Episode 46 - Suffering (Part 1)

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welcome to the liturgist podcast everyone i'm science mike and today we're talking about suffering what is it exactly how should we think about it what can we do to alleviate it and how do we suffer well to get things started let's consider what it means to be a human being on planet earth today if you have economic means to listen to this podcast through a computer or phone or tablet or whatever you use you're likely among the richest and most privileged human beings to have ever lived you most likely have running water a toilet that flushes clean water to drink you most likely have a bed to go to sleep in a roof over your head you most likely will eat more than one meal today think about it before modern times even royalty didn't have a lot of the luxury and convenience that we have today think about advil what do you think an emperor of rome for instance might have given for a bottle of advil let's take a minute and consider what it's like to be a human being somewhere else on earth right now about a year and a half ago i was really in a place where i needed to reconnect with um with the mission on a personal level this is scott harrison founder of charity water ethiopia i'd mentioned you know i've been there so many times 20 27 times now and a few trips back i was in this three dollar night hotel room and the hotel owner you know walks out of the kitchen recognizes our group and says you guys are doing great work here in the region let me tell you a story when he sits down and says i come from a rural village and in my village years ago when i was growing up there was this woman that used to walk eight hours every day with a clay pot a heavy clay pot on her back and she would walk to dirty water and he said one day at the end of her journey she comes back into our village and before she reaches her house she slips and she falls and her clay pot breaks and all the water spills out into the ground and he said she didn't go back and get more water she hung herself from a tree in my village and kind of let that sit with our group and then walk back into the kitchen i remember looking at uh you know friends at the time saying you know there's no way that story can be true you know tell the westerners a shocking story and it just nagged at me and i sent our partners to his village and they verified that this woman led akira's hailu had lived there and had indeed committed suicide and i asked my wife for a pass and said you know i need to go and live in this village i need to walk in her footsteps i need to i need to see the tree it was not easy to get to it was a five hour drive from the regional town of the north and then i had to hike nine hours over the mountains uh having rented a camel and a donkey to put water and my solar backpack and stuff on and i just spent a week in this village kind of just living it and you know it's so hard guys getting people here to imagine what it's like but you know when you walk in the footsteps of of of these women as they are every single day you know down to a swamp that's being shared with animals and and you watch kids drink fecally contaminated water it just it uh it outrages you it it it makes you want to act for one person or one family or one village and then it becomes the second village in the fifth village in the tenth and i i didn't know this until i lived there but she was 13 at the time of her death she was a little girl and i had spent time with her best friend who had walked with her that day who was by the way still walking for dirty water when i'd gone there and you know i asked her friend her name was yeshureg i said why do you think why do you think your friend didn't go back you know why not just get water the next day surely accidents happen and she said it would have been the shame they would have been too much because she knew that she broke this valuable asset of the family the clay pot and that her family would go out go without water for dinner and then her mom was waiting for that water that she had walked all day for to cook dinner and she had let her family down because of her carelessness and her misstep and that was too much to face them and you know i have this photograph of of this tree this frail tree um and the thought of a 13 year old taking the rope from the pot and climbing up the tree and jumping um which which fired me up guys i mean you know i came back and and i i still go back there as the reason as the reason why [Music] this story may sound extreme to you but when you look at the numbers the pain caused by extreme poverty on this planet is exceedingly difficult to take in almost half of the human beings alive today over 3 billion of us live on less than 2.50 cents a day under half of us have electricity 2.3 billion of us don't have access to adequate sanitation more than 650 million of us don't even have access to clean water this is overwhelming for some people they become hopeless in the face of such staggering injustice and pain scott and millions of other people however have decided to not keep their focus on just those overwhelming numbers and what isn't being done but instead somehow to look at what can be done to change this one life one well at a time there was a woman in in northern uganda that actually got clean water and our team was visiting her village and said you know helen how is your life actually different now that you have a you have a well it works it's pumping great water how's your life different and helen began to tell the story of two jerry cans and she said you know before i used to have to walk a far distance she was actually walking to another well but there was a long wait as it was overburdened and she said i could only take 10 gallons it's about two toilet flushes of water every day for her husband and two kids and she said i always put my family first but there was never enough water and every day i would make choices do i cook do i clean do i wash my husband's clothes do i let him wash his body do i keep my kids clean do i wash their school uniforms and she said as as the the woman of the house i never use the water for myself and she said the main reason my life is different now is that i feel beautiful and our team didn't really get it and they're like helen of course you're beautiful you're a beautiful woman she said no you don't understand i feel beautiful because i have enough water for my face and my body and my clothes and you know we don't think of water that way you know something so many of us take for granted simply because of the privilege we were born into being able to take helen from you know 10 gallons to 20 or 30 gallons still a fraction of what we would use every day was able to restore dignity was able to make her feel beautiful a woman who would sacrifice and put her family first so i think you know it's the it's the stuff behind the stuff that really keeps us going you know we hold on to to 13 year old girls who you know should should never be living in shame or desperation and we hold on to these stories of women who