A Suffering God

Another simplistic explanation for the baffling question of the seemingly random tragedies and accidents happening to children and innocent people, has been the notion that in this life we look at the tapestry of our lives from the back, full of incomprehensible criss-crosses of thread and fabric, but when we get to heaven all will be revealed when we see the brilliant front of it. While still small, I remember thinking, ‘Tell that to the mother of the baby who is dying of child-cancer.’ But we never said a word, did we? Already brainwashed and fearful, we just carried on trying to love this Creator who continually allows, and even plans, the terrible pains of the most innocent and purest of creatures. And these destructive teachings are still taught, and many still try to believe them. Most people now though, unable to believe these untruths and unafraid of ecclesiastical condemnation, simply walk away. And who can blame them?

There is a belief that God sends us the burden of pain because we are strong enough to handle it. But why? To prove what? How did we (and our parents) believe such empty and false explanations? Think again of a mother or father. This is never the loving way – the ‘tough love’ of God that many fathers offered as a pretext for the abuse of their families. But God never sends anything but love. It is life itself that brings us to the pain and the problems. It is fate, simply, that I am participating in the darkness of those of us diagnosed with cancer. God is as devastated as I am, weeps as some of my friends do, would die again to avoid the slightest cry of pain from any of us. We just happen to be living in an evolving world with its necessary breakdowns and breakthroughs. We may not want to believe it, but we are forever an indispensable dimension of all of nature. We have touched on this already. I know it’s a lot to reflect on, but once our Mother-God surrendered herself to Incarnation in Jesus, even she could not avoid being caught up in the time and space-bound, unfolding and developing of Creation, of life, of incarnate love.

Richard Rohr writes: ‘I believe – if I am to believe Jesus – that God is suffering love. If we are created in God’s image, and if there is so much suffering in the world, then God must also be suffering. How else can we understand the revelation of the cross? Why else would the central Christian logo be a naked, bleeding, suffering divine-human wretch?’ It took us priests long enough to realise one of the many forgotten central truths of Incarnation, and we still don’t – that Jesus is not merely observing the pain and wounds of human beings from a distance (heaven?); rather is he somehow at the centre of human suffering, with us, for us, through us and as us. Our own individual suffering is somehow at the heart of the co-redemption of the world as ‘all creation groans in one great act of giving birth’ (Rom 8: 22). My growing conviction these days is that my cancer plays a big part in ‘making up in my own body all that still has to be undergone for the sake of the Whole Body of God’ (Col 1: 24).

In my state of loss, this evening, before I go to bed early, I comfort myself with this prayer from God to me, ‘I know the pain you are going through, the knife of wounds that cut you open. Don’t run away. Learn from this experience, as I did. Hang there for a while as I did. It will be your teacher. Rather than long life now you will be gaining a larger life soon. It is not the end, it is the way through. For you, there is no choice because I’m holding you so closely. For you, it is the only way. Give it everything like I did.’ It helps so much to recognise our suffering is not our own, it is not only about me. It helps us realise that we are actually living inside a larger force-field of life and death: when I can see and accept my suffering as part of the wounds of my life, of humanity’s life, of the life of Jesus, of cosmic life, of the incarnate life of the living God. Only then, the wise ones say, can we begin to understand Incarnation and actually experience salvation. It is the power, the stubbornness, the intense vanity of the ego that forever constitutes the greatest blockage. It is so hard to learn that, according to Rohr, ‘suffering is the only thing strong enough to destabilise the imperial ego.’