4 posts tagged “suffering”

"To be a real Russian, to be wholly Russian, means only this: to be a brother to all men, and to be universally human." Fyodor Dostoyevsky

I have been reading Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Brothers Karamazov recently and there is obviously not a lot that I am going to say about it that others will not have said. I love the way that Dostoyevsky puts different aspects of himself into his various characters and then lets them argue with each other. Each aspect of Dostoyevsky is so brilliant and alive, even his doubting and rascally parts. One can almost see Dmitri (Dostoyevsky the body) Ivan (Dostoyevski the intellect) and Alyosha (Dostoyevsky the spirit) in the three Karamazov brothers. It is almost as if Dostoyevsky has externalized his internal debates and if you are the sort of person who is on fire with passion in body, mind, and spirit, the result is a bonfire of conflict and congruence.

A few thoughts from Anne Fremantle’s Introduction to Fyodor Dostoevsky: The Grand Inquisitor. Ungar: New York, 1956 may serve to get this blog rolling:

“Dostoevsky's own faith derives its strength from the fact that he has himself passed through atheism and come out the other side. Commenting on the critics of The Brothers Karamazov, he wrote contemptuously, "The dolts have ridiculed my obscurantism and the reactionary character of my faith. These fools could not even conceive so strong a denial of God as the one to which I gave expression... The whole book is an answer to that.... You might search Europe in vain for so powerful an expression of atheism. Thus it is not like a child that I believe in Christ and confess Him. My hosanna has come forth from the crucible of doubt."

Dostoevsky had come to this faith in Siberia. On his way to the labor camp, a lady visiting the convicts gave him a tiny volume, the Gospels, the only book permitted by the prison authorities. From that time on, God was for Dostoevsky "not somewhere, but everywhere"; and as for the painter Cézanne "light was the hero of every picture," so, for Dostoevsky, God was the hero of every novel as well as of every life.”

http://www.dartmouth.edu/~karamazo/fremantle.html

As I picture it, chapters 37-40 of Brothers Karamazov are not so much an argument as a battle. A battle between Ivan (and Satan) and Father Zossima (and God) for the soul of Alyosha. As if two ships of war have sidled up to Alyosha and grapple hooked him from two different sides. And the question is not really who will win so much as “Is Alyosha more a mind or a heart?” becaue the answer to that question answers the first. In the chapter, The Grand Inquisitor, Ivan lays out the argument that Jesus does not and cannot makes sense to the average intellect who will stop to think. Ivan appeals to Alyosha’s reason even as the Grand Inquisitor appeals to Jesus’. But Jesus does not respond with a counter-argument. He responds with a kiss. And thus does Alyosha respond to Ivan’s argument.

"That's plagiarism," cried Ivan, highly delighted. "You stole that from my poem.

And indeed, that is precisely what Alyosha has done. And, as we learn from reading the chapters about the death of Father Zossima, it is exactly how Alyosha was won to his faith in the first place. The grapple hook in Alyosha’s head cannot hold with the tenacity of the grapple hook that Father Zossima leaves in his heart. Zossima is not opposed to reasoning himself but he realizes that people will follow something deeper than their intellect. They wish to be loved. They wish to matter. They wish to belong. They wish to be in love. They wish to be honest … more than they wish to be right. The irony is that both Ivan and Father Zossima start from the same premise: This world is full of suffering. Ivan approaches this reality with his mind and says “Thus can we conclude there is no God”. Father Zossima starts from the same reality and says “Thus do we need to change the world with love so that God’s love will make sense.” Zossima is making the argument that we need to start with the assumption of God’s love and bring the world into conformity with the truth of the assertion so that there is no discrepancy.

Ivan is basically suggesting that Alyosha conform his belief about God to the way the world is so that there is no discrepancy. Father Zosima says that if we all will but love the world, it will eventually become a place where suffering cannot disturb a child’s tenderest faith. Father Zossima insists that humans will only be able to inflict so much suffering on one another, if only that suffering is not justified by a retaliatory act. He himself was converted by a servant that he hit in the face but who did not hit back.