who feel beautiful who always should have through this very powerful thing called water [Music] we'll come back to our conversation with scott later on but mike let's decompress a little bit first those stories are powerful yeah i just been sitting here trying to not sob into the microphone my eyes burn like horribly like they're throbbing i mean i thought about that like last year i had some pretty some pretty shitty moments in my life uh with my grandfather died and my dad had a stroke and i fell off a motorcycle and it was just a rough couple of months and then i thought about what if during that entire period i had to walk five or six hours to get water every day yeah like dirty water dirty water and then you know hearing somebody that we have a problem with shame in the west for sure i mean we have a real problem with shame culture but to feel shame over failing to bring home dirty water in a clay pot for your family so much that you the only choice you can come up with is to end your life ugh that's just horrifying that that that's part of reality i mean the having clean water come out of the sink is opulent luxury and so often i'm still like you got any bottled water or you know it's just like tap water feels like like poor man's water in my world like yeah i'll just do tap nowhere just say but it's like that's a luxury that millions of people don't have the way we decide how to distribute things is so messed up like we have the production capacity for everyone on the planet to have clean water yeah we just don't have the will we get too hung up in like discussions about what political philosophy is the best to handle the means of production and who is responsible for poverty and all these peripheral issues and in the meantime flint michigan is experiencing toxic water in the u.s because they diverted the clean water to make sure auto parts didn't corrode in a factory or in california southern california is going dry because we're pumping water into industrial agriculture for almonds almonds and the problem is not our ability to yet today the problem is not the total supply of fresh water in the world but it's our will for how things are distributed over these very odd arbitrary issues [Music] and i don't care how much it costs give people clean water i got yeah yeah can we can we sell a uh an aircraft carrier maybe and just give everybody clean water just just one just one aircraft carrier [Music] is a relic it has no place in modern society [Music] the efforts we spend on the war on poverty so pales in comparison to the war on drugs or the war on terror it's in terms of a priority a societal priority it doesn't register if there were a hundred charity waters someone was saying that that might be solved like we spend that kind of money on stupid stuff already yeah oh see this is this is the problem i i i'm about to i'm in a real risk of getting deeply political right now that's okay this is but this is where political to me this is some of the most important political conversation because this is when you talk about huge systems that's how this stuff keeps existing there's a lot of people that would love to help and there are millions of people that are giving how can we give money and help this and hopefully even through this podcast we're going to raise a significant amount of money but a lot of the huge changes need to happen at a political level on a policy level to really change the system for the world you know what i mean so go go political that's all i'm saying go go what are we spending money on that's more important than people's access to food and water what what is one 19 aircraft carriers higher federal budget in in the entire private industry what is more important than securing human access to food and water like let's forget shelter for a second because that's another one that's dumb to me that we should be able to fix but food and water like we can afford to put millimeter wave scanners in every airport in the country we can have a debate about whether we're going to erect a wall or use drones to patrol the border but food and water like well that's impossible but it in the scale of the problem and the amount of economic resources it takes to solve it we solve bigger problems all the time we spend the money all the time so this new york times article says bringing water and sanitation to everyone in the world would only cost about 10 billion dollars a year which is a tenth of what europe spends on alcoholic drinks every year about the same is what you're saying ice cream um yet alone we have what a 580 billion a year defense budget what would solving water do to the war on terrorism what would it do to yeah people seeing the america as the bully versus the you know if you just took a little chunk of the 580 billion said hey we're gonna give everybody clean water and sanitation in the whole world hungry and thirsty people are extremists yeah of course they are of cour it's not like this would be some great act of selflessness we would actually make our own geopolitical landscape easier to cope with yes if people could secure access to the essentials of life you know we don't need 2015 i think what 3.7 3.8 trillion dollar federal budget total oh there's so much money we're spending so much money it's so crazy like how many how many times do we have to be able to blow up the world we have enough nukes to blow up the world how many times over we need more firepower oh man it's just evil like freaking uh stalin starved out millions of his people had the ability to to not do that and you call them this evil thing but we have the ability to solve water and sanitation for millions of people and we don't because we want more nukes and more aircraft carriers and more i don't know how that's not just pure evil well any you know there are people who would listen who might say well but we got to take care of america first right but we're not like there's this big fight over who's going to cover the cost of fixing the water problem in flint michigan and at the scale with which we spend money at a federal level it's not an insurmountable issue it doesn't directly affect the top one percent but the these people in flint you've destroyed their home values these are the people some of the people least able to absorb that kind of economic loss in the country and so not only do they have not have clean water you've eradicated their wealth and their ability to do anything or move anywhere they're literally trapped and that's my whole point like it's such a strange thing to debate and posture about why is there not a bipartisan unilateral national commitment to helping these people out yup like what possible excuse is there to point fingers about who did it that's fine as we fix it have a criminal investigation too i don't care but the point is just fix it fix it fix it fix it i ca i can't imagine any economic priority more important than food and water for humanity [Music] when you talk about the american issues of what it's like to be poor and homeless in america and you have people like you you mentioned saying we need to put