A few more thoughts about suffering...

It was recently brought to my attention (again) that there are some obvious differences and disagreements in how some of us understand suffering - and these differences are both important and perplexing. I tend to stand in the tradition that sees suffering like the Princeton Educational Dictionary defines it:

+ agony: a state of acute pain

+ misery resulting from affliction

+ distress: psychological suffering

+ troubled by pain or loss

+ feelings of mental or physical pain

+ miserable: very unhappy

In this definition suffering = pain = an inevitable part of life that can either be avoided, embraced or exploited. Consequently, the challenge for those who follow Jesus becomes what are we going to do with this inevitable pain of living? Eugene Peterson suggests that Christianity - at its best - has historically offered the world a unique way of embracing and learning from the inevitable pain of life in Jesus Christ - which has created two distinct spiritualities.

One has come to embrace suffering as a fetish - a conscious choice that brings more pain upon one's self - in order to grow more like Christ. Think of the beloved Pope John Paul II and his flagelism - or the Irish monks standing in freezing water on one leg - or the Jansenists or evangelicals having themselves nailed to the Cross on Good Friday. This spirituality is attracted to suffering and pain because it causes the individual to grow closer to Christ and his agony.

To my way of thinking, this is a horrific twisting of the Cross and a sado-masochistic spirituality that bears no relationship to Jesus. Mel Gibson's film, "The Passion of the Christ" comes to mind with its obsession on the agony as a way into God's presence. Perhaps some in our overly antiseptic and pain phobic culture found the gore of Gibson's vision edifying as a corrective to the way so many numb themselves, but I found it ghastly and heretical.

Which suggests a whole other take on suffering: it is one of the mysterious portals embedded in our everyday living that can bring us into a deeper faith. It is not automatic by any means, nor is the pain a choice. Rather, like the Serenity Prayer, this spirituality of suffering suggests that because the pain of life in inevitable, we must either learn to "accept" it like Christ or else we will come to avoid suffering it in unhealthy ways or else become addicted to it. Acceptance is the only path that is liberating and of the Lord.

In this approach, the Cross speaks to us of the harshness of our lives - even the brutal cruelty - while also pointing to the trust that God is not only fully present with us in our pain but invites us to go through it with dignity and grace. The Cross speaks of our experience of God's absence, too, as well as the maturation of faith that learns how to trust beyond the evidence. No longer is faith dependent upon immediate pay offs - this is childish and simplistic - when I was a child, I acted like a child... but now that I have grown up, I have put childish things away knowing... that for now we can only see as through a glass darkly, yes? Later we shall see face to face, but not right now.

Please understand that I am NOT saying that God causes our pain so that we can mature nor that God wants us to suffer. Too often our traditional but legalistic Reformed and Roman Catholic spiritualities of suffering obscure the mystery of acceptance by teaching that suffering is our way of entering into intimacy with God. This denies the bounty of joy and feasting and grace in abundance that guides and shapes MOST of the way of Jesus. It also encourages people of faith to look for ways of suffering to mature as followers of Christ. No wonder, Jung responded to this notion in his reflection on Job by saying, "If this is the nature of God, who needs Satan!"

I believe that the mystery of suffering is better discerned as I Peter 2: 21 puts it: This is the kind of life you've been invited into, the kind of life Christ lived. He suffered everything that came his way so that you would know that it could be done - and also know how to do it, too, step by step. As we are embraced by Christ's grace - and enter into faith/trust more intentionally - we are given way to both accept (as in the Serenity Prayer) the pain/suffering of our lives and the suffering of the world and use it go grow deeper in compassion and trust.

Another favorite writer, Frederick Buechner, has observed: You can reconcile any of the following two propositions with each other, but you cannot reconcile all three: God is all-powerful, God is all-good, terrible things happen. The problem of evil (and I would add suffering) is perhaps the greatest single problem for religious faith.

There have been numerous theological and philosophical attempts to solve it, but when it comes down to the reality... none of them are worth much. When a child is raped and murdered, the parents are not apt to take much comfort from the explanation (better than most) that since God wants man to love him, man must be free to love or not to love and thus free to rape and murder a child if he takes a notion to.

Christian Science solves the problem of evil by saying that it does not exist except as an illusion of the mortal mind. (I would note that the same is true for various New Age spiritualities.) Buddhism solves it in terms of reincarnation and an inexorable law of cause and effect whereby the raped child is merely reaping the consequences of evil deeds it committed in another life.

Christianity, on the other hand, ultimately offers no theoretical solution at all. It merely points to the cross and says that, practically speaking, there is no evil or suffering so dark and so obscene - not even this - but that God can turn to good.

I have experienced this perspective to be true... what do you think?