Category Archives: Love and Suffering
Good Reminder for our Present Times
Two Sides of Darkness
It is very important, friends, not to think of the soul as dark. We are conditioned to perceive only external light. We forget that there is such a thing as inner light, illuminating our soul.
—Teresa of Ávila, The Interior Castle
Richard Rohr describes periods of darkness, confusion, and struggle as necessary for our transformation and growth:
Experiences of darkness are good and necessary teachers. They are not to be avoided, denied, run from, or explained away. Even if we don’t experience clinical or diagnosed depression, most of us will go through at least one period of darkness, doubt, and malaise in our lives. I hope during these times we can reach out to someone—a therapist, spiritual director, friend—to support us. And when we feel strong, may we be the shoulder someone else can lean on.
There’s a darkness where we are led by our own stupidity, our own sin (the illusion of separation), our own selfishness, by living out of the false or separate self. We have to work our way back out of this kind of darkness with brutal honesty, confession, surrender, forgiveness, apology, and restitution. It may feel simultaneously like dying and being liberated.
But there’s another darkness that we’re led into by God, grace, and the nature of life itself. In many ways, the loss of meaning here is even greater, and sometimes the loss of motivation, purpose, and direction might be even greater too. It really feels like the total absence of light, and thus the saints and mystics called it “the dark night.” Yet even while we may feel alone and abandoned by God, we can also sense that we have been led here intentionally. We know we’re in liminal space, betwixt and between, on the threshold—and we have to stay here until we have learned something essential. It is still no fun—filled with doubt and “demons” of every sort—but it is the darkness of being held closely by God without our awareness. This is where transformation happens.
Of course, the dark night we get ourselves into by our own “sinful” choices can also become the darkness of God. Regardless of the cause, the dark night is an opportunity to look for and find God—in new forms and ways. Neither God nor goodness exist only in the light but permeate all places, seen and unseen. It seems we have to “unknow” a bit every time we want to know in a new way. It’s like putting your car in reverse in the mud and snow so that you can gain a new track and better traction.
Periods of seemingly fruitless darkness may in fact highlight all the ways we rob ourselves of wisdom by clinging to the light. Who grows by only looking on the bright side of things? It is only when we lose our certainties that will we be able to deconstruct our false images of God to discover the Absolute Reality beneath all our egoic fantasies and fears.
Is Our Suffering Redemptive for Others?
To me the root of sin is fear. We dull fear with pleasure and we try to fight it with power. And human power is an illusion…..as Adam and Eve found out. A tiny, microscopic germ can wipe us out. The question of why the good suffer is confusing. Perhaps accepting suffering and trusting the grace of God to get us through it is somehow redemptive not just for us, but possibly for those that don’t get it together with God until the last minute or even until they see God. This may be wishful thinking on my part because of being the matriarch of five generations, some of whom don’t seem to be getting it together with or without God in a world that is increasingly scary. Perhaps our suffering somehow helps those we love unconditionally. Perhaps like Jesus, we can say, “Father, forgive them. They know not what they do.” If we who are imperfect can hurt for them and forgive, surely a God who is Love does.
The Mystery of Prayer
Sunday’s sermon was on prayer and I find that my experiences bring me to a slightly different, but possibly important slant on it. My friend, Montez, pointed out that we have a two way relationship with God that is the basis of everything else. A relationship with God is the heart of the matter. And that relationship is expressed, fleshed out in our relationships with others. Prayer is an important aspect of caring about others.
We can’t really understand God, so our relationship with God is always going to be something of a puzzle. (If we understood God, we would be equal to God and the story of Adam and Eve points out the very human, but treacherous path that takes us on. ) Let’s face it, whether we live in a small cave in a world hard to explore on foot or in a world of trips to the moon and other planets, we are still teeny tiny vulnerable limited beings in a immense and scary universe. Our very understandable human desire for power, whether it comes from the illusion of power through knowledge, riches, weapons of destruction, or even our sense of a relationship with the creator of it all, it is to some extent an illusion. Our relationship with God is a dialogue that’s about growing in our ability to love unconditionally. It’s NOT about power.
My experience has been that a simple openness to something far greater than anything we are or know can be life changing. Unfortunately we are naturally limited in our understanding, so once we become aware of the size and power of whatever it is, the temptation is to use it for our own agendas. So it can be a temptation to turn prayer into an illusion of power.
Over and over Jesus turned to prayer for refueling, for understanding, for empowerment to both teach and heal and feed others. Prayer was his WAY of keeping his relationship with God open for understanding, strength, and the gifts of the Spirit, but MOSTLY it kept him aware of his dependence on God. In the end, he was powerless, totally dependent on his faith in the Love of God.
My experiences of both the power and the lessons of prayer have varied in extremes.
Once at a Catholic Charismatic Conference I witnessed the shorter leg of a young woman friend respond immediately to prayer with instant growth. She had to take her built up shoe off and go barefoot that weekend! Ten years later she was still able to wear flip flops and tennis shoes.
Yet, I watched my mother die by inches with Alzheimer’s for fourteen years.