It is easy to see where Gandhi and Martin Luther King get the psychological arguments that they will later develop into full fledged social movements. It is up to us to change the world so that a belief in a loving God makes sense in it. The assertion will have to be believed to be proven. Not altogether unlike the once radical notion that “all men were created equal”. If it is true, when it is acted on, it will prove itself. And since we have to act on faith in SOME way in this world, why not act in faith on a proposition that can lead to a better world for us?

Zossima: 1 Ivan: 0

Question for Comment: What is an assertion about the universe that you hope your life can help prove?

It is well after midnight and I am tired and I have an early morning tomorrow. Perhaps a perfect time to take a moment to write about CFS, (Chronic Fatigue Syndrome). Though honestly, after watching this movie, I am reminded of how poor a conductor of actual experience a movie can be. All one can do is WATCH other people in pain. And even that involves an hour of one's life in which one is NOT in pain. At least not this kind.

As I was watching this movie, my mind went to a document that was written originally in cuneiform many thousands of years ago. In this record of one man's suffering, I find myself wondering about how we all search for some way to understand the causes of our suffering and put it in some context that allows us some sort of hope and purpose to it.

"Marduk! The skies cannot sustain the weight of his hand,His gentle palm rescues the moribund.When he is angry, graves are dug,"

This "righteous sufferer" from Babylon laments his condition in words that remind one of those describing the symptoms of CFS in the movie.

