What about suffering and meditation

The question of suffering is a difficult one.  If you are hale and hearty and happy and a friend of yours is ill or deeply sad or having a horrible operation, trying to offer words of wisdom about meditation isn't really going to sound genuine.  It seems that in order to understand suffering and to offer anything useful, it has to be shown that the thing which you offer works.  When Rev Alice asked what the ..... would Jesus do on her fabulous car sticker, it really made for thinking about this so here is where this blogger has got to.  What Jesus did and what others who point to a freedom beyond the world was to suffer publicly and horribly and then die and get wrapped in grave clothes and put in a tomb with a huge great stone in front of it.  And then the next day, he was up and about 'His Father's business'.  We intone these words with gravitas and they are the cornerstone of the Christian faith but what are they saying to us.  In case you think that this is just a Christian message, look into our own times, see how the Dalai Lama, thrown out of Tibet, watching the slaughter and dismay of his flock, reinvigorating the whole message of Buddhism by getting through it.  Amongst the Indian sages, Ramakrishna in the early part of the last century, had throat cancer and everything that went with it and seemed to show that the suffering part was only part of the whole story.  Are all these people saying that there is a part which doesn't suffer but that connecting with its reality is important.  Jesus practiced for 40 days, imagine that, no food, no drink and no company and not using any power to relieve the conditions.  This is so much part of this particular story which ends again with showing that He was still around even after everything to crush him out of existence had been done.  I think that this is what he was showing and what the Dalai Lama is showing us, that there is more to suffering than endings, there are new beginnings if we choose them.  In the little half hour meditation which isn't much, at least we get a chance to practice being without the things which seem so important in the rest of our life and practice might make perfect if you keep at it.