pray ALL ways: suffering as a school of prayer

PRAY ALL WAYS: Embracing Suffering as Prayer

(Notes from this morning's live-stream)

How we choose to live into our experiences of pain and suffering will shape how we ripen and mature as people of faith. I’m not trying to be pious here, just direct. We all know – and have known – pain in our lives. Grief, emptiness, sorrow, and anguish are givens in the human condition. An ironic Yiddish aphorism that I’ve long savored puts it like this: In life, God often seems like a banker: with joy and happiness, there are limited quantities; so, for a season the One who is Holy gives blessings to some, and happiness to others only to take them away to share with others. But when it comes to sorrow and pain? They seem are unlimited and are freely distributed to all!

· I am NOT one of those who believes this literally – that God causes us pain for one inscrutable reason or another that may only be revealed on the other side of this realm – not at all! Such a deity would be cruel and sadistic – not at all what Jesus shows to us. But I still like that old saying because it’s what life FEELS like when we’re hurting – like we’re living through a season of joy that will suddenly fade into fallow or dry times maybe even heartbreak as well.

· Suffering exists in a multitude of forms – from social injustice, violence, industrial disease, and climate change to depression, abuse, injury, and anxiety – they all zap our strength, exhaust our inner resolve, cause us to grieve and despair, and ask ourselves WHY the hell this is hap-pening to me? Or to US? Or to the communities and families we love?

Fr. Richard Rohr writes: “Sooner or later, the heart of everybody’s spiritual problem is, “What do we do with our pain? Why is there evil? Why is there suffering?” The dean of San Francisco Theo-logical Seminary’s post-graduate program, the Rev. Dr. Warren Lee, used to say to us on a regular basis: “How you respond to the unavoidable agonies of a parishioner’s suffering is your personal, existential litmus test concerning whether or not you should stay in pastoral ministry! If you come up with nothing, it’s time to get out!” Blunt but insightful professional advice.

To which the late Dorothee Soelle, post-Holocaust German theologian who helped me shape my senior thesis in seminary, taught that the reason we in the West no longer know how to respond to human suffering with insight and compassion is because we’ve been blinded to death’s wisdom by our quest for success. We want to know the WHY in every situation. We ache to control ALL the mysteries of life. And while this has an upside in science and technology – the speed by which we were able to create and distribute COVID-19 vaccinations is proof – this quest has been a dismal failure when it comes to embracing suffering as a mode of authentic prayer.

· St. Paul wrote in Romans 8 that “nothing can separate us from the love of God. Not death nor life, nor angels nor the powers of hell, not things present nor things to come, not height nor depth, nor anything else in creation will be able to separate us from the love of God made real in our lives by Christ Jesus our Lord.”

· Why then, Soelle asks, does traditional Western Christianity teach that the Creator is an “omnipotent, distant Father-God” who stoically, mysteriously, and seemingly randomly acts beyond human compassion in ways that may only make sense after our death? It’s because we’re addicted to success and control to such a degree, she replies, that we have lost our capacity to live without a why.

We’ve sanitized death – we hide from it – losing touch with a wisdom which is built into the rhythm of the seasons and the soul of nature. Small wonder we can miss the truth Jesus incarnates in his life, death, and resurrection. The core of Christ’s journey documents that suffering can NOT be avoided and must not be endured alone; rather it’s to be embraced as yet another way of encoun-tering God’s loving presence. Richard Rohr, Gustavo Gutierrez, and Dorothee Soelle all attest to the assertion that Jesus learned in his life what Job discovered before him. Job begins his journey beg-ging God for an explanation that never comes – because Job is NOT in control.

Only when he relinquishes his demands and becomes silent does Job start to realize that he has NOT been ignored by the holy, but rather welcomed into a sacred conversation with God’s love that takes his pain seriously. You may that Job started out asking his friends to explain his anguish but all they offer are worn-out religious cliches about a punitive God who afflicts only sinners: what is YOUR secret sin, brother, they demand? What have YOU failed to confess? Such bankrupt, em-otionally callous, and theologically cruel replies only demoralize and infuriate Job – and well they should! The poetic prophets of ancient Israel assure us that God HATES this type of abstract, shame-based spirituality. You can find it in the Bible, of course, whenever Deuteronomy or Leviti-cus is interpreted in wooden and uncreative ways. But far more plentiful and persuasive are the cries of prophets like Amos and Isaiah who shout:

I HATE and despise your feasts days says the Lord… So shout out and do not hold back! Lift up your voice like a trumpet and announce to my people… that they may seek me day after day pleading: “Why do we fast, but you do not see? Why do we humble ourselves, but you do not notice?” Look, you serve your own interest on your fast day and continue to oppress all your workers. You fast only to quarrel and fight and to strike with a wicked fist. Take stock, you who have eyes but will not see: Is not this the fast that I choose: to loose the bonds of injustice, to undo the thongs of the yoke, to let the oppressed go free, and to break every yoke? Is it not to share your bread with the hungry and bring the homeless poor into your house; when you see the naked, to cover them, and not to hide yourself from your own kin? Do this and then your light shall break forth like the dawn and your healing shall spring up quickly; then you shall call, and the Lord will answer; you shall cry for help, and God will say, Here I am.

Job is a righteous soul, however, who continues to plead with the holy, trusting the steadfast love of the Lord that endures forever until he’s so exasperated by God’s apparent silence that he explodes in exhaustion. When he hits rock bottom, when he is completely empty of self, and no longer holds any illusions of control, then symbolically and emotionally Job hears and experiences the still small presence of the sacred within and beyond him which evokes this response: Oh, NOW I get it! Now…I know that you can do all things and that no purpose of yours can be thwarted… Once I uttered what I did not understand, things too wonderful and grand for me to grasp. Now I know that when I can hear, you will speak. When I engage and trust you, you are present. Once I had only heard of you by the hearing of the ear, but now I have seen you, experienced you, trusted you… and I am humbled into trust…

· James Hillman, a protégé of depth psychologist C.G. Jung, speaks of this as “growing down” in contrast to the “growing up.” Until the culture recognizes the legitimacy of growing down, he says, each person will struggle blindly to make sense of the darkness that the soul requires to deepen into life.

· There was a time, Hillman recalls, when, “one of Jung’s students, in a discussion of Pilgrim’s Progress, asked Jung what his own pilgrimage was like. “In my case,” the learned professor replied, “my Pilgrim’s Progress consisted of me having to climb down a thousand ladders until I could reach out my hand to the little clod of earth that I am.” Hillman adds:

The path of descent, the “deepening into life,” means letting go. At some point we must surrender; let our roots sink into our own darkness to weave and web their way into what lives in that dirt of self – what has been waiting within us. Here we can discover the deeper realities hidden within our own bodies, our circumstances, our experiences, as we let the old ways die. In this loss we can make space for Something Greater, for the soul to be reborn. It is from here that we can be re-enlivened like limbs warming back from cold or a lack of blood, returning not with the trap-pings of the world, but to an enriched, embodied life.

Jesus experienced the conundrum of descent as he literally and figuratively lived into his own passion, death, and resurrection. Jesus discovered in his day what Job found out before him: God is present during the darkness of our suffering. And not only present, but trustworthy and loving. Richard Rohr builds on this saying: 

We are “saved” or made whole by being addressed and included in the cosmic conversation. We do not really need linear answers; we need only to be taken seriously as part of the dialogue. To be loved. But we usually only know this in hindsight after the suffering and the struggle. It cannot be known beforehand, not theoretically or theologically, for our knowledge of God is participatory. God refuses to be intellectually “thought,” and is only known in the passion and pain of it all, experientially, when the issues become soul-sized and worthy of us.

Rachel Alana Falconer of Midwives of the Soul adds that: A growing down so often necessitates a "sinking to the depths". If we do not consciously choose the journey, the journey will choose us. The soul, weary and neglected so often captures us in the only way it can - calling us into sickness or depression, perhaps some kind of a fall or terrible grief, or betrayal - even a lingering apathy. At some point all the ornaments of self-image will lose their sparkle or even vanish, and it's often with great suffering we realize they no longer contain the mean-ing the world assured us they would have. Eventually we have no choice but to turn within in silence.

Which is precisely what Soelle taught us at Union Theological Seminary: The more people anticipate the elimination of suffering, the less strength they have to actually oppose it. The more we sanitize death and avoid its lessons, the farther we move away from the presence of God’s love. For whoever deals with his or her own personal suffering in the way our society teaches – through illusion, minimization, suppression, apathy, and our addiction to success – will certainly deal with societal suffering in much the same way.