1. After the Lord changed day into night
2. And the warrior Marduk became furious with me,
3. My own god threw me over and disappeared,
4. My goddess broke rank and vanished
5. He cut off the benevolent angel who walked beside me
6. My protecting spirit was frightened off, to seek out someone else
7. My vigor was taken away, my manly appearance became gloomy,
8. My dignity flew off, my cover leaped away.
9. Terrifying signs beset me
10. My mouth once proud was muzzled like a ....
11. My lips, which used to discourse, became those of a dead man.
12. My resounding call struck dumb,
13. My proud head bent earthward,
14. My stout heart turned feeble for terror,
15. My broad breast brushed aside by a novice,
16. My far-reaching arms pinned down by flimsy matting,
17. I, who walked proudly, learned slinking,
18. I, so grand, became servile,
19. To my vast family, I became a loner,
20. By day sighing, by night lamentation,
21. Monthly, trepidation, despair the year,
22. I moaned like a dove all my days,
23. I let out groans as my song,
24. My eyes are forced to look through constant crying,
25. My eyelids are smarting through of tears.
26. My face is darkened from the apprehensions of my heart,
27. Terror and pain have jaundiced my face.
28. The.... of my heart is quaking in ceaseless apprehension.
29. ..... like a burning fire,
30. Like the bursting of a flame falshehood beset me,
31. .... lamentation, my imploring!
32. One whole year to the next! The normal time passed.
33. As I turned around, it was more and more terrible,
34. My ill luck was on the increase, I could find no good fortune.
35. I called to my god, he did not show his face,
36. I prayed to my goddess, she did not raise her head.
37. The diviner with his inspection did not get the bottom of it,
38. Nor did the dream interpreter with his incense clear up my case
39. I beseeched a dream spirit, but it did not englighten me,
40. The exorcist with his ritual did not appease divine wrath.
41. I have pondered these things; I have made no sense of them.
42. But as for me, in despair a whirlwind is driving me!
43. Debilitating disease is let loose upon me:]
44. An evil vapor has blown against me from the ends of the earth,
45. Head pain has surged upon me from the breast of hell,
46. A malignant spectre has come froth from its hidden depth,
47. A relentless ghost came out of its dwelling place.
48. A she-demon came down from the moutain,
49. Ague set forth with the flood and sea,
50. Debility broke through the ground with the plants.
51. They assembled their host, together they came upon me:
52. They struck my head, they closed around my pate,
53. My features were gloomy, my eyes ran a flood,
54. They wrenched my muscles, made my neck limp,
55. They thwacked my chest, pounded my breast,
56. They affected my flesh, threw me into convulsion,
57. They kindled a fire in my epigastrium,
58. They churned up my bowels, they twisted my entrails
59. Coughing and hacking infected my lungs,
60. They infected my limbs, made my flesh pasty,
61. My lofty stature they toppled like a wall,
62. My robust figure they flattened like a bulrush,
63. I was dropped like a dried fig, I was tossed on my face.
64. A demon has clothed himself in my body for a garment,
65. Drowsiness smothers me like a net,
66. My eyes stare, they cannot see,
67. My ears prick up, they cannot hear.
68. Numbness has spread over my whole body,
69. Paralysis has fallen upon my flesh.
70. Stiffness has seized my arms,
71. Debility has fallen lupon my loins,
72. My feet forgot how to move.
73. A stroke has overcome me, I choke like one fallen
74. Signs of death have shrouded my face!
75. If someone thinks of me, I can´t respond to the enquirer,
76. "Alas" they weep, I have lost consciousness,
77. A snare is laid on my mouth,
78. And a bolt bars my lips,
79. My way in is barred, my point of slaking blocked,
80. My hunger is chronic, my gullet constricted.
81. If it be of grain, I choke it down like stinkweed,
82. Beer, the sustenance of mankind , is sickening to me.
83. Indeed, the malady drags on!
84. For lack of food my features are unrecognizable,
85. My flesh is waste, my blood has run dry,
86. My bones are loose, covered only with skin,
87. My tissues are inflamed, afflicted with grangrene.
88. I took to bed, confined, going out was exhaustion,
89. My house turned into my prison.
90. My flesh was a shackle, my arms being useless,
91. My person was a fetter, my feet having given way.
92. My afflictions were grievous, the blow was severe!
93. A scourge full of barbs thrashed me,
94. A crop lacerated me, cruel with thorns,
95. All day long tormentor would torment me,
96. Nor a night would he let me breathe freely a moment
97. From writhing, my joints were separated,
98. My limbs were splayed and thrust apart.
99. I spent the night in my dung like an ox,
100. I wallowed in my excrement like a sheep.
101. The exorcist recoiled from my symptoms,
102. While my omens have perplexed the diviner.
103. The exorcist did not clarify the nature of my complaint,
104. While the diviner put no time limit on my illness.
105. No god came to the rescue, nor lent me a hand,
106. No goddess took pity on me, nor went at my side.
107. My grave was open, my funerary gods ready,
108. Before I had died, lamentation for me was done.
109. All my country said, "How wretched he was!"
110. When my ill-wisher heard, his face lit up,
111. When the tidings reached her, my ill-wisher, her mood became radiant,
112. The day grew dim for my whole family
113. For those who knew me, their sun grew dark.

http://www.piney.com/BabRightSuff.html

The woman who created this movie on Chronic Fatigue Syndrome states:

"I took on this project because of my own need for answers and because I was hearing about so many people who were suffering from the physicality of the illness but they were suffering almost as much from ignorance and from their treatment by society."

Professional soccer player, Michelle Aikers, states of her suffering with CFS

"I never had the thought of taking my life. I had the yearning to be taken.”

My hat is off and my bald head exposed to all those who have had to face this particular element of unasked for life-script without knowing from where it came, for what purpose it was "given" or to what end it was taking them. Wow! Thats all I can say.

Question for Comment: Would you rather be given a more difficult suffering but WITH explanation or a less difficult suffering with NO explanation? Why?

 

I just finished reading Dreamtime and Inner Space: The World of the Shaman  by Holger Kalweit

I have been wanting to read a good book on Shamanism for several weeks and one of my students provided the opportunity by doing a book report on this book and then loaning it to me. The reason for my interest I suppose is somewhat simple. This past Fall I began experiencing some things that I was struggling to fit into the narrative of my existing theology and world view. I have always had a fascination for dreams but this went a step deeper into the rabbit hole for me.

