Suffering

To every thing there is a season, ...A time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance; Ecc. 3:1-4

It is part of my job to keep in touch with the families in our Co-op. As such, I partake in your joys and sorrows. Right now, the tide is washing up a good deal of sorrow on our shores. Though it would be folly to hope to treat the subject of suffering fully in one page or less, nevertheless, your experiences of the present and past month have occasioned more than a little reflection on the issue on my part. That, coupled with a reading of some of the work of Mother Theresa among the miserable warrens of Calcutta, makes me ponder the whole problem of pain and suffering in God’s creation.

Ultimately, suffering is the price we pay for dwelling outside the Garden where we must live by our wits and the sweat of our brow, all at the mercy of the elements. It was a choice we made, and in so doing, we took all creation with us. The dark of the night brings with it a thousand fears of what can happen, a place where beast devours beast and man does his worst. But suffering is endemic to all creation even apart from the evil deeds of men. Cancers devour, defects cripple, and accidents maim the innocent and guilty alike. Rational creatures that we are, we would love to see some rhyme or reason to it all. C.S. Lewis wrote that pain was “God’s megaphone.” Yet, this seems heartless in watching the young and the innocent die who don’t even have language of the heart to hear or understand. The poet William Blake offers another view:

Joy and woe are woven fine,

A clothing for the soul divine;

Under every grief and pine

Runs a joy with silken twine.

It is right it should be so;

Man was made for joy and woe;

And when this we rightly know,

Through the world we safely go.

Is it true that man was made for sorrow and woe, mixed also with joy? It seems so when we consider that we are able to experience joy because of being made in the very image of God, and equally so with sorrow when we consider the far reaching effects of the fall upon man and all creation. Fallen-ness and the image of God, all wrapped up in one frail creature. What a recipe for ‘angst’, that dark turmoil of the soul.

Many demand that suffering just should not be so and spend much of their lives trying to insulate themselves against it in any form; some with money and others with distance. Others blame and rail against God, turning their hearts to stone. Or there is always the ploy of flight, to run from it whenever it appears. But in fleeing from the pain, we invariably multiply the damage like some wounded bull run amok. Marriages are shattered, children discarded, and promises broken all to renounce the reality of the pain. I rather like what Malcom Muggeridge has said and must quote directly: “One can dimly see and humbly say that suffering is an integral and essential part of our human drama. That it falls upon one and all in differing degrees and forms whose comparison lies beyond our competence. That it belongs to God’s purpose for us here on earth, so that, in the end, all the experience of living has to teach us is to say: Thy will be done.” That is a tall order for any of us. Yet God himself identifies with our suffering through His own Son. At the cross, “God suffered in the person of a man but brought redemption for man in the person of God.” In this, we see “the greatest sorrow and the greatest joy co-existing on Golgotha.”*

I take great comfort knowing that God knows our frame, that we are but dust, and that Jesus was a man of sorrows, well acquainted with grief. I also take comfort in knowing that when one of us suffers, it brings out the best in those who are willing to share in that pain and help bear the burden. This dance of suffering and joy literally defines what it is to be human. May we embrace our humanity with courage and resolve.

*Something Beautiful for God, Malcom Muggeridge, p. 106