Cumulatively, this is why I believe Fr. Ed Hays tells us that suffering can become a school of prayer for us where we discover like Job and Jesus that our anguish is yet another way to embrace God’s love. It is how we can be embraced, too. Suffering can become one way to pray ALL ways if we relinquish our illusions of success and control, learn to wait in the silence for God’s assurance that our pain has been taken seriously, and then enter into a deeper intimacy with the holy. There are three foundational wisdom texts from the New Testament that I want to share with you:

· First, the post-resurrection conversation between Jesus and two disciples on the Emmaus Road in Acts. Second, the words Jesus shares with his friends about bearing fruit in St. John’s gospel. And third, the confession St. Paul offers linking trusting God with the presence of the Holy Spirit during hard times.

· In Romans 5 he puts it like this: Because of grace we can celebrate our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, a hope that does not disappoint us, because it is God’s love being poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit.

For me, the key to the Emmaus Road story is the conversation: like Job’s mystical encounter with God that evokes trust when he is taken seriously, and Christ’s passion that leads him into a communion with God that carries him beyond the Cross into a resurrection, this story starts with the despair and questions of the disciples: Why did Jesus have to die? Why were our hopes dashed? Why have we been forced into grief? Fr. Ed writes that the questions of the disciples are “timeless, as current as anything today.” But the Holy One does NOT respond to these why questions with a logical answer; instead he offers a relationship: Jesus meets his friends in their pain, listens to them with compassion, refuses to ignore their woes, and finally shares with them a mystical insight about a seed falling to the ground and dying before it bears good fruit:

How else could the Messiah come into his glory,” he asks? There’s no explanation or excuse for our suffering, simply a conversation and relationship that honors their broken hearts. Fr. Ed writes: Without entering the darkness, the suffering of his Passion, the gentle rabbi from Nazareth would have remained simply Jesus and never become the Christ, the Cosmic or Universal source of hope, grace, and love. The brutal death and resurrection transfigured the wonder-worker from Galilee permanently into the essence of divine light and glory. Because – and this is critical – this is how God’s love bears fruit.

I know that when I have been locked into agony, fear, shame, and suffering, two truths have been salvific: holding on to my baptism by faith and remaining open to the loving solidarity of key people I trust. During a particularly bleak bout of burn-out in Tucson some 20 years ago, the only prayer I could articulate was the one Martin Luther used during his darkest hours: I have been baptized!

This was NOT a statement of pride, privilege, or triumph, just a hopeful, short-hand affirmation of trust that from the beginning of time I have been loved and cherished by God as one of the beloved. I didn’t FEEL loved, cherished, or beloved by anyone – least of all myself. But for nearly five months I made myself pray those words over and over to remember that NOTH-ING could separate me from the love of God. Not my feelings of despair. Not the reaction of some of colleagues nor anything within or beyond. Like they say in AA, sometimes you have to fake it till you make it. So I kept saying that nothing could separate me from the love of God. I had been baptized – and I just didn’t have the energy or wisdom to pray anything else.

Same goes for the deep conversations and loving embraces of a few key confidants: they did not nor and could not fix me. They really didn’t have all that much wisdom to share with me either – certainly no answers for what I was feeling and dealing with. But they listened. And they loved. They kept our relationship alive and real. They refused to ignore or abandon me either. In this, even at my lowest, I knew I wasn’t alone – and this is how I stated to learn that my suffering could be a school of prayer – that my descent mattered – and that’s part of what I hear taking place in the Emmaus Road story.

· Jesus listened and shared with his wounded friends what he had experienced both from God and from Mary Magdalene. You may recall that there are parts of the New Testament that try to erase this fact, but Magdalene and Magdalene alone never deserted Jesus: she stood by him when the disciples doubted, she was there through the Last Supper where she anointed Jesus Messiah before his death, and she continued to stand witness for him through his trial, crucifixion, and burial.

· I have been persuaded that Cynthia Bourgeault is right in insisting that we reclaim this truth and add it to our liturgies for it shows how Jesus gives to us what he first received from his beloved friend and then the Lord adding credence to what the old timers used to say: you can’t go where you don’t know and you can’t give what you ain’t got. What was true for Jesus – and Job and Magdalene and even St. Paul as well – is true for us, too.