Holger Kalweit’s book makes an intelligent well educated attempt to open up the possibilities for thinking about universal phenomena in a less skeptical light than Western Science has generally allowed people to take.

“The shaman tends to be seen as a kind of trick artist, and psychologically disturbed person characterized by all the irrational excesses of a predominately non-Aristotelian view of the world. As such, he has always been the strongest possible challenge to the interpretive addiction of Western academics interested in the theory of culture.  This is because the shaman is seen as an intolerable bogey by any ideology limited to such basic tenets as normal awareness, three-dimensional logic, and strength of ego.” P. xiv

“Here is what the Indian shaman Lame Deer says on the subject:

“Only human beings have come to a point where they no longer know why they exist.  They don’t use their brains and they have forgotten the secret knowledge of their bodies, their senses, or their dreams.  They don’t use the knowledge that spirit has put into every one of them; they are are not even aware of this, and so they stumble along blindly on the road to nowhere – a paved highway which they themselves bulldoze and make smooth so that they can get faster to the big, empty hole which they’ll find at the end, waiting to swallow them up.  It is a quick comfortable superhighway. I know where it leads to.  I have seen it, I’ve been there and my vision and it makes me shudder to think about it.” P. xvi

The book has helped me to put a number of my experiences into another potential narrative if I want. And it has gotten me to think about how the present world view and the potential new world view could be assimilated. For example, Kalweit stresses how vital to Shammanic initiation suffering is. He write of this central argument in several places.

“Our long and continuous battle against death and sickness has so deeply taken root in our consciousness that even modern psychology has felt compelled to take up the cudgel against physical weakness and dying.  Consequently, psychic and physical suffering have remained unacknowledged as a means of altering consciousness and as forces and mechanisms of transformation and self-healing.” P. 75

“We must not overlook the fact that an unhappy marriage and the death of other dramatic experiences which can provide fertile ground for entering an altered state of consciousness.  Dramatic shock can cause the collapse of psychic structures, whereupon a more subtle and para-normal sensitivity begins to grow from the ruins of normal consciousness.” P.86

“Resistance to psychophysical change in the disintegration of the normal structure of existence has always been part and parcel of the transformative process.  Because of this, it forms at least a partial aspect of every right of transformation.  The rejection of the new and unknown is a standard human response.  True, existence itself is change, but the leap from three-dimensional to multi dimensional perception and experience is the most fundamental change.  To reach a trans-logical form of knowledge or realm of wisdom, celestial beauty, and spiritual essence is one of the most ancient experiential goals of mankind.  The central issue raised by this chapter is therefore: why do we have to become ill before we can accept a new insight?  Why is the entry into a more comprehensive level of experience so frequently marked by sickness or, one might say, a cleansing process?” p. 89

This seems to be a “self evident truth” now that I have experienced it. And I recall thinking this many times this last Fall. Suffering forces the brain to work and the heart to search. I suspect that suffering has a literal impact on neural development as the mind MUST exercise itself to find solutions, answers, explanations.

Another interesting insight I gained into the Shamanic experience is how these individuals use heightened sensitivity to “absorb” other people’s illnesses so that they can learn to deal with them. Shamans are sort of like white blood cells, learning from the viruses that they come to surround and embody. I could so relate to this as I felt it deeply this past Fall. There were a number of people with various disabilities that I … felt like I was absorbing, taking on, catching … like a cold. It was scary. I confess. It made me feel like I was loosing control of the boundaries of self that I was so used to thinking were under my control. Feeling one with other things and other people made me feel like being one but it made me feel so vulnerable. Like I had no choice who’s mental diseases I would acquire next.

