Posts Tagged ‘suffering’

Thomas Merton on Suffering and Sin

Tuesday, December 11th, 2012

A society whose whole idea is to eliminate suffering and bring all its members the greatest amount of comfort and pleasure is doomed to be destroyed. It does not understand that all evil is not necessarily to be avoided. Nor is suffering the only evil, as our world thinks.

If we consider suffering to be the greatest evil and pleasure the greatest good, we will live continually submerged in the only great evil that we ought to avoid without compromise: which is sin. Sometimes it is absolutely necessary to face suffering, which is a lesser evil, in order to avoid or to overcome the greatest evil, sin.

What is the difference between physical evil – suffering – and moral evil – sin? Physical evil has no power to penetrate beneath the surface of our being. It can touch our flesh, our mind, our sensibility. It cannot harm our spirit without the work of that other evil which is sin. If we suffer courageously, quietly, unselfishly, peacefully, the things that wreck our outer being only perfect us within, and make us, as we have seen, more truly ourselves because they enable us to fulfill our destiny in Christ. They are sent for this purpose, and when they come we should receive them with gratitude and joy.

Sin strikes at the very depth of our personality. It destroys the one reality on which our true character, identity, and happiness depend: our fundamental orientation to God. We are created to will what God wills, to know what he knows, to love what he loves. Sin is the will to do what God does not will, to know what he does not know, to love what he does not love. Therefore every sin is a sin against truth, a sin against obedience, and against love. But in all these three things sin proves itself to be a supreme injustice not only against God but, above all, against ourselves.

No Man Is An Island, p.83f.

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The Search for Compassion (2)

Saturday, April 28th, 2012

More from Dr. Andrew Purves, The Search for Compassion: Spirituality and Ministry. In his chapter, A Theology of Compassionate Suffering, he writes:

“Jesus alone is the compassionate person, the one in whom compassion is an actuality. This means that compassionate ministry is possible for us only if we are in a relationship with Jesus Christ. Through our relationship with him we participate in his compassion. We recognize that apart from him we can do nothing (John 15:5).

Suffering can cripple us. No matter how sound our theology is, or how intense we make our piety, or how firm our faith remains in spite of real difficulties, suffering can squeeze us dry. Suffering can destroy us as lively human beings.

Compassion involves suffering. There is no way around the blunt fact that compassion will increase our experience of suffering. To suffer with another is still to suffer. What is to prevent us from being squeezed dry? Left to itself, suffering, even in the most noble of causes, can cripple us as we buckle under the weight of accumulated pain.

Our natural response to suffering in others and in ourselves is to turn away from it in some way. Our instinct is to avoid suffering if at all possible. We avoid suffering because the suffering of others is painful to us. Apathy is a form of the inability to suffer. In the officially optimistic society suffering is denied and repressed.

Compassionate ministry has the responsibility of entering into the loneliness and loneness of those who suffer. The Bible gives voice to suffering in the form of the lament psalms.

Alternative models of the Christian life and ministry can be derived from the parable of the Good Samaritan. According to the first interpretation of the parable, God charges a person to be compassionate and to go and pick up wounded people. The person then moves in obedience into a ministry of tending to wounded people. This understanding of ministry tends to set up a Ping-Pong match in which the minister bounces back and forth between two extremes. If he or she picks up every wounded traveler, exhaustion will soon set in, to be accompanied inevitably by anger, disillusionment, and despair. In other words, the minister will experience what we now call burnout. If, on the other hand, he or she does not pick up every wounded traveler, guilt will cripple his or her ministry every bit as quickly as exhaustion. This model of ministry leads, then, to a two-step dance as one beats a rhythm between burnout and guilt.