america first i mean i get that partially in the in the same way that like on some level i guess it's sort of like i need to make sure my daughter's school tuition is paid before i start giving money to her friends at school for their tuition like closer to home make sure that that's taken care of first but then there i mean there crosses the line where it's like is it more important for omelee to have a hundred christmas presents than for one of her friends at school to have clean water to drink no it's not it's not so when you talk about like america make sure america is okay first yeah we need to make sure everybody's has clean water food here first with our money for our i mean just that seems to make even just organizational sense to send it elsewhere is more complicated more expensive but then when you have an expanded awareness of humanity as a single family you start seeing through things like national borders is just they're just constructs and that person walking eight hours a day to get clean water is my sister on a fundamental existential level you know getting getting somebody from economic point five to point six more important than getting that person from zero to one so the sanitation the water that to me is a human issue that supersedes our higher economic level we need to make sure that everybody can get a great even education i don't know i mean you're talking about from from zero to one survival that just seems like that should be far more nation's priority let's get the world up to level one before we're worrying about eight to nine we're worrying about our housing bubble like there's people that don't have water when you see through america not being a real thing it's just a construct that's held in authority with a military um i mean i love america i love ideas about it [Laughter] this is gonna be a very popular episode in which science mike and michael gunger slaughter the idol of american nationalism i mean i love my country and as much as a country is a thing i mean i love harry potter too but they're both just things people made up yeah exactly somebody somebody uh used our contact form and sent in why do you guys always say everything's a construct that i replied because everything's a construct [Music] i mean the underlying thing may not be but like your belief about it is a construct [Music] you know i think i stumbled into water through you know a personal experience i was with a group of doctors and surgeons and we were in post-war liberia trying to help people get healthy at the time there was one doctor for every 50 000 people living in the country so if you were sick you were completely out of luck and there was such a greater need than our doctors could ever service we didn't have enough money we didn't have enough doctors we didn't have enough time and you know i was scrubbed up uh documenting these very powerful life-changing surgeries but as i went out into the rural communities i saw kids drinking from swamps and i had never seen a child drink from a brown viscous uh swamp before you know my former life i was selling 10 bottles of pellegrino and nightclubs people who don't even drink them and i learned that half of the country didn't have their most basic health need met half the country was drinking dirty water so i kind of put these two things together like no no wonder people are sick no wonder you know the doctors have their hands full and and many years more people to treat if this most basic need isn't met so to me it felt like the question behind the question and i did a little more digging and then the deeper you dig with water it it it's it's almost like unpeeling an onion you learn about the impact of water on education so at the time half of the schools in the world didn't have clean water or toilets so you know rather than start charity education and go build more schools i mean how good could the education be if girls when they got their period stayed home because there was no toilet at the school there was no clean water uh you know there was they stayed home in shame learned about the huge impact of water on these local economies and it's primarily through time when you add up the 40 billion hours that women spend just in south sub-saharan africa you know it is this huge economy it's more than the entire global workforce of a country like france and when you're able to give three hours five hours seven hours back into the days of these women and children the economies grow and there's data behind all this stuff now 53 of all disease in the developing world is directly caused by water and a lack of sanitation so you get to play doctor to half of the sick people through the developing world by doing clean water and sanitation um the un published an 88-page report that found every dollar invested in water and toilets yields four to eight times return to the local economy so you get to make people four to eight times richer by coming in at this basic need level and what i loved about it too is it was just one of the most unifying things regardless of politics or race or religion or geography every single person could stand for clean water you know nobody wanted kids walking eight hours a day nobody wanted kids dying of diarrhea because they were drinking water you know with bacteria or leeches in it it's normal at so many different points in our life to feel like something is getting in the way of being present or happy something stopping us from achieving the goals that we have for ourself or feeling connected to the people that we love better help will assess your needs and match you with your own licensed professional therapist to help you work on all those things you can connect with someone in a safe and private online environment for that reason it's so convenient you don't even have to leave the house and you can start working with someone in under 24 hours when working with someone through better help you can send a message to your counselor at any time and get a timely and thoughtful response plus you can schedule weekly video and phone sessions better help has licensed professional counselors who are specialized in treating things like depression anxiety navigating family conflicts and so much more they're committed to facilitating great therapeutic matches so they make it easy and free to change counselors if needed anything you share with your counselor is confidential so many people have been using better help that they're recruiting additional counselors in all 50 states start living a happier life today as a listener you get 10 off your first month by visiting betterhelp.com liturgists join over 1 million people taking care of their mental health again it's betterhelp h-e-l-p-com liturgists if you're anything like me at this point in the conversation you start to feel hopeless when you contemplate the amount of suffering that happens in our species in human life today it is staggering it really is and so far we're just talking about square one water because even if we solved extreme poverty it's not like that's the end of the to-do list for us right i mean there are an