“Frequently the shaman enters a patient’s state so thoroughly that he himself experiences the symptoms and pains of the illness and, in this way, requires special knowledge as to its cause.  There are several reports about shamans who went so far as to take a patient’s illness upon themselves in order to destroy it.  In the course of their painful existence, many shamans have physically experienced countless illnesses and are therefore conversant with a wide range of physical and psychic reactions.” P. 90

“If we wanted to summarize the effect of a long psychosomatic sickness on the shaman, we would have to say that the essential criterion lies in his talent to enter into an intensified exchange with reality, thereby transcending the material demarcations between objects and people.  It lies in the very nature of the shaman to perceive the pulse of the universe in himself and others and, by going along with it, to influence and change it.  His approach is based on empathy and unity with actual life forces and therefore it is inimically incompatible with the dichotomies and codified differentiations of a materialistic philosophy."

“According to the modern view illness disrupts and endangers life, whereas the shaman experiences his sickness as a call to destroy this life within himself so as to hear, see, and live it more fully and completely in a higher state of awareness.” P.91

The author is hopeful that the experiences of “primitive” Shamans will someday come to be thought of as a science of a different kind.

“We have for centuries fought a merciless battle against magic and mutilated it beyond all recognition.  Now we are slowly becoming aware of the raging blindness of Western subjectivity and ethnocentricity, which forced everything that was culturally alien into the straitjacket of its progressive thinking.  Today the tide is turning.” P. 255

Its interesting. A few years ago, I saw a Disney movie entitled A Far Off Place. It is a movie in which a young teenage boy is “schooled” in the shamanic arts of dreaming and spirit listening by a African bushman and a sufficiently sensitive white girl. In the course of the movie, the boy is taught to respect the bushman’s “tappings” – premonitions. I can recall thinking that the movie was literally standing the Enlightenment on its head, placing “superstition” above science as the “more correct” epistemology for living one’s life.

Dreamtimeand InnerSspace is the anthropological justification for that movie. I may still regard myself a skeptic but … a skeptic with more experiences to confuse him.   

Question for Comment: Would a return to respectfulness for the experiential wisdom of Shamanic traditions be a step back into superstition and/or dark ages? Or have we entered the Dark ages since we began demanding that no one but those in our religious traditions was capable of a legitimate spiritual encounter with the divine? 

The last few days, in between exams and final papers, I have managed to read Toni Morrison's Pulitzer Prize winning novel, Beloved. Needless to say, you won't get the final word on a Pulitzer Prize winning book from me. But I mean to outline a few things that Morrison speaks to me.

One of the themes of the book has to do with how long it can take to process abuse and trauma. All of the characters in Beloved have been traumatized and physically and emotionally abused by slavery. In that sense, Beloved is a second Uncle Tom's Cabin, gnawing away at the lie in the National consciousness that slavery could be a humane institution. Morrison makes it clear that it destroyed lives, whites and blacks.

Every person that came out of slavery was a survivor and every one would have to have pieces of them put back together. With any luck, they found people that could help them, some related, some not:

"“Suddenly he remembers Sixo trying to describe what he felt about the 30 mile woman. “She is a friend of mine.  She gather me.  The pieces I am, she gather them and give them back to me in all the right order.  It's good, you know, when you got a woman who is a friend of your mind.” P. 273

What is particularly interesting to me is that the WAY Morrison writes, you have to put pieces together yourself. You, as a reader have to do what the characters have to do. Work out what happened and what it means. Sometimes, you are inside people's heads. Sometimes, you are watching what happens to them through the floorboards. Memory and "rememory" are incessently present, as if the memories of these slaves are scabs that have to be peeled off to be healed, and peeled off again to be healed again, - all one can hope for is that in each round of the painful process, a little less gravel will be found in the wound. Morrison makes use of a set of characters that had lived on a "humane plantation" to make it clear that even there, abuse, psychological, emotional, sexual, and economic was rampant.

"“We could move,” [Sethe] suggested once to her mother-in-law. “What would be the point?”  Asked Baby Suggs. “Not a house in the county ain't packed to its rafters with some Negro’s grief. . . . In all of baby's life, as well as Sethe’s own, men and women were moved around like checkers. Anybody Suggs knew, let alone loved, who hadn't run off or been hanged, got rented out, loaned out, bought up, brought back, stored up, mortgaged, won, stolen or seized.