There is another way to understand ministry in the light of the parable of the Good Samaritan. Here we see God is the minister. Only God in Christ can take on the suffering of the world in compassion and not be destroyed by it. Only God can heal the world’s brokenness. All ministry is God’s ministry, or, more accurately, God’s ministry in Jesus Christ, so the glory of the Father, in the power of the Spirit, for the sake of the world. Ministry is not a pragmatic attending to human need whenever that arises for us. Rather, ministry is first of all God’s work of healing and saving in Jesus Christ, and our ministry finds its identity, goal, and possibility entirely from that actual prior ministry.

As we look at this second model, it is important to understand that we are, first of all, the persons lying in the ditch and in need of divine help. God in Christ ministers in compassion to us, taking the first step. Outside of our life in Christ, ministry really becomes impossible for us, for it becomes our ministry and not God’s ministry in which we by grace participate. Spirituality and ministry always belong together. To attempt to relate to others outside of our being in Christ would be to claim false autonomy for ourselves.

Jesus is the sufferer. His suffering defines our suffering. And his suffering allows us to be secure in the knowledge that God is a God who suffers

In 2 Corinthians 4:7-14 we are presented with the image of our life as a jar of clay that is filled with the treasure of Christ. The power belongs to God not to us. The life of Jesus is ministered in and through my body. It may be death in me, but life to others. God brings new life from death for the believer. We participate in the suffering of Christ. “

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The Search for Compassion (1)

Thursday, April 26th, 2012

Andrew Purves, Professor of Reformed Theology at Pittsburgh Theological Seminary has become one of my favorite authors. In reading his more recent bestsellers, The Crucifixion of Ministry, and The Resurrection of Ministry, I found that he had written a book in 1989 entitled, The Search for Compassion: Spirituality and Ministry. It is a classic and deserves to be better known. Here are some extracts from it.

“Life is hard. Certainly, there is more to life than suffering, but suffering is inevitably part of the story. The case for our exposure to suffering hardly needs to be made.

It is evident that what we and everyone else in the world need in our suffering and sorrow are people who will care for us. It may not be the only thing we all need, but it is always a part of what is needed. Wolterstorff, in his book, remarks:

‘But please: Don’t say it’s not really so bad. Because it is. Death is awful, demonic If you think your task as comforter is to tell me that really, all things considered, it’s not so bad, you do not sit with me in my grief but place yourself off in the distance away from me. What I need to hear from you is that you recognize how painful it is. I need to hear from you that you are with me in my desperation. To comfort me, you have to come close. Come sit beside me on my mourning bench.’ (Nicholas Wolterstorff, Lament for a Son, p.34)

Wolterstorff’s plea is for a renewed compassion.

How is a renewed compassion possible for us? It is probably a matter of time before the intensity of suffering in others leads us to harden our hearts against it. After all, there is only so much suffering any of us can take before we are simply overwhelmed by it. We can only sit on the mourning bench for a while. We who would suffer with others can become casualties of the very acts of our love. Our compassion recoils, as it were, making us its victims. We begin to realize, perhaps, that exposure to too much suffering will destroy us as well. It will drive us mad. And so we shut off, or at least very carefully control, our sensitivity to the suffering of others, often being unaware that we are doing so.

There is a profound confusion over the nature of ministry. The ministry of the clergy is in a state of deep and damaging confusion. What is a clergyperson supposed to do? He or she is a worship leader and a preacher, a teacher, a student and theologian, an administrator, a program director, a pastor, and, if possible, a pastoral counselor, a community organizer, and perhaps even the person who fixes the boiler and turns off the lights at the end of the day. He or she should also be a paragon of virtue, constant in prayer and study…In the face of all this, many clergy today suffer from a plummeting sense of personal self-respect and an acute loss of professional identity and satisfaction.

The practice of compassion is the practice of ministry. Compassion means ministry. It is not simply sympathy or the expression of well-meaning good intention. Compassion means getting involved in another’s life, for healing and wholeness.”

Purves describes how compassion featured in the ministry of Jesus through a treatment of five miracles. He concludes:

“Compassion, as we see it in these texts, is a ministry of presence. To be present for another is to be available for him or her. It is to relate to another with all of one’s attention and energy. And it is to invite that other into a relationship with oneself.

