Suffering Without Value

A couple of days ago on one of my favorite blogs, the discussion centered on the value of suffering: on how much of value we learn from it, on how it changes us for the better.  An excellent discussion, complete with the oft-quoted Leonard Cohen line about how it's the cracks through which the light breaks in.

I wanted to run screaming from the room.  

So, what I did instead was, I didn't enter.  

I didn't want to interrupt the glorious conversation about the gift of suffering.  There were people there whom I admire tremendously, with whom I am friends, and they said some true and eloquent things. I didn't want to interject my own story, from another little universe, and  I didn't want to feel that condescending glance, that raised eyebrow, that "Oh, she's just not there yet; someday she'll know."

When someone whom you love from the inside out dies of suicide, you learn that there is a degree of suffering that goes beyond value; that is pointless, useless, and evil in its depth and capacity for alienation and despair.

And when that someone is your child, whatever gifts of insight, wisdom, and availability to others that might be ascribed to your own suffering are but minute drops in the vast ocean of sadness to which you have been exiled.

And then this morning, going through past blog posts, I found one in which I had reflected upon words reportedly said by parents whose children had died to other parents who had already embarked upon that walk:

"I realize now that I had no idea what you were talking about."

The Love That is Gracious Gift and Solidarity

For awhile, there were few things that plunged me into the deepest darkness with more speed than the platitudes offered by people who . . . well, they offer platitudes.  That's what they do. The "God's will, better place, suffering over, God never gives you more than you can handle" folks.  Eventually, I learned not to hear.

My days now tend to be satisfying more often than not.  But sometimes I forget and take on too much, as I did this week-end.  A party Friday night.  An intense meeting Saturday morning.  And a baby shower Saturday afternoon.  The last one finally did me in, and I'm only just now getting up (mid-morning Sunday).

But as I was in and out over the course of yesterday, I read two posts that I urge you to absorb in their entirety.  The first is by Ryan Duns, S.J., a young Jesuit and aspiring theologian (and, these days, a high school religion teacher ~ in their 15 or so years of formation, Jesuits earn all kinds of degrees and engage in all kinds of occupations).  Ryan tackles one of those platitudes with depth and graciousness, urging us to recognize that "God gives us far, far more than we can handle."

He says that "when we face the Mystery of evil and suffering in our lives, the icy terror of loss and suffering, we must resist the temptation to think that this is something that God has done and commit ourselves to what God is doing. This latter insight isn’t meant to take away the pain stemming from fear or the sorrow from loss…but it is to say that we are always being offered more than we can imagine: a relationship with the God of the Resurrection, the God for whom life, and not death, is the meaning of human life."  You can read the entire post here. 

The other post was written by my dear friend Karen, whom I have come to know as we have both walked this terrible journey.  We don't write theological treatises about it; we live it.  Karen's daughter Katie died from cancer three and one-half years ago, and so in some ways the terrain we've covered has been quite different, one from the other.    Karen's daughter died quietly, surrounded by her loving family; my son died violently, and alone.  Karen's travels have taken her out the door of the institutional church; mine took me back to seminary.  Karen is a woman filled with grace and generosity; I am . . . not so much!  But we have both, as she says, "entered the story of Mary and Jesus."

I particularly admire her final paragraph, in which she says, "It's not what I thought Love looked like. It's not what I wanted Love to look like - I wanted Love to look like rescue. But it is Love, when you look at it from a certain angle - the love that is solidarity, understanding and union. And for that, I am grateful."  The entire piece is here.

If you are in this place where we live, or you accompany someone who is,  both of these posts are well worth your time.

In which I attempt to explain myself . . .

There's a great little story up here, on People for Others, a blog which I enjoy very much.

Today, though, I find that I don't agree with the story.  Because:

There are people look to God for help all the time and pain and suffering still abound.

There are people who do not evince the slightest awareness of God and goodness and grace still abound.

I don't pretend to know what the connection is between the grace of God and the human glance toward God.  

There are people drenched in, saturated with, the grace of God, whose lives are filled with suffering.  People who extend themselves to the furthest inch to contribute to the repair of our world and are rewarded with . . .  more repair work to do.

It seems, in fact, that to know suffering, whether in one's own life or in the lives toward which we offer care,  is one of the surest means for coming to know God.

It also seems that to know or to observe suffering is one of the surest means by which we can drift far from God.

I do not pretend to understand the causal connection, if there is one.

I only wish that the answer were as simple as human effort, or lack thereof.

All At Once

Within about the same half hour tonight, moving back and forth from one thing to another:

Final preparation for Sunday morning preaching: one last read-through of sermon and a new layer of sparkly nail polish (because that's what the old layer is);

Reading through the humorous comments on RevGals as other preachers pull things together for tomorrow;

Reading through comments in a place where four of us are discussing the last moments of our children's lives;

Wondering: This is it, really?  This is my life?  This is the frontier ? This blend of "Come and see" and those excruciating images? (It seems that it is.)

And pondering this, from Joe:

"How, finally, does our own experience of loss and separation prepare us to meet the Risen Lord?"

AMDG, indeed. 