. .  . what she called the nastiness of life was the shock she received upon learning that nobody stopped playing checkers just because the pieces included her children.” P. 23

... And the emotional impact would take generations to work out, not just in the time it took to announce an Emancipation Proclamation. So many of the character in this novel have scars - they have broken trusters and frozen passions. In so many ways, their ability to form bonds and to love was crippled. And clearly, as one of the characters so eloquently puts it, "Anything dead coming back to life hurts.”

Trauma taught slaves that they should put as many emotions into hibernation as possible:

"Sethe looked at her hands, her bottle -greensleeves, and thought how little color there wasn't the house and how strange that she had not missed it the way baby did.  Deliberate, she thought, it must be deliberate, because the last color she remembered was the pink chips in the headstone of her baby girl.  After that she became as color conscious as a hen.  Every dawn she worked in fruit pies, potato dishes and vegetables while the cook did the soup, meat and all the rest.  And she could not remember remembering a molly apple or yellow squash.  Every dawn she saw the dawn, but never acknowledged or remarked its color.  There was something wrong with that.  It was as though one day she saw a red baby blood, another day the pink gravestone chips, and that was the last of it."

It taught them tobond to nothing and no one:

“Risky, thought Paul D., very risky.  For a used-to-be slave woman to love anything that much was dangerous, especially if it was her children she had settled on to love.  The best thing, he knew, was to love just a little bit; everything, just a little bit, so when they broke its back, or shoved it in a croaker sack, well mabe you'd have a little love left over for the next one.” P. 45

“So you protected yourself and loved small.  Picked the tiniest stars out of the sky to own; lay down with head twisted in order to see a loved one over the rim of the trench before you slept.  Steal shy glances at her between the trees at chain-up.  Grass blades, salamanders, spiders, woodpeckers, Beatles, a kingdom of ants.  Anything bigger wouldn't do.  A woman, a child, a brother -- a big love like that would split you wide open in Alfred, Georgia.  He knew exactly what she meant: to get to a place where you could love anything you choose -- not to need permission for desire -- well now, that was freedom.” P. 162

Clearly, everyone got disconnected by the institution of slavery and needed help getting put back together. Sethe needs Paul D to provide a sense of saftey. Paul D needs Sethe to affirm his ability to create a place of safety - something he could never do for anyone before. It is because of him that she begins to see colors again:

" . . kneeling in the keeping room the morning after Paul D. came, she was distracted by the two orange squares that signaled barren 124 really was.

He was responsible for that.  Emotions sped to the surface in his company.  Things became what they were: drabness looked drab; heat was hot.  Windows suddenly had view.  And wouldn't you know he'd be a singing man.” P. 39

It is because of her that Paul D begins to assemble his disconnected self, unpacking the emotions that he had for so long slammed shut in the tobacco can that sits where his heart used to be.

“He would keep the rest where it belongs: in that tobacco tin buried in his chest where a red heart used to be.  It's lid rusted shut.  He would not try it loose now in front of this sweet sturdy woman, for if she got a whiff of the contents that would shame him.  And it would hurt her to know that there was no red heart bright as Mister’s comb beating in him. . . . working dough.  Working, working dough.  Nothing better than that to start the day's serious work of beating back the past.” P. 73

As I said, all of the main characters are having to suck out the venom of slavery from their veins and memories. Even the saintly, Baby Suggs, holy:

“Those white things have taken all I had or dreamed,” she said, “and broke my heart strings to.  There is no bad luck in the world but white folks.” (P. 89) . . . but . . .  "Bit by bit, at 124 and in the clearing, along with the others, she had claimed herself.  Freeing yourself was one thing; claiming ownership of that free itself was another.” P. 95

Perhaps one of the most moving and powerful passages in the book is a sermon (Call'in) given by Baby Suggs, holy in the camp meeting, Calling these former slaves to combat the abuse they experienced with love.

