' I experience the degredation, the inequality, the unnecessary struggle to live the good life. This experience causes me to turn in upon myself, and to deflect my pain by seeking pleasure in automated joy - games, netflix, tv - I dull myself into an interior and solitary stupor.
When I try to love another human, when I learn to love another human, I find myself unexpectedly thrust out of my interior solitary stupor. But learning to love is voluntary and also bi-directional. It isn't fully true that I learn to love you - we learn to love each other - together.
And so, in a very real sense, I experience your suffering of the sins of the world. I get to learn what it means to be you, and experience degredation, inequality, and the unnecessary struggle to live the good life even as you experience them. And so my self grows because my experience changes.
So we don't live, we live with. I live with you, I love with you, I fear with you, I hope, with you. This essential 'with-ness' of life re-writes power. In order to approach and be approachable, to live with and be live withable, I must give up the notion of control - control of outcome, process, and experience. Living with is disposession.
In many ways, the more people I enter into life with, the more people I decide to love with, the richer my suffering the sins of the world is. And so as I live and love 'with' people more and more, so I suffer more and more the sins of the world.
And yet my desire to turn in upon myself, to deflect my pain, to not experience your pain, to seek pleasure in automated joy, to dull myself into an interior and solitary stupor also increases. I wonder if this is what the old language about the mortification of our natural selves and the pleasure of the body is referring to.
Perhaps it is helpful to consciously think about learning to suffer the sins of the world together. To name our shared degredation, our shared inequality, and our shared unnecessary struggle to live the good life.