estimated 100 million somewhere between 100 million 200 million girls under the age of 18 that suffer some form of sexual violence every year just in the united states 10 million people a year physically abused by an intimate partner one out of every six american women has been the victim of an attempted or completed rape tens of millions of people around the world are slaves of one kind or another owned by other people sold like cattle to the highest bidder in america over 2 million men and women an overwhelming and statistically absurd ratio of whom are people of color are locked into cages like animals we call these cages prisons you know listing out the causes of our pain could obviously go on and on and on sickness oppression broken relationships addiction betrayal doesn't stop being a human being is a painful endeavor and we have this thing in us compassion where we want not only ourselves to stop suffering but we want other people to stop suffering as well but it's just like built into the fabric of human life it seems like we're eventually in this episode going to get to some conversation about what we can do about all this both in ourselves and for others but i also think listening is important seeing and hearing stories other than our own can actually open the heart and opening our heart to the suffering of others can be painful but it's important so we're just going to hear a few more stories before we get into a conversation about how we can respond my name is marilyn gunn and i'm the founder of the community kitchen program of calgary this program is a program that strictly addresses one issue in our city and that is hunger and food security we always think that there is enough food and we don't realize how deep poverty is and i'm going to ask a question do you know what your neighbor had for breakfast lunch and dinner yesterday do you know can they afford it do you know if their fridge is full so as you can imagine not many of us know and i don't think we have any way of knowing but poverty is in our own backyard the one i want to really discuss is the poverty of the working poor i have a story we have a program called tummy tamers and it goes into the city of calgary parks and there we help feed children who are either latchkey children or from families that are struggling financially but as we fed these children this mom had brought her little girl and this little girl was sitting there eating and she gulped down every bit of food and then we watched the mom and we were shocked to see after the children left their plates down on the ground and went back to play in the park this mom went and took the scraps off the plates and started eating and then the balance she took out a container to take them home this is poverty i can tell you many stories we um we were in a school and this is through our youth program there was a young boy they were teaching them how to make a healthy sandwich and we brought all the food for him to do it and this young boy he made a sandwich and while every other child in the class sat down and just started eating and and was so happy and so content look at i've made this great big sandwich and you know what he didn't he took a piece of paper out of his loose leaf and started wrapping the sandwich up the two teachers went over and said what are you doing and he said you know what he said i have to bring this home because we don't have anything for supper and i can share my sandwich with my mom and my sister i'm going to ask you should a nine-year-old have to carry that burden that's a burden we were out talking to a group of people and when i would go and talk i would always bring some food and these were seniors i was talking to down in an area of our city that's just known for poverty and i brought cupcakes real fancy cupcakes and their eyes lit up and this one lady just took a nibble and then i saw her take her napkin and wrap it up and put it in her purse and then she went up to get another cupcake took a bite wrapped it up put it in her purse well i watched her do this three times then finally i went over to her and i said hi are you enjoying yourself oh yes she said and then i said would you like to take some cupcakes home and then she whispered to me she said do you have anything more than just a cupcake you wouldn't have some cheese or some bread or some meat anything do you have anything else she said you know i can go to the corner store and she said when the manager is not looking i can get a chocolate bar and i can get some gum but i can never get any real food can you help me you know that's just another story there is so many of them so as you can see this is happening probably in your city in my city in my backyard and in yours this is just a growing growing concern and it's growing faster than we can even believe are you sure your family there isn't someone in there that is just living paycheck to paycheck and not meeting it they're not going to come up and tell you because hunger is something that people find it it it almost makes them disgraceful because they can't even provide the basics of life we have to change this i'm going to urge you please get up and make a difference be compassionate and love one another as we're called to do my mother came to this country in the back of a pickup truck this is leslie garcia crossing the border is house slippers cactus ridden pricked by blistered feet and memories of grandmothers using chanclas as police clubs the only moses leading this exodus was a coyote dressed as tar wetbacks crossed rivers to get to their promised land my people swim because the red seas aren't divided for them they walk under the moonlight play hide and go seek with border patrol check points get on the bellies as helicopter lights try to tag them pray to lavir and maria as bullets are shot into their camouflage bushes different frontiers tell different stories yet they all remember that old immigrant saying i prefer to risk my life crossing the border and to lose it in my country with my hands on my lap we cross borders because the fear of home is greater than the fear of crossing death in the rivers they saw the bodies floating like bigots yelling go back to your country in protest they chose to float face down lungs collapsing in themselves they found fear a fear that made them play follow the leader as they climb mountain tops past volcano ashes and serpent backroads then when they finally reached the top of the mountain they saw the city lights shining esta america there is america yet freedom like those lights is a mirage miles away how none of us are native to this land but we all have a common ancestor with empty pockets and a compass seeking shelter we're aliens to the aliens we're wetbacks after crossing rivers yet your reflection shows your ancestors crossed oceans of history textbooks claiming this country was unfounded on the trail of tears [Applause] bloody footprints the color of the american flag heat has always been home but now it's a reminder that freedom is only a first-degree burn and first-degree murder is legal when the killers wear badges and