“Here in this here place, we flesh; Flesh that weeps, laughs; Flesh that dances on bare feet in grass.  Love it.  Love it hard.  Yonder they do not love your flesh.  They despise it.  They don't love your eyes; they'd just as soon pick them out.  No more do they love the skin on your back.  Yonder they flay it.  And all my people they do not love your hands.  Those they only use, Tie, bind, chop off and leave empty.  Love your hands!  Love them.  Raise them up and kissed them.  Touch others with them, add them together, stroke them on your face as they don't love that either.  You got to love it, You!  And no, they ain't in love with your mouth.  Yonder, out there, they will see it broken and break it again.  What you say out of it they will not heed.  What you scream from it they do not hear.  What you put into it to nourish your body they will snatch away and give the leavins instead.  No, they don't love your mouth.  You got to love it.  This is flesh I'm talking about here.  Flesh that needs to be loved.  Feed the need to rest and to dance;  backs that need support; shoulders that need arms, strong-arms I'm telling you.  Know my people, out yonder, hear me, they do not love your neck unnoosed and straight.  So love your neck; Put a hand on it, and grace it, stroke it and hold it up.  And all your inside parts that they'd just as soon slop for hogs, you got to love them.  The dark, dark liver -- love it, love it, and the beat and beating heart, love that too.  More than eyes or feet.  More than lungs that have yet to draw free air.  More than your life holding womb or your life giving private parts, hear me now, love your heart.  This is the prize.” P. 88-89

One of the greatest traumas that slavery inflicted on people caught in its web, as Morrison portrays it, was the ways in which it drove slaves to inhumanity themselves. In Beloved, Sethe kills one of her own children to keep it from being taken back into slavery. Forgiving whites was one thing but how did one forgive themselves for the many ways that slaves had to compromise themselves?

“You got two feet, Sethe, not four,” Paul D says to Sethe when he learns of what she did, “and right then a forest sprang up between them; trackless and quiet.” P. 165

Can one forgive a person for doing something like that? Can one forgive themselves? Baby Suggs, holy is left in a moral paralysis over it.

". . . she could not prove or condemn Sethe’s rough choice.  One or the other might have saved her, but beaten up by the claims of both, she went to bed.  The white folks had tired her out at last.” P. 180

Paul D puts his finger right on the heart of the dilemma when he says "that just beyond his knowing is the glare of an outside thing that embraces while it accuses.” P. 271 I can only assume that he is referring to God who, if the Gospels say anything, knows exactly what it is like to kill a child to save a child."

I close this review of what I got out of this book with a passage that expresses ever so clearly how we eventually create in reality what we project in imagination:

"White people believed that whatever the manners, under every dark skin was a jungle.  Swift unnavigable waters, swinging screaming baboons, sleeping snakes, red gums ready for their sweet white blood.  In a way, he thought, they were right.  The more colored people spent their strength trying to convince them how gentle they were, how clever and loving, how human, the more they used themselves up to persuade whites of something Negroes believed could not be questioned, the deeper and more tangled jungle grew inside.  But it wasn't the jungle blacks brought with them to this place from the other livable place.  It was the jungle white folks planted in them.  And it grew.  It spread.  And, through and after life, it spread, until it invaded the whites who had made it.  Touched them everyone.  Changed and altered them.  Made them bloody, silly, worse than even they wanted to be, so scared were they of the jungle they had made.  The screaming baboons lived under their own white skin; the red gums were their own.” P. 199

The world owes a debt to Toni Morrison, holy for helping us all work through our Traumas.

Incidentally, the house number in which the story takes place is 124. Sethe has four kids and the third one is dead which is why the three is missing I suspect. It has been "disremembered" 

Question for Comment: In the novel, Beloved, Baby Suggs, holy insists that the work of reclaimg our sense of dignity and self worth must come from within us. We cannot wait for someone to affirm our worth to us. And yet, it seems, that no one in this novel recovers without the love and affection and support of others. When you look at the distance between where you are and where you would like to be in terms of loving yourself, do you see a need for more internal initiative or external help in the process?