A Paradigm of Struggle

By Joan Chittister

Life is a series of lessons, some of them obvious, some of them not. We learn as we go that dreams end, that plans get changed, that promises get broken, that our idols can disappoint us. We learn that there is such a thing as human support and that there is also such a thing as paralysing isolation. We learn that life is a balancing act lived between the poles of unreasonable hope on the one hand and disheartening disquiet on the other. We learn these things but we do not always understand them.

One thing time has taught me that can be learned no other way. One thing I know out of my own experience, despite years of wanting to deny it: however hard I strive to prove it otherwise, I know that there is no such thing as life without struggle. I have met it, indeed, from one end of life to the other. Over and over again, the foundations of life have shifted and slid away from me, sometimes changing the mental landscape only a little, other times shattering every given I’ve ever assumed into a kaleidoscope of pain. I have come through the death of loved ones, debilitating illness, life-shaping disappointment, and rejection by the very institutions and people that have meant the most to me......................

There is no one, not anyone who escapes the soul-wrenching experiences that stretch the mind but threaten to calcify the spirit.

There is no one who does not go down into the darkness where the waters do not flow and we starve for want of hope. Then life goes out of life and there is nothing left to do but simply follow routine, hoping down deep that we will not really have to go on much longer. It is a sad and barren time.

There is no one who does not have to choose sometime, someway, between giving up and growing stronger as they go along. And yet if we give up in the midst of struggle, we never find out what the struggle would have given us in the end. If we decide to endure it to the end, we come out of it changed by the doing of it. It is a risk of mammoth proportions. We dare the development of the self.

Life forges us in struggle. From one end of life to another we duel and joust, contest and dispute, rebel and revolt – against forces outside ourselves, yes, but against tensions within us as well. We struggle from infancy in an attempt to exert our own will on the world around us only to discover that we are pinioned in our efforts by the equally strong wills of those around us. We find ourselves pitted against forces of our own making and against forces beyond the edges of our understanding, greater than the limits of our strength to repel.

There is no one who has not known what it is to lose in the game of life, to feel defeat, to know humiliation, to be standing naked and alone before the cold and staring eyes of a world that does not grieve for your grief. Everyone I know has driven back great waves of pain, weathered deep ruptures of life’s innocent designs............

I have seen person after person broken by the breaking open of life’s great fissures. And I have also seen them survive. I have learned through them that all struggle is not destructive. I have come to understand from them that it is not struggle that defeats us, it is our failure to struggle that depletes the human spirit.

Something else I have come to know in them as well as in myself: all struggle is not loss. All those who struggle do not give way to depression, to death of the spirit, to dearth of heart. We not only can survive struggle but, it seems, we are meant to survive in new ways, with new insights, with new heart.

Struggle is a part of life. In fact struggle is an unavoidable part of life. It comes with birth and takes its toll at every stage of development. In each of them we strive for something new at the price of something gained. We tussle between the dark and the daylight moments of the soul. If we stop struggling, we may die. But if we struggle and lose, we stand to die as well. So how are we to think of struggle? Is it loss or is it gain?

Life itself is the answer. If no one can escape struggle, than it must serve some purpose in life. It is a function of the spirit. It is an organic part of the adventure of development that comes only through the soul-stretching process of struggle. No other dimension of life can possibly offer it because no other process in life requires so much so deeply of us. Struggle bores down into the deepest parts of the human soul like cirrus tendrils, bringing new life, contravening old truisms. The problem is that struggle requires the most of us when we expect it least.