Bear Each Others' Burdens

Copyright 1995 by John R. Mabry

*This article previously appeared in an issue of _Creation Spirituality_ magazine.*

As a child, I read about people who believed that by rubbing a stone on their warts, the malady could be discarded when the stone was cast away. "How stupid," I thought, in my third-grade Eurocentric arrogance.

One thing I've learned since is not to dismiss the concepts I've found in Native religions, but to come to them with profound respect and a recognition that the ideas and rituals speak to the very heart of my own being, and in fact are themselves central to the faith I embrace and practice, though adorned with centuries of Christian spirituality and tradition.

This practice of transferring evil, sickness, and sin from the afflicted to something else, be it an inanimate object, an animal or another human is found around the world, in both Native traditions and in most of the major world religions. In southern India a village practice is to lay hands upon a calf while reciting a litany of sins upon the animal, which is then driven into the wilderness, carrying with it the people's sins. This is nearly identical to the Israelite ritual found in the Torah concerning the scapegoat, and, similarly, Muslims in the Middle Ages rid themselves of plague by leading a camel through the village and then sacrificing it in a sacred place. In India a holy man, for a certain fee, will bear the sins of another and exile himself to take them away forever. This is a central concept in Christianity, where Jesus, the divine scapegoat or lamb, willingly bore our sins himself.

It is not uncommon in Native religions for a sickness to be borne away by another. A Celtic healer may take the sickness upon herself to the relief of the afflicted. (In fact, a woman, Agnes Sampson was put to death for just such a ministry in 1590.)

What do we make of such a ministry today? Is this superstition? Are such occasions miracles? Can they actually occur?

A story is told of the famous Oxford apologist, C.S. Lewis, whose wife was suffering so terribly from terminal cancer that she was unable to rest. Lewis, it is said, took and bore her pain for an hour, himself experiencing the agony of the disease while his wife sank into a much needed sleep.

I was incredulous upon hearing this story for the first time, until I came across the work of the great Anglican mystic and author Charles Williams, who, in his novel Descent Into Hell, describes a character who offers to carry the paranoid fear of a young woman so that she might have the strength to face what she must. The young woman rejects his bizarre offer, humiliated, "Would I push my burden on to anybody else?" she replies. "Not if you insist on making a universe for yourself," she is answered. "If you want to disobey and refuse the laws that are common to us all, if you want to live in pride and division and anger, you can. But if you will be part of the best of us, and live and laugh and be ashamed with us, then you must be content to be helped." As the novel continues, she finally consents and is so overwhelmed with the grace of her surrender that she herself mystically travels to the aid of an ancestor several hundred years past at his martyrdom, and bears much of his pain as he is burned at the stake. So she had entered into communion. She can receive, and also willingly and in love, bear the pain of others.

I thought of this as so much interesting fantasy until a friend offered to receive my disabling worry over an approaching event. I laughed nervously, incredulously. He insisted that he was willing to share my burden of worry. I was amazed that I was clinging so desperately to this affliction. I confronted myself, and in a few seconds I was able to let it go. "Okay," I said to my friend, "Please help me." Instantly a wave passed over me, and the burden was lessened. My friend had indeed helped me and enabled me to meet my fear with courage.

Similarly, Yoruba priestess and ICCS faculty member Luisah Teish, in her book Jambalaya, relates an experience in which she was so sick she could hardly move to do anything to help relieve her suffering. Making a cup of herb tea seemed an impossibly exhausting endeavor. She says she was "too sick to heal myself...and too stubborn to die." She goes on: I remember asking the question, "What would [Momma] do if her child was this sick?"

Some time passed; then I got up. As my feet hit the floor, I noticed varicose veins in my legs (which I do not have), and my muscles were not sore. I stood up and felt my hips much larger than they are.... It seemed as if I were wearing my mother's body!

Teish went to the kitchen and prepared the home remedies Momma would have and went back to bed. "When I sat down on the bed, I became my sick self again who could barely lean over the bowl to steam my head clear...."

This all seems terribly primitive to my "enlightened" intellect, but I must reconcile myself to the fact that I do indeed believe in miracles. And I am willing to be an agent of such healing grace, now that I have experienced it firsthand. Why is such a phenomenon so incredible to us? Our traditions are founded upon such supernatural occurrences, and they speak to us of a universe where these occurrences are not the exception, but the norm.

When in Paul's epistle he exhorts us to "bear each other's burdens" we should perhaps take him more literally. It is natural for us to exhibit compassion-"suffering with"-towards one another, and to accept such kindness and communion. We may be the instruments of grace and profound healing to one another. The witness of our tradition and the wisdom of so many of our sister faiths speak this to us, that we may indeed "bear each other's burdens." There is a world around us groaning with the weight.