At various times all of us have been on the giving and receiving end of both presence and lack of presence. To experience presence is to feel that another is really taking you seriously. You matter to that person. His or her attention is really on you. You feel that you are significant to that person. This gives you the feeling of personal worth. To experience lack of presence is to feel that your personhood has little value. It is to feel self-esteem diminish and anger rise. You feel put down.

Compassion as presence involves patience. As patience, presence is the gift of one’s quality time. One gives away one’s time to another. One ‘wastes’ time in compassionate presence. Patience is presence with fortitude. It is walking with another and not giving up when the going becomes difficult or even dangerous.

Simone Weil once wrote,

‘those who are unhappy have no need for anything in this world but people capable of giving them their attention. The love of our neighbor in all its fullness simply means being able to say to him: “What are you going through?” This way of looking is first of all attentive.’ (Simone Weil, Waiting for God, p.75)

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The Battle Ground of Life

Saturday, February 11th, 2012

This excerpt from Pennar Davies, Diary of a Soul, about life as a battle ground, is worth sharing.

“I saw great weakness and frailty in the face of one dear to me and I have been in the presence of a friend’s anxiety and sorrow. Our lives are battle grounds. The Dark Death, the Great Executioner, the General-in-chief of the cohorts of Hell, who can raise his terrible banner over every human body and parade with terrifying pride over every member. But the Christ will reign.

Oh Lord Christ, the Resurrection and the Life, the First-born from the dead, take this precious life into your breast. Jesus, who wept in the past, accept our tears as a witness to the strength of Eternal Love who insists on calling his dear ones out of the grasp of the dust. Consecrate our grief to the glory of the Name which is above every name.

The grief of the friend who is left is bitter. But the fierce anguish of the rent testifies to the strength of the partnership. The life together was not in vain: it is part of the Life together which is to eternity. Does not the cry ‘My God, My God, why have you deserted me?’ convince us that God never leaves us?

Oh Lord Jesus, King of the Jews, King of kings, King of the world, accept our homage; for in You there is every virtue and every praise. Your Cross is part of the fabric of the whole world, part of the pattern of man’s history, part of the witness of our conscience – the part which gives meaning and light to the whole.

We have been one in sin; we are one in untruth. But this is the oneness of hell, the deadly oneness which divides us against one another and against our selves! Deliver us from evil. Unite us in your Own Love.

We can see the false unity in the contempt of those who were passing by and saying: ‘Save yourself and come down from the cross’; in the words of the chief priest, ‘He saved others but he cannot save himself. Let us see the Messiah, the king of Israel, come down from the cross now, and we will believe in him’; in the blasphemy of the wrongdoer who was crucified with You, ‘If you are the Messiah, save yourself and us’; in the mockery of the soldiers, ‘If you are the king of the Jews, save yourself.’ We see the divided humanity uniting to insult Your Love!

But you are interceding for us on the Cross. Oh the wonder of the universe, unite us for ever in the endless forgiveness which glorified heaven and earth.

Comfort all the Companions of the Cross this day. The needy, the sorrowful, the widow, the orphan, the one without hope and the one without succor – take us all. You who were lifted from the earth, draw us to Yourself. To whom shall we go but to You?”

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Innocent Suffering

Saturday, January 21st, 2012

Thomas G. Long, Bandy Professor of Preaching as Candler School of Theology, Emory University, has done it again. He has a habit of writing books on subjects that are pertinent to today. This time it is about innocent suffering. WHAT SHALL WE SAY? EVIL, SUFFERING, AND THE CRISIS OF FAITH, tackles head on the contention that a good God, who is all-powerful should not allow undeserved evil. In particular he responds to Bart Ehrman’s book, GOD’S PROBLEM: HOW THE BIBLE FAILS TO ANSWER OUR MOST IMPORTANT QUESTION – WHY WE SUFFER.