A forty-year-old woman friend, who had not been raised in any religion, was in intensive care on a respirator in the hospital. She had a diagnosis of incurable idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis and was told she would never again be able to breathe off a respirator. She wanted to be unplugged, but a woman stopped to talk to her in the ICU one night and told her to simply give herself to the God of Jesus and trust his Love.. She did this. Three days later she was permanently off the respirator. She became a beautiful witness to the Love of God that was fleshed out in Jesus for all. But she continued to have all sorts of other health crises, even losing a leg. After about ten years she was polishing the candle holders and praying in her Episcopal church and was finally freed to forgive her father, who had been so awful that she had actually been happy that he died in a fire. Shortly after this she had a heart attack and was freed from her earthly struggles.
God is simply beyond anyone’s understanding. So, prayer is also.
I have had many prayers answered so quickly that it was beyond doubting a connection. But also, plenty that seem to fall on deaf ears. This isn’t heaven. And though when we are suffering it seems like eternity, it isn’t even a blip in eternity. My youngest son was seriously ill from a heart defect his first four years, running temperatures that were beyond the thermometer. Every time he had to have a shot; it took three adults to hold him down. I’m sure that few minutes seemed like an eternity to him, because it did to me. At four years of age, he finally was healed without any medical repair. Through the whole four years I had many Christians of many denominations praying with me for him. (Note: Obviously as a child he was not being punished for anything).
My guess is that healings are so we will know that when God or medicine does NOT heal us, that it’s a part of our journey to a new level of faith and capacity for loving God and all others unconditionally.
Many Europeans seem to have given up on God. Most of the small churches have been turned into cafes or theaters. The crowds in Cathedrals are tourists. We in America have not had widespread bombing blitzes, fire-bombs, or nuclear destruction of our homes and cities. When in Holland my brother asked the tour leader if people in Holland thought we were now facing the end times. She said, “We thought it was the end times when we were eating our tulip bulbs to survive.”
Here in the USA, we don’t really realize how spoiled we are. We think it’s the end of the world when groceries cost too much, Hurricanes increase, and Covid makes us reclusive.
If it’s the end of our world, it’s because we killed it, not because Jesus is coming. Though I am seeing what seems to be some seeds of a renewal of faith in our country, as a History major, I’m pretty sure this isn’t the rapture.
Contrary to what Americans still seem to expect, this life is not heaven. As I’ve said before it seems to me to be a school for growing from need to the capacity for unconditional love……like the life journey of Jesus. And obviously we haven’t gotten there yet.
But I could be wrong, since I’m only 87 and God isn’t finished with me yet.
Solidarity in Suffering
Richard Rohr believes that Jesus’ cross reveals God’s solidarity with suffering:
When we try to live in solidarity with the pain of the world—and don’t spend our lives running from necessary suffering—we will encounter various “crucifixions.” Many say pain is physical discomfort, but suffering comes from our resistance, denial, and sense of injustice or wrongness about that pain. I know that is very true for me. This is the core meaning of suffering on one level or another, and we all learn it the hard way. Pain is the rent we pay for being human, it seems, but suffering is usually optional. The cross was Jesus’ voluntary acceptance of undeserved suffering as an act of total solidarity with the pain of the world. Reflecting on this mystery of love can change our lives.
I think the acceptance of that invitation to solidarity with the larger pain of the world is what it means to be “a Christian.” It takes great inner freedom to be a follower of Jesus. His life is an option, a choice, a call, a vocation for us, and we are totally free to say yes or no or maybe. We do not have to do this to make God love us. That is already taken care of. We do it to love God back and to love what God loves and how God loves! We either are baptized “into his death” and “resurrection” (Romans 6:3; Philippians 3:10–12), or Christianity is largely a mere belonging system, not a transformational system that will change the world.
The “crucified God” as personified in Jesus revealed that God is always on the side of suffering wherever it is found, including the wounded and dying troops on both sides in every kind of war, and both the victims and the predators of this world; frankly, this pleases very few people. Our resistance to suffering is an entire industry now, perhaps symbolized by the total power of the gun lobby and the permanent war economy in America, the fear of any profit sharing with the poor, or the need to be constantly entertained. Maybe that is why some have said that the foundational virtue underlying all others is courage (cor-agere, an action of the heart). It takes immense courage to walk in solidarity with the suffering of others, and even our own. [1]
If God is somehow participating in human suffering, instead of just passively tolerating it and observing it, that changes everything—at least for those who are willing to “gaze” contemplatively. All humble, suffering souls learn this from God, but the Christian Scriptures named it and revealed it publicly and dramatically in Jesus.
We can’t do it alone at all, but only by a deep identification with the Crucified One and crucified humanity. Jesus then does it in us, through us, with us, and for us. Then we have become a “new creation” (Galatians 6:15) and a very different kind of human being. [2]
More About Ripening as We Age
James Finley shares his thoughts on spiritual maturity as a form of ripening:
We ripen in holiness and spiritual fulfillment as we learn to sit in the sun of God’s mysterious, sustaining presence that energizes and guides our efforts, bringing us to realms of grace that are beyond, way beyond, anything we can achieve by our own efforts alone. . . .
