To Bow Down and Scream

I recently sat with someone who was dying. Yes, I know we’re all dying, but in this particular person’s case, death had moved from the category of “abstraction” to “unavoidable reality.” Which is always a difficult movement, and one with no small amount of anguish attached to it. This suffering is not unto death. So said Jesus about Lazarus’s predicament to Mary and Martha, at least in his majesty King James’ version of the gospel of John. But so much suffering is. Unto death, that is. Or, at the very least, a reminder that it’s coming.

Can suffering be sacred? In his recent book Zero at the Bone, Christian Wiman reflects on the question:

For most people suffering is simply something avoid thinking about as long as possible, and then, because to avoid it forever is impossible, to expunge from one’s mind the minute one is beyond the scald. Think of our culture’s almost Talmudic attention to physical health or — adjusting the dial on Oblivion ever so slightly — our national addiction to opiates. Think of all the hours we feed our brains to screens, the numb way we move from one month’s mass shooting to the next. Think of the way we separate the very old from society as if they were being culled, the stifled, baffled air of the modern funeral. The proximate causes for these conditions are many, but ultimate one, I suspect, is the same: we would evade our pain.

We would evade our pain. Well, yes, of course we would. Who would seek it out? Even for the Christian who believes that suffering can be redemptive (we’re sort of obliged to, given, well, Jesus). Suffering may contain the possibility of redemption, but it also contains the certainty of pain. Which we do not like. And so, we evade, evade, evade. In the ways Wiman describes and many others besides.

Christian Wiman’s personal story contains its share of suffering. Probably more than its share. He’s had cancer for nearly two decades — a cancer which could have killed him multiple times already even though he’s not yet sixty. He knows pain, as well as what it can do to a person. As he notes in the introduction to this book, “To write a book against despair implies an intimate acquaintance with the condition. Otherwise, what would be the point?” At one point, in a chapter on the book of Job and a course he teaches at Yale on suffering, Wiman ponders whether or not suffering is just part of intertwined nature of reality that we have to learn how to accept or whether it represents a “crack that runs through creation” that must be repaired or resisted:

Predictably, I find myself in both camps. I think all creation is unified; the expression of this feeling is called faith. And I think a crack runs through all creation; that crack is called consciousness. So many ways to say this. I know in my bones there is no escape from necessity, and know in my bones that God’s love reaches into and redeems every atom that I am. I believe the right response to reality is to bow down, and I believe the right response to reality is to scream. Life is tragic and life is comic. Life is necessity and love is grace. (Reality’s conjunction is always and.) I have never felt quite at home in this world, and never wanted a home altogether beyond it.

Does that make sense? Of course it doesn’t.

Actually, it does. Especially that part about the right responses to reality being to bow down and — always and — to scream. Reverence and resistance. Faith and fury. Awe and anger. Worship and… well, I’m running out of alliterative options. How beautifully Wiman puts it. There is no escape from suffering. But I, too, know in my bones that God’s love reaches into and redeems every atom of this suffering world and its suffering souls.