He reviews all the major arguments over the centuries and recent books on the subject, including those of the new atheists: Hitchens and Dawkins, and Harold Kushner’s sympathetic, WHEN BAD THINGS HAPPEN TO GOOD PEOPLE. His aim is to encourage preachers to deal with the difficult challenges of unbelief from the pulpit and to avoid bromides.

“There they are out there in the pews, people who want to believe but who are plagued with honest doubts, people who are remind-ed every day in ways explicit and implicit that their faith in a God who loves humanity and acts in the world benevolently is merely the ‘unresolved residue of childish fantasy,’ people who are pressed by the powerful ideology of science and the pressure of a secular culture to pack their bags and to head out ‘East of Eden’ along the road of unbelief, but who leave reluctantly and with re-gret and nostalgia, looking back as they go to see if someone, anyone, will speak a word that kindles their faith once again and gives them hope that God is alive and that life is more than a flat, technological world ruled by raw human ambition and power and pun-ctuated by random and meaningless suffering.” (p.29)

He has some wonderful stories to tell – excellent witnesses to the spiritual mysteries that transcend our understanding and exper-ience. He is aware that every day people in congregations face suffering for which their theology is not sufficient. They want to know that God loves them, and want to be shown how. After discussing all the arguments, and the book of Job, he ends by explor-ing the teaching of Jesus in the parable of the wheat and the weeds (Matthew 13:24-30). Jesus locates the presence of evil to the work of the enemy, the devil. “To say that the enemy is the devil is not to revert to pre-scientific fairytale images but to say, through the ancient language of the Scripture, that evil has a cosmic, trans-human reality. Evil is not just a failing; it is a force….Evil is not merely a problem; it is a mystery…It is cosmic because it recognizes that evil is a spiritual force; it is not just a result of human err-or, natural forces, and understandable conflict, but is rather a force that transcends human capacities and rational explanation …. God’s enemy is a constant presence and a fact of life.” (134-137)

In my book SURVIVING HURRICANES I say the same thing. The problem of innocent suffering is really the problem of evil, the enemy, the devil, the cosmic fall. We have to endure it in this present age until the harvest, when the wheat will be separated from the weeds.

I commend Long’s book. It is superb. Anyone who has wrestled with the problems of natural disasters and the evil of human beings, accidents and disease, will find it a great comfort.

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House of Prayer No.2

Saturday, August 20th, 2011

Mark Richard was called a “special child,” the Southern social code for mentally and physically challenged children. He was crippled by deformed hips and was told that he would spend his adult life in a wheelchair. After a series of surgeries he managed to live a remarkably active life and has written about it in a memoir: House of Prayer No.2.

The author of two award-winning short story collections and a novel, he has been published in The New Yorker, Harper’s, Esquire, Vogue and GQ. He has been visiting writer in residence at several universities. He has also written screen plays for television and movies.

This excerpt is worth the price of the book. He is now in his fifties.

“By this time you have two sons, the older of whom has a glitch in his spine. You are now the parent your father was, driving him to special clinics, watching as the doctors make him run, walk, stand on one foot. No one seems to know what the condition is. They think it is developmental and not degenerative, but they’re not sure.

You tell your mother that you need some prayers sent your way. Your mother has been employed at the same hospital these last thirty years. She has worked her way up from switchboard operator to one of the managers in a terminal care ward of the hospital. People bring her their loved ones who are dying, and she sees that they are comfortable to the end, sees that they have what they need. Your mother has developed a network of prayer warriors at the hospital, mostly black women and a few black men who meet informally in side hallways and unused rooms to hold hands in a circle and offer up prayers. Your mother attends Bible study classes in the black part of town. On Sunday mornings, she attends her small white Episcopal church, and in the afternoons she attends her black friends’ church, House of Prayer, No.2.