The second text to consider comes from St. John’s gospel where Jesus tells his friends that in nature there is a cycle of dying into new life that we need to honor in our spiritual journey. I know I’m starting to sound like a broken record about this, but we in the industrialized West are SO out of touch with Mother Nature and her sacramental wisdom and healing that it can’t be restated enough. Not so with our first century itinerant rabbi who spoke the language of his family and friends. Bearing fruit: Is a clue to understanding the problem of pain – and what we can do with it. For fruitfulness in human beings resembles the pattern of fruitfulness of nature.” In the 12th chapter of St. John’s gospel Jesus tells his friends that there is a cruciform shape built into the ebb and flow of nature:

Very truly, I tell you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit. Fr. Rohr interprets this with stunning simplicity: To say that there is a cruciform shape to reality means that loss precedes all renewal, emptiness makes way for every new infilling, every transformation in the universe requires the surrendering of a previous “form.” And death is not the end, but part of the renewing gift of life.

In John 15 Jesus builds on this by referring to himself as the True Vine in whom we are to abide – which means to rest and trust that God will prune from us those parts that keep us from bearing good and healthy fruit. I am the true vine, and my Father is the vinegrower. He removes every branch in me that bears no fruit. Every branch that bears fruit he prunes to make it bear more fruit. You have already been cleansed by the word that I have spoken to you. Abide in me as I abide in you. Just as the branch cannot bear fruit by itself unless it abides in the vine, neither can you unless you abide in me.

· If part one of the school of suffering prayer teaches that descent can lead to a deeper intimacy with the holy where we are not ignored but embraced as the beloved; part two tells us that there are times when parts of us must die or be relinquished before we can become our best selves.

· And the truth is that most of us are not very good at letting go. Or accepting what cannot be changed as the Serenity Prayer puts it. So, we fight death in small and big ways even when Jesus asks us to rest into a death that must happen so that we can become fully alive.

So let me speak to you from my experience, not because I’ve mastered this spiritual dying or des-cent, but because I still fight such the counter-cultural wisdom that links death to renewal. I know all too intimately that we’ve been taught to avoid suffering at all costs: we have meds and physical diversions as well as entertainment and emotional manipulation.

We have whole industries built on distracting us from all that hurts. And while there’s a place for taking a break from our woes, there is also a time to pay attention to the pain like a rotten tooth must be extracted and give it up. In my mother’s last year of life I bumped up against the fact that I knew she was going to die soon and I still hated parts of who she had been for me. We had a tense and often abusive relationship where alcohol too often got the better part of her and led her into violence. As one of my sisters put it, “I’m having a hard time dealing with the fact that Mom loved Jim Beam more than me.” Me, too.

So, when she was drawing close to the end, knowing that I was expected to say something at her memorial service, I found myself outraged and terrified. I would never say anything cruel about her at such a time, but a dark and mean-spirited hatred was churning away inside me that I didn’t really know what to do with. I’m serious: it was ugly and vicious and deeply troubling. I thought I’d dealt with all that junk, but… apparently, I was wrong. My spiritual director and counselor at the time listened carefully to my lament and then asked me how I might deal with my mom if she were simply a member of my faith community. It did not take long to realize that I would be heart-broken for her: not only had she survived abuse herself, but she did the best she could with the resources available to her. Acknowledging her pain helped me take stock of the suffering we shared– and gave me a measure of relief. My own hurt and shame did not vanish, but now I could embrace her as one of Christ’s own beloved wounded ones.

Which empowered me to sing, rather than speak, at her memorial service using Mary Chapin Carpenter’s song, “Jubilee” to express my complicated but recovering love and forgiveness. The heart of this song still cuts close to my heart and goes like this:

I can tell by the way you're listening that you're still expecting to hear
Your name being called like a summons to all
Who have failed to account for their doubts and their fears
They can't add up too much without you so if it were just up to me
I'd take hold of your hand, saying come hear the band play your song at the jubilee

Yes, I can tell by the way you're searching for 

something you can't even name
That you haven't been able to come to the table: 

simply glad that you came
And when you feel like this try to imagine 

that we're all like frail boats on the sea
Just scanning the night for that great guiding light announcing the jubilee

My pain, her pain, our pain are a part of God’s pain – it’s all wrapped up together – and I stumbled and wept a sharing that song. But by facing the whole mess with wise counsel mixed with God’s grace and the courage to accept what I could not change: I tasted a bit of serenity in the suffering, and it keeps growing stronger. To bear fruit, the kernel of wheat must fall to the ground and die – this is the cruciform shape of God within all of life.