the corpses carry minority cards [Music] we have always been mourning doves willing to settle in any place where there is refuge for a family marias carry the holy children in swaddled cloths in wombs that be too heavy jose's traveled to foreign countries working construction because callous hands mean bread for communion little boys named jesus grow up with a shank in their back with asphalt bruises from crucifixes they were born into maria jose jesus mary joseph jesus survival is a history in translation survival is my 14 year old mother being stacked in the back of a pickup truck refusing to cross her hands and accept death she crossed the mountain and the river and the crooked fence and said [Music] we have finally reached home this is amy she's part of an organization called hope dies last which counteracts human trafficking and exploitation with media the situation with prostitution in russia is different than we've seen elsewhere in europe a prostitution is illegal within the country and has been pushed outside of the city of moscow it's completely controlled by organized crime russian organized crime and the women in prostitution are held captive by pimps they are managed by madames and they are on the outside of the city and so the way that it works is you'll be driving along a freeway one of the ring roads that surround moscow and you'll see a person in a high visibility vest who will direct you off the road normally you'll go down a path and then you'll find a clearing sometimes in the woods and there'll be people hanging about there a few cars a few vans you'll talk to security and then once it's established that you are a client you name your price to the madam and she will call the women in prostitution out of the vehicle at the price point you have asked for and they'll stand in front of your headlights in your car and you will then make your selection [Music] a client will then take a woman for the evening often it's more than that the women have no idea what they're getting into obviously they're removed from the location they'll go back to an apartment to a hotel sometimes it's to one or two men sometimes it's to 30 or 40 and often times it's for multiple days and their situation is just terrifying the people will say go to a red light district and then they'll see these women you know often they're dancing they're having fun um and they don't give an outward appearance of of suffering or struggle and so it can be easy just to discern from that initial interaction with them that actually this is a choice they're having a great time they're probably making a lot of money the reality is it's just below the surface they're exhausted they're freezing cold obviously there's physical signs of abuse yeah the toll that this sex industry takes on these women is immense in terms of physical trauma but yeah mental and spiritual trauma as well [Music] i sat down recently with william matthews who you might remember from episode 34 black and white racism in america and we talked about how overwhelming suffering can be in the world and and how we can possibly exist within it without being completely overwhelmed into despair so william how do you engage in social justice work in alleviating suffering in a way that doesn't get so heavy you know what i mean like i feel like there are times in my life where i've been so passionate about these issues whatever name the issue and you're trying to fight apart and it can become overwhelming to this place where it can either lead you to paralysis where you you really don't even know what to do anymore you're so overwhelmed you just don't do anything and you just stay where you are it can lead you to despondency you can lead your depression it can lead you to even in good causes becoming vitriolic and caustic and your your actions actually become kind of counterproductive if you've ever seen this or like people that are just almost liberal friends yes yeah you're not all of them but it's yeah and then there can also be like the liberal guilt and you become the savior of the world that's what that's us white people go to africa and save the world or it's the pictures of aborted fetuses on people's hearts yeah whatever it is that they throw up yeah but you know how like you're your our passion for justice can so easily get heavy and dark and when you compare that with the christian the christian jesus and the stuff he would talk about when you because we a lot of us relate our passion for justice to him in some way you know like love the poor you get it we gotta bring the kingdom of god we brought we're brought up in ways and we've a lot of us have transitioned our evangelical fervor of getting people to change their beliefs into changing social realities in the world yeah but when you listen to jesus talk you see what jesus said it was like you got to be like a child your my yoke is easy my burden is light um don't worry about tomorrow yeah look at the there's like this lightness to all of it of course you see these moments where he's passionately whipping in the temple i don't think he was whipping in the temple whatever like not whipping or nae-nae or twerking he wasn't doing any of that i think yeah no okay let me answer your question okay so i think that there is this uh beautiful tension at work in the world between urgency and delight and i think the urgency you know often sometimes when taken to the urgency can be the social justice cause it could be the you know someone's suffering right now or i'm suffering right now and there's the pain of the moment and i think sometimes the pain of the moment uh well first let me just say i think it's always important to voice pain i think you have to put a voice on your heart i think as a five you know this we can often just be more internal and we don't always voice how we're how we're feeling you know or sometimes it's personality sometimes it's the pain is so intense or it's so embarrassing or humiliating that you don't want to voice it you don't want to talk about it so i think it's important put a voice on your heart allow yourself to speak what it is deep down that is uh i think that's where the freedom is you know to be able to voice hurt so there's a lot of hurt people in the world people have hurt people and there needs to be a voice for that and that's important it's cathartic it's healing um then though sometimes i think what can happen is you can become sort of like a slave to the or what some people call the tyranny of the moment you know like you can just be the slave to somebody's always hurting and there's always something wrong and especially when you start deconstructing whether it's social institution systems uh social structures um within relationships and and then when you start thinking you know human species type level stuff which you know honestly a lot of people are you know people are challenging the notion of gender and they're challenging the notion of race and they're challenging there's so much being challenged and then you're looking at these problems and then you have violence and you deconstruct and you're like