The God of Suffering: God with Us
One of the most difficult and mysterious aspects of faith is our understanding, or lack of understanding, of the reality of suffering. Why does God allow us to suffer? How does faith change how we experience suffering? Is there meaning in our suffering? Not easy questions. This article will attempt to touch on three aspects of this great mystery: how our image of God changes when we experience suffering, how suffering connects to our understanding of the Pascal Mystery and how community affects suffering.
Suffering and Our Image of God
Suffering gets our attention. It calls us out of the routine of our daily experience and makes our eyes focus on a deeper reality. In the words of CS Lewis, “pain is God’s megaphone to rouse a deaf world.” Not surprisingly, suffering will often cause us to look at and rethink our relationships, not the least of which is…. who God is for us? Our image of God may be called into question. Is who I believe God to be consistent with this God who has allowed me to endure this suffering? Sometimes the answer is “yes” and sometimes it is “no”. One response to suffering is to say “God is not who I thought God was, so I do not think God exists.” Another response is to say, “God is not who I thought God was, so I do not want to be in relationship anymore.” Yet another response is to say, “If my experience is not consistent with whom I thought God to be, maybe I need to look more deeply at who God is.” Perhaps, again, the response to suffering is to see within that experience of suffering the footprints of a God whom one has known all along.
Richard Rohr states that “adult Christianity knows that suffering can’t be dealt with intellectually or rationally. Dealing with suffering has something to do with one’s capacity for presence- to oneself and to God.”[1] Are we able to stand with our selves and with God in the midst of our suffering, in the messy reality of pain? As much as that might be a challenging question for each of us, the Christian faith teaches us that God, through the Incarnation, chose exactly that: to stand with us, naked and vulnerable in our humanity. Emmanuel, “God with us.” (Matt 1:23, Is 7:14).
My own awareness of this is rooted in an experience I had as a nineteen year old when my older brother was seriously injured in a car accident. My god, at the time, was a god who blessed and protected if you did good things. All of a sudden, God, who I so desperately wanted to cling to in my suffering, was a stranger. For many months, prayer of any kind seemed disoriented, surreal. Who was God? Where was God? One day in prayer an image came to me of the site of the accident. As I stayed with that image, another image slowly emerged: God hovering over the mangled car, weeping deeply. Interiorly, I was filled with the truth of who God was. God is a God who weeps with me. God is with me in the midst of the suffering.
Suffering and the Pascal Mystery
It has been said that our tragedy is not that we suffer but that we waste suffering.[2] The fact that we will all face circumstances in our life that are painful, tragic, uncomfortable, can open up for us possibilities for human growth. We can choose to withdraw and become embittered by our suffering or we can accept the invitation it offers to stand in the midst of difficulty and allow ourselves to be opened up and changed by the experience. It can be holy ground. We can emerge, walking one step at a time, with a
beauty of spirit, hard won knowledge and a deeper sense of the mystery of life and faith.
Jesus’ own suffering provides us with a template of sorts for understanding our experiences of suffering. Suffering, death and transformation (resurrection) is a pattern we are invited to live again and again. Job loss, the end of a significant relationship, the news of a devastating diagnosis, these can all invite us, in a personal way, into the paschal mystery. We experience the pain and suffering of coming to the end of something important. The paschal mystery is the mystery of how we, after living some sort of “death”, receive a new life and a new spirit.[3] We have the possibility of walking through the pain and sadness and emerging transformed. We are not the same again.
This spirit of transformation relies on our openness and trust in God. To trust the path ahead that we cannot see and sometimes, that we cannot even imagine. In faith, we live an experience of suffering knowing that our God came to earth to walk the path of suffering ahead of us, but in this mystery, is also, here and now, right beside us.
Suffering and Community
One of the most difficult aspects of any type of suffering can be the reality of being alone with our suffering. This reality can take on many forms. A person may be alone without the support of friends or family. A person may be surrounded by friends and family, but there is no one person who is able to really be attentive to the reality of suffering that they are living. The person may consequently feel alone to deal with emotional turmoil of their situation.
Leo Tolstoy’s great novella, The Death of Ivan Ilych[4], brings us intimately into the experience of the title character as he grapples with the reality of his own demise. Written after Tolstoy’s personal faith conversion in the late 1870’s, it tells the story of Ivan’s physical and emotional suffering as a random injury escalates into a terminal illness forcing him to confront the reality of his life as well as the reality of his imminent death. Gerasim, Ivan Ilych’s poor servant, is the character in the story whom is most able to be present to Ivan’s reality. He does not recoil from the physical and emotional realities of Ivan’s illness and impending death as Ivan’s wife and daughter do. Gerasim is the one who is able to give Ivan comfort through his authentic attitude, his attentive presence and his desire to alleviate his physical pain by allowing Ivan to rest his legs on his shoulders. Only Gerasim understands that this experience of dying for Ivan is a “great” moment, a moment that he will only live once, a moment he would like to live in its fullness.
This relationship draws out a very important reality of suffering. Sharing our experience of suffering with an authentic and compassionate listener can, in some small way, ease the burden of it. When we suffer, relationship can make all the difference. The care may come via friends and family, but sometimes, as for Ivan, it comes through an unexpected person. Gerasim’s lack of pretence or selfishness, rooted in a life well lived, provides for Ivan an anchor as he wrestles with his mortality and the realization that his life was not what it should have been. An open heart, unobstructed by a personal agenda or selfish motive, can be an enormous gift of love to another person. Given as gift at a time of suffering, a listening heart can be the place where the chaos and pain of suffering has a soft place to rest, at least for a time.
The mystery of suffering has much to teach us. It can bring our image of God into sharper focus, helping us to see what is authentic and what is not. While it is a path that we never want to seek out, if it comes, which it inevitably does, the way of suffering offers us hope in the person of Jesus who walked through suffering and death and transformed death into life again. This new life, scary and uncharted, can be glimpsed if we have the courage to be present to the God that goes before us, keeping our eyes on the light, even in the midst of darkness.
By Cathie Macaulay
Published in Ecumenism , Spring 2011, Issue No. 181
[1] Richard Rohr, Adult Christianity and How to Get There (CD MP3)
[2]Mary Craig, Suffering- Our Human Situation. Originally published in The Way, January 1973. Adapted by John Veltri, S.J. www. jesuits.ca/orientations.
[3] Ronald Rolheiser, The Holy Longing, (New York: Doulbleday,1999),p.145
[4] Leo Tolstoy, The Death of Ivan Ilych and Other Stories (New York: The New American Library, 1960)