The situation with your son is a test of your faith. The platitudes you hear don’t help. You do not offer platitudes to people in their times of need. You have learned that the only platitude you can offer others in a time of need is to tell them that you love them. You also do not offer prayers in the hopes of changing things. You have come to believe that those types of prayers are dangerous, especially when the word ‘if’ is used. Those types of prayers are a type of negotiation, and you are beginning to believe that negotiation with God is sinful.

Your mother does not offer a platitude about your son. She recounts all the years of trials and suffering she says she watched you endure, and she says maybe all of that was necessary for you to be the parent of this boy who has his own difficulties. If that is true, then it is a kind of God’s redemptive grace that you can finally accept.” (pp.171.172)

What words of wisdom, experience and faith that we can all apply to our own situations!

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Answered Prayer

Tuesday, July 19th, 2011

Dennis Lennon, writing in “Fuelling the Fire: Fresh Thinking on Prayer”, on answers to prayer.

“The most helpful approach to ‘prayer for healing’ I’ve encountered recently was at the Community of the Holy Name in Derby. Sister Lilias is herself confined to a wheelchair yet conducts a remarkable prayer-ministry for the sick who come in to her regular meetings. At each gathering she explains that God could answer prayer in any of four ways.

  1. He can, and he will, heal you tonight.
  2. or he may say ‘I will heal you but later. There are things going on in your life that must be dealt with first.’;
  3. or his answer to you may be, ‘My grace is sufficient for you’;
  4. or he may tell you, ‘I’m preparing you for death.’ (Sister Lilias commented on the remarkable interest people show in this fourth possibility, as if it is a liberation to be allowed ‘officially’ to embrace the possibility of death.)

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Unanswered Prayer

Saturday, July 2nd, 2011

Phil Yancey in Prayer: Does It Make Any Difference? struggles with unanswered prayer.

“Some, but not all, unanswered prayers trace back to a fault in the one who prays. Some, but not all, trace back to God’s mystifying respect for human freedom and refusal to coerce. Some, but not all, trace back to dark powers contending against God’s rule. Some, but not all, trace back to a planet marred with disease, violence, and the potential for tragic accident. How then, can we make any sense of unanswered prayer?” (p.232)

 After exploring many avenues to understand unanswered prayer Yancey concludes his chapter….”the only final solution to unanswered prayer is Paul’s explanation to the Corinthians: ‘For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as I am known.’ No human being, no matter how wise or how spiritual, can interpret the ways of God, explain one miracle and not another, why an apparent intervention here and not there. Along with the apostle Paul, we can only wait, and trust.” (p.247)

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The Presence of God in Earthquakes

Saturday, April 2nd, 2011

Chris Trotter is a political commentator associated with the Labour Party in New Zealand. He is also a Christian. The following are his reflections on the recent earthquake in Christchurch.

 

WAS GOD PRESENT in Christchurch on 22 February 2011? It’s a question many New Zealanders have wrestled with over the past month, and the tragedy which engulfed Japan on 11 March has given it added urgency.

Officially, we’re a secular nation, yet Census data confirms that more than half of New Zealanders retain a belief in God. That belief is sorely tested by natural disasters. If God was present in Christchurch on 22 February, why didn’t He prevent the earthquake?

But, in posing this question aren’t we separating God from the natural world? Seating Him on a divine throne beyond this earthly realm? Requiring Him to demonstrate his mastery over his own creation by, in this case, countermanding the movement of the earth’s tectonic plates?

Yes, we are. But we can hardly be blamed for doing so. Because, when all is said and done, this is the view of God we have inherited from the Bible. He is the maker of heaven and earth and if it pleases him to command the sun to stand still, or the oceans to o’ertop the world, then it will be so. He is Jehovah, “I am that I am”, the God Charlton Heston (in the role of Moses) invokes when Pharaoh’s army traps the Israelites against the margins of the Red Sea.

“Behold His mighty hand!”, Charlton cries, and low, the waters of the sea are parted.

There are, of course, plusses and minuses to the Jehovan conception of divinity, as the celebrated author, C.S. Lewis, well understood.