Sigh

I ran into a former teaching colleague at Target tonight.  I hadn't seen her in several years. She's in her 30s, I suppose, and expecting identical twin boys any second.

I was hoping to escape before she asked about my family, but no such luck.

Imagine explaining, in the middle of a Christmas-decorated Target, to a mother of twin boys just about to make their appearance, that one of your own twin boys died of suicide at the age of 24.

I suppose it's progress that my concern was entirely for her and her well-being when she goes home to her new husband tonight with this story.

I had just picked up some new outdoor lights, in which I have completely lost interest.

Such a hard season.

Friendship with God

Sixty! ~ that was the birthday celebrated several days ago by a blogger whom I read regularly. Her birthday celebration was quite simply wonderful ~ she was surrounded by all of her children, including a couple of them who had traveled quite a distance to surprise her.  She remarked upon how her life has gotten better with each decade and how she anticipates the same continuing.  A wonderfully generous and expectant attitude in our youth-driven culture, a culture in which people bemoan turning thirty as if that's one of life's worst curses.

Her experience will not be mine.  I was startled to realize that for me the thirties, two decades past, will always be my best one.  My late forties brought some sad and difficult challenges and my fifties, begun in such joy and anticipation, have brought with them one of life's greatest sorrows.  I can, and do, look forward to many things in work and in love, including most especially the possibility of my surviving children's marriages and their own children, all of which, should any of it occur, will bring me tremendous joy.  But there will always, always be the reality that Josh is not here to share it, or to add his own wife and children to the mix.  The girl he was hoping to marry is beautiful and brilliant and gifted and sensitive, and the loss of her as the daughter-in-law of whom I had dreamed is another facet of this endlessly turning prism of sadness.

And so I was greatly pained, in an envious and angry kind of way, to read of my friend's happiness on her birthday.  (Charming, yes?  Envy is such an attractive personality trait.) And then I thought, as I have begun to on occasion (RARE occasion), that perhaps my experience harbors another kind of blessing.  The invitation to accompany Jesus into this kind of wilderness is an offer of tremendous friendship, in the sense that we long for our friends to share and understand our experiences.  And when I think about it ~ with whom do we share our most searing pain and our longing for wholeness?  Very few people.  I know that as a spiritual director I am often awed by what people entrust to me, knowing that it is a great privilege to receive some of their hardest and saddest experiences ~ because I myself offer mine to only a very few and deeply trusted individuals. 

Flannery O'Connor says that the Christian life involves taking up one's cross everyday.  Well.  Here we are.  I cannot think of a single more unlikely or ambivalent candidate than myself. The idea of embracing suffering has no appeal for me, none whatever.  I have no interest in being brave or strong or an inspiration to anyone.  I am pretty sure that most anyone who reads this will be fairly convinced that I have lost my mind or gone over to the far side of religious extremism, but let me assure you:  I would be quite willing to embrace a perfectly ordinary suburban life, all sparkly with grandchildren and puppies.  I have never, thanks to my childhood, taken for granted the grace of ordinary hopes and expectations fulfilled in ordinary ways. 

But ~ it's gone, that ordinary life ~ at least the wholeness of it is. And with it, any chance of my engaging in a relationship with God without being profoundly drawn into the matter of human suffering and ultimate hope for release and healing.  No ~ I go there and I want to know what that cross is about and what that bread and cup are about.  I want to know what is shared with us and what is healed, restored, recreated.  I want to know what God's friendship really means, what it means on God's side and what it means on ours.

And so I wonder these days about another of Mary Oliver's poems, the one ~ I think it's called "The Uses of Sorrow"  ~  in which she says,

"Someone I loved once gave me a box of darkness.

It took me years to understand that this, too, was a gift."

Perhaps someday I can report back on what the exact number of those years is.

Does God Suffer?

One of my great privileges over the past year has been to study with a brilliant new member of the seminary faculty. He appeared for the last quarter of my second year to teach a class on Christology. I'd already taken the course, but a friend mentioned one night that I might want to visit the new guy's class which I ended up doing almost every week following. He was teaching not only the subject at hand, but also how to evaluate various theological approaches. Finally! ~ I felt that I was getting that for which I had gone to seminary: the opportunity to begin to learn to think like a theologian.

I did an independent study with this professor the next (this past winter) quarter on the subjects of sin, grace, and freedom. I'm sure that I was a consistent disappointment to him, in that my complete lack of background in philosophy meant that the readings were virtually incomprehensible to me, but I did struggle through them. And then I audited his course on Stanley Hauerwas and took his course on Miroslav Volf. In the end, I was able to graduate with the sense that I had learned a tiny bit about Reformation and contemporary theology and a tiny bit about how to approach my own future study, and had found a friend with whom I could continue the conversation.

I had a question for him last week, and in response he sent me a paper he'd written in grad school. The overall question has to do with God's emotional life, but I thought we'd start with the question within the question: Does God suffer? It's been a topic of significant debate during the past century, and is for obvious reasons of great interest to me.

What do you think? Does God suffer? Does it matter to you whether or not God does? Are you comforted or reassured one way or the other? Does the question bother you? Go for it ~

(Cross-posted from my other place.)