there's it feels like a pit that you just can't get that we can't get out of right like i know like i know this feeling i've been in this feeling i'm probably in this feeling more often than i like to admit where you feel so overwhelmed and you feel so bogged down with the systemic problems the relational problems and you're like i'm tired of seeing divorce all the time i'm tired of seeing people not value each other i'm tired of church hurt i'm tired of all these things that i hate that have happened to me and i've hate that they've happened to people that i love and care about and i feel powerless to do anything about it and so that is all there and so the the i don't know if it's balanced because i kind of don't like that word but i feel like there's two things i'm always holding in my hand it's urgency and delight and so i care about the urgency i want to hear people's pain i think the most important thing we can do is uh to answer that you're original because you kind of asked like five questions yeah in a long way which was you know like how do we in our own way like begin to heal this fix this like wrestle with these problems and i think the biggest thing is to acknowledge and see you know i can't always have power to change someone's situation but the most important thing i've learned to do is to put myself in someone else's situation and to actually not just empathize for a minute but actually imagine or reimagine i think you do this really well michael uh to reimagine what would it feel like to be in this woman's position what would it feel like to be in the in a transgender person situation what would it feel like to live in poverty in such a way that i can't right now imagine what would it feel like to uh live on the streets of calcutta like when you start really imagining life outside of your grid then you i think that's when you really begin to see people and so you know we wrote that song free and there's a line in there uh when we see our brother we'll all be free and i think ultimately the pain that we all feel from one another is i don't feel seen i don't feel hurt and so what i try to do personally is to relate to people uh and try to see how they see whether i fully agree whether i i mean it's not even about agreement's such a trite word to me these days but i do believe it's important to see people to acknowledge their pain i i've sat with people at times and just have watched them weep when i've just described back to them a reality that i've never lived through but i'm acknowledging just because i'm putting myself in that situation i'm acknowledging what they've gone through and how it's impacted every part of their life and it actually caused me to see people differently because now i'm not seeing you as an issue i'm not seeing you as a hurt person i'm seeing you as someone that's dealing with the fallout of suffering in your life and i feel so when i look at humanity i'm like we're all just dealing with the fallout of suffering in each other's lives and if we would see our brother if we would actually see people in their pain acknowledge it call it what it is don't minimize it don't trivialize it don't dismiss it but actually call it forward i think that's what allows people to be healed [Music] the other thing i have in the hand is delight and i think delight is you know richard who you've had on this podcast you know has talked about how the brain it's harder for the brain to grab a hold to positive things versus negative things it's easier for us to gravitate towards the sadistic the sad the the negative but more importantly uh when you have a positive memory he was like it takes a minimum of 15 seconds you have to like gaze into it and see it and so i think there's so much in our world that is worth delighting in and delighting and even about each other there's so much to delight in like when i part of the reason why i love spending time with you and your family is because i see so much delight that you guys have in each other as a family the way you and lisa carry yourselves and the way you interact with each other the way you interact with your children we were out for dinner tonight watching the way lisa looks at you with your daughters that's the light like there was a delight in her face and her eyes and there was a delight with you with your children and i think tom was there like we were just kind of watching it and we were just being you know but it was that's delight and so learning to savor those moments and to carry both uh things intentions suffering and delight because there is so much to be thankful for and there's so much in this moment who knows what tomorrow will bring who knows what pain tomorrow will bring whatever happens happens but i know in this moment i can take delight in this moment i can see the good in this moment i can treasure beauty or treasure difference in someone else that makes me laugh or causes joy in my heart and so i think ultimately you know bring it full circle back to jesus right is you know i think he was a man of great joy and he was a man of great burden like it was both and i think that's what it means to be fully alive is to be people who engage with the suffering in a deep way in a very intentional way as well as to be people who also take note of the joy and the delight that exists in the world that exist in each other and define way that's how we build bridges is to find the joy the common joy that we all have the way we see and uh feel about each other and that's why i love music because music nothing brings people together yeah like music and joy and dancing and like fellowship or whatever that is the spirit moves in that and where two or three are gathered there i am and jesus is there and jesus being the substitute of christ being the substitute of all things like he is there when we are together in love and unity and you know we don't we don't agree no one agrees about anything throw it out the window but yeah love delight suffering i think it's the bitter and the sweet and that's what makes life life we'll come back to william in my conversation in a bit when we get into some more abstract philosophy about suffering and attachment but in talking about this idea of urgency and delight here's a story that really demonstrates that in a beautiful way my name is janelle nardin and i am the founder of evolve spa nine years ago i last minute won on a trip to san francisco and um went to volunteer with a group of teens who were going to bring the essentials to the neighborhood to people that were living in crisis um mainly people that were homeless and it's pretty crazy we get there and we get off the bus and this place is um something i could not have imagined i didn't think we'd be working and staying in this area um you get off the bus and people are so strung out in fact the pigeons can't even fly because there's so much crack in this area that they are high as well and we get off and our whole week we just get to know the area with the focus of the last week being that we're gonna make amazing dinner and and serve the homeless and they can come to this