In The Horse and His Boy, one of his Chronicles of Narnia, he makes it clear that his own rendering of the Jehovan God – the golden lion Aslan – is not a pet to be called for and dismissed at our convenience. On the contrary, he is an altogether dangerous being. As one of Lewis’s characters indignantly observes: “He’s not a tame lion!”

And, yet, it was to a rather tame deity that the Dean of Christchurch Cathedral, Peter Beck, appeared to be appealing in the aftermath of the earthquake. In answer to the question: “Where was God on 22 February?” he responded:

“God is in all these people. God is in the midst of all this. God is weeping with those who weep. God is alongside those who are finding the energy to just keep going. God is in the people who are reaching out and seeking to sustain one another. God is about building community, about empowering people.”

And, when a journalist demanded: ‘Yes, but where was God was when offices pancaked and burned and hundreds died?’

He replied:

“Well, we live on a dynamic, creating planet that’s doing its thing. For whatever reason, our forebears chose to build this city on this place. They didn’t know we were on this fault line. God doesn’t make bad things happen to good people. We make our own choices about what we do.”

Doing its thing?! What exactly is the Dean trying to say? That the natural world is a conscious entity? That it has its own volition and (God save us!) its own agenda? And did Cantabrians, thanks to the poor choices of their “forebears” simply find themselves in this “dynamic, creating planet’s” way? And was Jehovah, in fulfilment of some hitherto undisclosed self-denying ordinance, required to turn his face from the imminent suffering of Cantabrians and keep his mighty hands in his pockets?

If so, then God has a rival – a divine competitor in the omnipotence business. And the Dean is in flagrant breach of the Nicene Creed, the first article of which states, unequivocally: “We believe in one God, the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth”.

Perhaps the Dean should return to his Bible and ponder the God that spoke to Moses from the burning bush. The God that gave man counsel from the whirlwind, and moved before the Children of Israel in a pillar of fire. Perhaps he should consider the God that laid Jericho low and sent fire from heaven to consume Sodom and Gomorrah. A red God, a wrathful God, a jealous God. The God that was ready to drown the whole world. The God who, when his son, nailed to a cross, cried out “Father, why have you forsaken me?”, remained silent.

Shock and awe. These words have been sullied by the Pentagon’s bloody hands. Yet it is only in those moments when all our human conceits are battered down and laid to waste that we, shocked and awestruck, come close to understanding Jehovah as the authors of both the Old and New Testaments understood Him.

Was God present in Christchurch on 22 February? Oh yes, He was there. And He is with us always. Beyond our questions; beyond our understanding; beyond our judgement.

Not a tame lion.

This essay was originally published in The Press of Tuesday, 22 March 2011

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The Will of God

Saturday, March 26th, 2011

 

In the Amelia Plantation Chapel Lenten Meditations for 2011, Iris Jacobsen wrote, “Sometimes bad things happen to good people, sometimes things that should be so simple are not. Sometimes we plan and we hope about how things will go, but they simply do not turn out that way…. All of my life I have heard and respected spiritual people who have talked about events being the will of God. This poem has helped me to understand the things that have happened and given me hope; perhaps it will help you as well.

The will of God will never take you

Where the grace of God cannot keep you,

Where the arms of God cannot support you,

Where the riches of God cannot supply your needs,

Where the power of God cannot endow you.

 

The will of God can never take you

Where the Spirit of God cannot work through you,

Where the wisdom of God cannot teach you,

Where the army of God cannot protect you,

Where the hands of God cannot mold you.

 

The will of God will never take you

Where the love of God cannot enfold you,

Where the mercies of God cannot sustain you,

Where the peace of God cannot calm your fears,

Where the authority of God cannot overrule for you.

 

The will of God will never take you

Where the comfort of God cannot dry your tears,

Where the Word of God cannot feed you,

Where the miracles of God cannot be done for you,

Where the omnipresence of God cannot find you.

…God will help us endure, grow and win the victory over the things that happen in our lives. That is the will of God.”

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