Carole Angier’s biography of Primo Levi, an Italian Holocaust survivor, tells a story of how Levi was so thirsty one day during his ordeal at Auschwitz, he broke off an icicle from a nearby tree. Before he could get it to his mouth, a guard knocked it from his hand. “Why?” Levi asked. “There is no why here,” the guard replied.

I’ve never suffered like Levi or Victor Frankl suffered. Mine has been the slow wearing away of my own expectations of what I thought my life would be until I am what life intends me to be. There must be something about horrific suffering that stretches a person beyond the boundaries of what we think of as being human, so as to allow their higher angel to step through.

That callused guard’s response to Levi echoes in my ears: “There is no why here.” Perhaps, a more appropriate response would have been, “There is no who here.” There is no I-Thou encounter, as Martin Buber says, when a human being is addressed as an It. Is this not the intention of death camps and inhumane violations to strip down the human spirit to its minimal animal nature? Otherwise, even the tormentor could not tolerate the reality of what they do.

The sacred is lost when the I-Thou is lost. Then there is suffering. For Buber, when the I-Thou is absent, evil is present. When a person’s humanness is annihilated, when they are treated as an It, they are leveled to the ground. Suffering is the leveler. Everything a person has counted on for identity, comfort, meaning, companionship is stripped away until all that is left is the self, the person, the encounter with one’s own essence. All else seems lost.

After sitting in the ashes of such annihilation for what must seem like endless agony, there must come a stirring, a movement — of light and sound and energy. New life emerges from the leveled ground, within the person, within their consciousness, within the field of their alternatives. I can sit here amidst the ruins of my life and ask “why?” Or, I can dig deep and enter that place inside myself that encounters “who?”

Vicktor Frankl speaks of this existential encounter with the self in Man’s Search For Meaning, his own experience while in the death camp. Prisoners who could not get past the “why?” died all around him. Frankl sought to connect with the sacred in everything he encountered, from the piece of bread in the morning to the threads of rug he lay on in the evening. Everything became a Thou for him, an opportunity to create a connection and meaning from the smallest life activity.

This alone empowered Frankl to out step the death that stalked him. He did not allow his suffering to define him. What defined him was his connection to anything, anyone in his day that got him in touch with his humanness, his own sacredness, and to his connection to the sacred in all things, even in those who sought to annihilate him. Everything became a Thou, an invitation to encounter, an invitation to live. His suffering cracked open his heart and enabled him to feel one with everything in life.

Suffering, in its most demonic form, freed Frankl to encounter the I-Thou, the sacred in life in ways we more protected, defended humans don’t. Moving into the suffering, feeling it, allowing it to pass through him, leveled him and allowed him to identify with the ground of his humanity, which is sacred energy. The sacred is not lost with annihilation, but strangely discovered.

We humans are too distracted by our activity in the outer topside world to pay attention to the emerging sacred other in all things. It takes a dip into the underground, a return to the primordial origin of our becoming to encounter this sacred energy and to re-identify with all of life. Suffering levels us enough to see that the sacred is not absent after leveling but profoundly present. Our suffering is a natural, necessary experience if we humans are to remember who we are.
 
Just as the rose bud must be shattered in order to release the full blossom within it, our heart must be shattered in order to release the compassion we need to consciously see ourselves as one with all life forms. When we forget this truth, when we begin to treat nature and one another as an It, we set in motion energies that unleash suffering, and ultimately, evil.

Whatever personal suffering we as individuals experience can be addressed, can be held and contained, only when we are willing to move into an altered state of consciousness, through our breathing. Our breathing helps to contain the suffering while we allow the work of spirit to unfold in us. As we breathe into our suffering, the pain is present but the suffering quiets.

Our breathing becomes a presence within us. We recognize it as not coming from us, but from the universe. Our breathing becomes a Thou and not an It, can move with us through our suffering. We are not alone. We are one with the forward movement of life that suffers and opens itself to the life-death-life cycle of all living things in order to experience the wholeness we remember only at the center.

There is a “who” present in my suffering – the “I AM” who calls me forth, who creates in me a song, a song of myself: I am light, I am dark, I am energy, I am life.

There is no “why” here.