location and receive a good dinner but as we were going through the week i couldn't help but notice some of the different needs this one lady was walking and as she took her step and she was wearing flip-flops just the frame of her flip-flop remained each step she took her foot not on a flip-flop any longer but on the concrete and her feet cracked open and bleeding i just was like i i want to do something for her me loving the spa and loving spas and loving getting them and giving treatments i had brought a bunch of spa stuff for me to give foot rubs to my teammates when i saw her i was like we can do something different on our final evening here and so together with my team members the girls that were with me we collected some buckets from the kitchen and created a foot washing station and just washed people's feet and it was the most amazing experience people would come and they would sit down and some would sit there and just weep this exchange of touching them and them sitting and resting as someone to love them just the way they are right where they are others would come and they would be fast asleep and they would just rest their feet in your arms and your hands as you massage them that evening was so impactful in my life i just knew that i had to come home and wash more people's feet so i came home and contacted some of my friends who are estheticians and work in the beauty industry and together we created a mobile spa and we would go to domestic violence shelters homeless shelters family shelters it didn't really matter and we would go and we would just love people and our whole thing was we wanted to create a space that was like they could enter another world it was we wanted to create an experience for them because they're special and so we came and we would light candles and we would bring in furniture and we would set up stations and we would bring massage beds and we would have incense burning and it was just a way for them to come and get away from from their current crisis and just feel loved and one of my most favorite stories of all is the day that this lady came it was a shelter that had over 100 women living there and we came with enough staff to give everybody two boss treatments that day and she comes in and she's really withdrawn and she's guarded and holding her heart close to her her body language speaking loud and clear completely uncertain if she should even walk in this room like what is going on in here and she walks in and turns out that i get to wash her feet and she comes to my my little station and i hold her hand her feet in my hands and begin to wash her feet and something unearthly happens in the space between her and everyone else in the room and she begins to cry and she with her tears begins to sing with the most angelic voice the words amazing grace how sweet the sound is saved a wretch like me her voice filling up the space everyone stopping people crying really all of us crying at this point as she just she just sings from her heart and her soul and these walls and these barriers just fall she proceeds to tell me her story and we cry and we hold each other and i just love her after we packed everything up i get a phone call from the staff and they say i just don't know if you know what happens when you come here yesterday you came and you massaged and loved and you just treated them with kindness and love and touch and she said i don't think you realize what happens it takes us three to six months to break through barriers to get them to hope to get them to believe in a brighter future to get them to even want to and she said what you did in that's that those four hours it takes us months to do she said these women don't come in here willing and able to love each other or themselves for that matter they come holding close to themselves they come quiet and still but after you guys left these women walked the halls and we saw other women holding other women words like you are so beautiful came from their mouths they said we don't see this we do not see women able or willing to get incapable to hold another person but this place was humming with hope there is this belief in that there is a brighter tomorrow just to say when you come here and you hold these people and you touch them you give them back a piece of humanity that nothing else can [Music] a lot of the time on the liturgist podcast we talk about the esoteric the philosophical the hypothetical issues that are deep into the weeds and fun to think about but other times we talk about issues that directly affect people's lives that open up our audience's eyes in many cases to issues they've never fully contemplated before and allowed them to see human suffering and need in a new light and when we do those episodes every time thousands of you reach out to us on twitter and on facebook and via email to ask what you can do so on this episode about suffering for the first time ever we're going to tell you one thing you can do to address the most basic human need clean water and in doing so address and reduce human suffering in the world we're going to listen to scott harrison from charity water one more time here for a minute but i just want to make something clear this is not an ad this is not something that the liturgists are getting anything from there's no kickback happening from charity water in fact charity water is the highest rated charity that you can be with its four stars on charity navigator and they've sort of reinvented charity in this interesting way where they actually raise all of their operational funds separately from individual donors who understand those needs so every penny that we the public give to charity water through these projects and we're about to tell you something that we're going to try to do together but every single cent goes directly to the projects even credit card fees they have donors reimburse that so every cent so let's listen to scott here and i really have hopes that we can do something amazing together as a community instead of feeling helpless we'd like you to feel hopeful that you can help i think one idea that that we're always trying to spread that seems to work with everyone is this idea of of uh redeeming the birthday you know the organization started on a birthday and i was just doing that because i was a club promoter and i used to make a lot of money throwing birthday parties and realized that i didn't need anything i didn't need a tie or a wallet or an apple gift card you know a pair of socks and you know gosh 660 million people don't even have their most basic need met and i got this idea on our one year anniversary what if i donated my birthday and i asked for my asian dollars i thought that might be sticky enough to get people to talk about and everyone i knew had 32 dollars that they could give especially if 100 of the money went and they could actually see the impact of that and to my surprise i raised 59 000 with my 32nd birthday and then right after that this seven-year-old kid in austin texas donates his seventh birthday doesn't throw a party doesn't accept gifts starts knocking on doors