The third insight grows out of the first two wherein St. Paul suggests that letting suffering connect us with God’s spirit of holiness can lead us into the light of hope. Fr. Ed writes: “When we’re able to flow with suffering, we move with it and into it and then through it. When we fight or reject it, when we are at war with suffering, we end up a victim of anxiety and exhaustion. Suffering and pain are creative when they lead to the growth of the human spirit and the ability to live life fully.” So, he asks: is there any room in your prayer life for the Gethsemane Prayer? “We might find it valuable if we had a special feast day to celebrate the mystery of Gethsemane, a prayer of lone-liness and doubt, a prayer of preparation for facing and embracing the suffering that will certainly come our way, a prayer to help us make suffering creative, redemptive and productive.” For the past few years, I’ve been taking Richard Rohr’s wise interpretation of these words with a renewed seriousness. Religion in America has become a wreck, filled with hatred, violence, blame and shame. It’s nothing like the way of Jesus. Rohr writes:

All healthy religion shows you what to do with your pain, with the absurd, the tragic, the nonsensical, the unjust and the undeserved—all of which eventually come into every lifetime. If only we could see these “wounds” as the way through, as Jesus did, then they would become sacred wounds rather than scars to deny, disguise, or project onto others. I am sorry to admit that I first see my wounds as an obstacle more than a gift. Healing is a long journey. If we cannot find a way to make our wounds into sacred wounds, we invariably become cynical, negative, or bitter. This is the storyline of many of the greatest novels, myths, and stories of every culture. If we do not transform our pain, we will most assuredly transmit it—usually to those closest to us: our family, our neighbors, our co-workers, and, invariably, the most vulnerable, our children.

One of the ways we pass on our pain if we haven’t dealt with it is scapegoating: blaming and punishing others for our wounds. The Republican Party is doing this in spades right now with the Big Lie, but it’s written into the fabric of our American mythology where the winners are the only ones who count: they get to shape what the city on the hill looks like and everyone else is either en-slaved or enemies. Rohr reminds us that the Jesus Story “is about radically transforming history and individuals so that we don’t just keep handing on the pain to the next generation.”

The late Rene Girard, French anthropologist who studied the role of violence in fomenting social cohesion in cultures, put it best when he concluded that the gift Jesus on the Cross gives us is showing us what scapegoating looks like from the perspective of the vanquished. The sacrificial gift of the Cross gives is not some magical obliteration of sin through a blood offering to God. Rather, it is how Jesus inverts culture and documents what cruelty and scapegoating look like up close and personal from the perspective of the loser. The innocents made to suffer the violence of empire. Jesus offers us a non-violent alternative to scape-goating by practicing sacrificial love and sharing the burden of social suffering with us all.

“For unless we can find a meaning for human suffering and discover how God is somehow in it and can also use it for good,” Rohr concludes, “humanity is in major trouble – because we will suffer – and even the Buddha said that suffering is part of the deal!” Our challenge – and the charism of the school of suffering – is to learn how to carry this pain and hold it consciously without projecting it on to others. Trusting that God’s spirit and presence will lead us into a deeper love, the mystics ask us to “learn to carry the cross of our reality quietly until God transforms us through it.” This is how our suffering empowers us to become the wounded healers of the world. I think Fr. Henri Nouwen is right when he holds up Mary in Michelangelo’s Pietà as one such wounded healer:

(After the Cross) one would expect her to take the role of wailing or protesting, but she doesn’t! Mary is in complete solidarity with the mystery of life and death. “There’s something deeper happening here,” she prays; so how can I absorb it just as Jesus is absorbing it, instead of returning it in kind?” Jesus on the cross and Mary standing beneath the cross are classic images of transformative spirituality. (To which I would add Mary Magdalene.) They do not return the hostility, hatred, accusations, or malice directed at them. They hold the suffering until it becomes resurrection! That’s the core mystery of Christianity and it takes our whole life to begin to comprehend this.

It is my conviction that over the next five years many of our lives are going to challenged like nothing we’ve known on the continental USA since the Civil War: the white nationalists, the para-military fascists, their minions, and financial backers are planning for a time of violent chaos and the dismantling of elections. It is not inevitable, but should it come to pass, we will experience blood in our streets and threats to the well-being of all we hold dear. Our spiritual tradition at its best offers us a way into deeper intimacy as the Holy Spirit opens our hearts to trust.