The lifelong process of ripening brings about a corresponding ripening of our ability to understand the fundamentals in a wiser, peace-giving manner. . . . As a person ripens in unsayable intimacies in God, they ripen in a paradoxical wisdom. They come to understand God as a presence that protects us from nothing, even as God unexplainably sustains us in all things. This is the Mystery of the Cross that reveals whatever it means that God watches over us; it does not mean that God prevents the tragic thing, the cruel thing, the unfair thing, from happening. Rather, it means that God is intimately hidden as a kind of profound, tender sweetness that flows and carries us along in the intimate depths of the tragic thing itself—and will continue to do so in every moment of our lives up to and through death, and beyond.
As fruit ripens, it fulfills itself in reaching its full potential to nurture us and give us pleasure. We might say that, as fruit ripens, it fulfills itself in giving itself to us. In a similar way, we do not undergo the transformative process of ripening for ourselves alone, but rather that our transformed presence might be a source of nurture to others.
Then too, there is the fruit that, in remaining unharvested, falls onto the ground and dies. The lesson here is in Jesus’ words, “Unless a grain of wheat falls into the ground and dies, it remains alone, but if it dies, it brings forth fruit a hundred fold, a thousand fold” (John 12:24).
And so it is with us. As we grow old we realize that, in all we have been through, Love has been using us for its own purposes. And for this we feel immensely grateful. We know, too, that our inevitable passing away, in which we fall into the ground and die, is not the end of our ripened and transformed life. It is rather our passage into an infinite and deathless fulfillment. Saint John of the Cross [1542–1591] talks about a windfall of delight. [1] When fruit becomes very ripe, the slightest wind can cause it to fall to the ground. This is also true of us, and not just in the sense in which we learn to be undone and fulfilled in all the unexpected little blessings that come to us throughout the day. The windfall of delight pertains as well to our last breath, which we know and trust will send us falling forever into the deathless depths of God.
Eileen: I have shared this story before, but I think it can help when we are suffering and old age often has lots of that. When traveling in several countries in Europe in a wheelchair, I experienced purposefully cruel prejudice not just from skin heads, but from even obviously middle-class, middle-aged women. There were no handicapped bathrooms in those countries except the airports and McDonalds. This was thirty years ago, so hopefully this has changed. But back then handicapped people were kept inside away from public view. At one point I was feeling extremely sad and hurt when in a crowded Cathedral filled with silver and gold. My husband wanted to take photos and my son wanted to climb to the top of the dome, so they looked for a place to park me out of the crowds. We found a dark empty corner and I stayed there out of the way. They were gone a long time and I began to feel even sadder there alone. I looked around over the crowd for Jesus on the Cross, but only saw the gold tabernacle and statues and lavish decorations. Finally, I looked up behind me in the dark corner and there was a life-sized Jesus on the cross. I experienced an incredible sense of his presence and love and realized that he is with us in all our suffering and times of despair. We are never alone. And whatever anyone does to others, they do to Jesus also. Suffering is a difficult mystery of life, but there is grace for the journey, when we realize we are never alone in it. The Love of God, Jesus, is in it with us.
Love and Suffering
Richard Rohr teaches that God uses love and suffering, and especially suffering, as universal paths to reach and change us.
Two universal paths of transformation have been available to every human being God has created: great love and great suffering. These are offered to all; they level the playing fields of all the world religions. Only love and suffering are strong enough to break down our usual ego defenses, crush our dualistic thinking, and open us to Mystery. In my experience, they like nothing else exert the mysterious chemistry that can transmute us from a fear-based life into a love-based life. None of us are exactly sure why. We do know that words, even good words or fine theology, cannot achieve that on their own. No surprise that the Christian icon of redemption is a man offering love from a crucified position!
Love and suffering are part of most human lives. Without any doubt, they are the primary spiritual teachers more than any Bible, church, minister, sacrament, or theologian. Wouldn’t it make sense for God to make divine truth so readily available? If the love of God is perfect and victorious, wouldn’t God offer every human being equal and universal access to the Divine as love and suffering do? This is what Paul seems to be saying to the Athenians in his brilliant sermon at the Areopagus: “All can seek the Deity, feeling their way toward God and succeeding in finding God. For God is not far from any of us, since it is in God that we live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:27–28). What a brilliant and needed piece of theology to this day!
Love is what we long for and were created for—in fact, love is what we are as an outpouring from God—but suffering often seems to be our opening to that need, that desire, and that identity. Love and suffering are the main portals that open the mind space and the heart space (either can come first), breaking us into breadth and depth and communion. Almost without exception, great spiritual teachers will have strong and direct guidance about love and suffering. If we never go there, we will not know these essentials. We’ll try to work it all out in our heads, but our minds alone can’t get us there. We must love “with our whole heart, our whole soul, our whole mind, and our whole strength” (Mark 12:30).
Finally, there is a straight line between love and suffering. If we love greatly, it is fairly certain we will soon suffer, because we have somehow given up control to another. That is my simple definition of suffering: whenever we are not in control.
Adapted from Richard Rohr, The Naked Now: Learning to See as the Mystics See
Laughter: Carbonated Grace 