asking for seven dollar donations and he raises twenty two thousand dollars and then after that an 89 year old gives up her birthday she starts asking for 89 donations uh telling people that she has lived double the life expectancy uh of so many the people that we're trying to serve simply because of the privilege she was born into and you know if her 89th birthday could help people realize a few more birthdays through clean water and health and this whole community started growing and the beautiful idea was that you know people were raising so much more than they could ever give you know people that a seven-year-old kid can't write a 22 000 check but he captured the hearts and minds of people in his austin community and that's been really exciting we've seen that the average birthday party or the average charity water birthday now raises over a thousand dollars from 15 friends or family and you know the idea of turning a very personal moment into a giving moment and making your birthday about others and involving loved ones and colleagues in it has been something we've just been trying to spread and we've never done any advertising it's really just spread word of mouth um but close to a million people have gotten clean water now just through birthdays one of the stories that's impacted me the most around uh the birthdays was this nine-year-old girl named rachel beckwith gave up her ninth birthday tried to raise 300 which would help 10 people get clean water and she fell a little short and raised 220 and right after her birthday she was killed in a 20 car pileup [Music] she was the only fatality her single mom was driving in the front her sister was in the front she was in the back seat and a tractor trailer just taking out the car and rachel's mom said you know we would love to honor our little girl's last wish for her birthday which was instead of having a party instead of accepting toys or gifts she wanted kids she'd never met to have clean water [Music] and i remember ryan saying you know we're gonna blow up this girl's dream nine dollars at a time and it starts spreading through his church community uh and i remember sitting with my wife uh on the couch refreshing her fundraising page and i saw 299 thousand and then 300 000 uh a thousand times more than her goal start spreading through the seattle community starts spreading across the country start spreading around the world and people in africa start donating nine dollars to this girl in seattle that had heard about them and their needs and rachel's campaign winds up to raise uh 1.2 million dollars 60 000 strangers from around the world gave she impacted 37 000 lives and i met her mom in the green room of a tv show in new york uh and i remember just walking up to her in complete strangers blurting out with tears you need to spend the one year anniversary of rachel's death you got to come with me and you have to meet the actual people you got to see the kids that your daughter helped and she started crying and i started crying and she said i'll come can i bring rachel's grandparents and exactly a year after that we all went village to village to village to village and met tens of thousands of people that had gotten clean water because you know as you said a nine-year-old girl was not paralyzed by the scope and the order of the magnitude she wanted to raise three hundred dollars she wanted to just help 10 people and wound up helping 37 000 i remember women in these villages would walk up to samantha rachel's mom they would throw themselves at her feet weeping and say through translators we have lost children too but your daughter's death has brought us all life and uh it was it was an extraordinary story that um that i think you know challenges everyone at the organization every every day do we have that much empathy and compassion for others you know to so much to learn from from a little girl [Music] so here's what we're gonna do we'd like to ask you to consider giving up your birthday this year with us we've talked on this episode about how our attempts to alleviate suffering are like a drop in the ocean but here's the thing there are a lot of drops who listen to this podcast just go to the liturgist.com slash water that's the liturgists.com slash water there'll be a form there that will ask you for your birthday your name and your email address and by giving that information charity water will email you closer to your birthday and remind you to set up a fundraising page and then using your social media profiles by emailing your friends and talking to your friends in person you're going to ask people to donate money to charity water instead of giving you a gift we tend to reach a group of people who identify as spiritually homeless or frustrated and i know from personal experience that sometimes when you're in that space your purse strings can tend to get tight after all many of us have been hurt by large organizations asking for money and so we can tend to get cynical and stingy but but i hope if you hear anything in this whole podcast that you hear this don't let your heart close to suffering don't let your heart close to love and this is an opportunity for all of us together and again we're not getting anything for saying this this is not an ad this is just we want to do this together because we think it could be amazing so again you just go to the liturgist.com slash water and it's an incredibly helpful thing to do charity water because they're so well rated and because they're so transparent is great at turning donated money into good in the world and in a way that doesn't depress local economies doesn't create a dependence on foreign aid but actually helps communities become independent and sustainable based on the number of people who download this show just a small percentage of us that would do this together would make a significant impact so do it now before you forget go to the liturgists.com water and let's see what we can do together thanks for listening to another episode of the liturgist podcast we'd like to thank our patrons on patreon for making this podcast possible you can join them by going to the liturgist.com and clicking on the donate button in the upper right hand corner of your screen when you do that you'll get access to a second patrons only podcast called the liturgist conversations that only comes out on off weeks from this program we'd like to thank corey pig for his work doing production management and project management for the podcast we'd like to thank greg nordine for production help editing also tyler chester who provided several pieces of music for today's show and of course thank you for listening we'd love to hear your thoughts on this episode just go to our website at the liturgists.com podcast and leave a comment on this episode or reach out to us via twitter at the liturgists or on facebook at facebook.com the liturgists and of course don't forget you can help provide clean water across the globe just by pledging your birthday at the liturgist.com slash water i'm science mike i'm michael gunger thanks for listening everybody [Music] you