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Posts from the ‘Suffering’ Category

Mar 19

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Two Hands

I notice her standing in line at the café. She’s young, attractive, and has an easy smile. Everything about her appearance screams confidence and self-assurance. She’s dressed stylishly, I suppose, a little bit provocative or edgy or something (as if I knew a thing about style). She turns toward me and I notice her shirt. It’s tight and black and it has what looks like a Jack Daniels logo on the front. But it doesn’t say “Jack Daniels.” It says, rather, in bold, bracing white letters, “100% PURE ATHEIST.” Underneath, in smaller letters, “Two hands at work for good in the world are more useful than a thousand folded in prayer.” I sigh, almost audibly. I would have preferred Jack Daniels. Read more

Mar 4

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Hope is a Condition of Your Soul

Fear. Of nothingness. Of dying. Of failure. Of change. It is of different degrees, but it all comes from one source, which is the isolated self, the self willfully held apart from God. There are three ways you can deal with this fear. You can simply refuse to acknowledge it, dulling your concerns with alcohol or entertainment or exercise or even a sort of virtuous busyness, adding your own energies to the white noise of anxiety that this culture we have created seems to use as fuel. This is despair, but it is a quiet despair, and bearable for many years. By the time that great grinding wheel of the world rolls over you for good, you will be too eroded to notice. 

Or, if you are strong in the way that the world is strong, you can strap yourself into life and give yourself over to a kind of furious resistance that may very well carry you through your travails, may bring you great success and seem to the world triumphant, perhaps even heroic. But if it is merely your will that you are asserting, then you will develop a carapace around your soul, the soul that God is trying to refine, and one day you will return to dust inside that shell that you have made.

There is another way. It is the way of Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane, pleading for release from his fate, abandoned by God. It is something you cannot learn as a kind of lesson simply from reading the text. Christ teaches by example, true, but he lives with us, lives in us, through imagination and experience. It is through all these trials in our own lives, these fears however small, that we come close to Christ, if we can learn to say, with him, “not my will, Lord, but yours.” This is in no way resignation, for Christ still had to act. We all have to act, whether it’s against the fears of our daily life or against the fear that life itself is in danger of being destroyed. And when we act in the will of God, we express hope in its purest and most powerful form, for hope, as Václav Havel has said, is a condition of your soul, not a response to the circumstances in which you find yourself. Hope is what Christ had in the garden, though he had no reason for it in terms of events, and hope is what he has right now, in the garden of our own griefs.

— Christian Wiman, My Bright Abyss

Feb 28

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Safe at the Foot of the Fuzzy Cross

Lord teach us to pray (Luke 11:1).

Like the disciples, I often have no idea how to pray. I don’t know what to ask for, I don’t know how long to keep asking, I don’t know if I am doing it right, I don’t know how it all really works. That doesn’t sound very pastoral, I know. What can I say? I suppose I am, at least, in decent (or at least populous) company when I say that prayer is often very hard for me. Read more

Feb 25

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The Receptionist and the Messenger

There are times when it feels like to be a pastor is to be the receptionist at a walk-in clinic where the doctor is never in. The sick and the wounded, the weary and confused, the angry and exhausted—in they stumble, speaking of bodies that are breaking down, of loved ones who are dying, of relationships that stagger under the weight of too many cumulative breaks and fissures to possibly think of mending, of doubts born of too much suffering and silence. In they come, assuming that the receptionist has some kind of special access to the doctor, to the healing they want and need. Read more

Feb 18

“I Am What Comes After Deserving”

 The news is bad today. But then the news is so very often bad.

Where to begin? Violent conflicts in the Ukraine, Syria, the Central African Republic, and so many others grind wearily on, with all the predictable innocent pain and suffering that drags along in the wake of tired, old, struggles for power. A volcanic eruption in Indonesia displaces more than 100 000 people. There is political unrest in Egypt and Venezuela. There are the places that we need only name to know that there is bad news: Afghanistan. Iraq. North Korea. Iran. Haiti. And all of this bad news takes place while our eyes are mostly fixed upon a very expensive extravaganza for the rich  at a resort on the Black Sea.

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Feb 12

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One Good Thing

I did one good thing today.  Only one. 

I did some things inadequately and halfheartedly. I mechanically responded to email, returned phone calls, chipped away at the mountain of paper on my desk. I was often bored and listless, and struggled to corral my wandering mind. I yawned a lot, and looked out the window. Read more

Feb 6

The Meaning of Life

“Would you be interested in coming to give a short talk to a group of high school/university students?” The question came a few weeks ago and, as is my customary practice, I enthusiastically agreed without giving so much a passing glance at my calendar. How hard could it be, right? “What would you like me to talk about?” I asked. “Well, we’re wondering if you can speak on the topic, ‘What is the meaning of life?’” The meaning of life. Right. 

This was followed by period of awkward laughter and dumb silence on my part. Not terribly inspirational, I wouldn’t think.  Read more

Jan 9

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Love is Our Fixed Address

A few days after Nelson Mandela’s December 5 passing, I checked out his autobiography, Long Walk to Freedom from the local library. This morning, I turned the last page. The book was, of course, inspiring, illuminating, heartbreaking, stunning, rage inducing, hopeful, profound and a whole host of other superlatives. Given the subject matter and the nature of the story, how could it not be? Read more

Dec 20

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There is Nothing Ordinary About This

Advent is not about arrival.
Advent is about waiting in hope.
Advent is about prayer for the coming Kingdom.
 
Advent is about saying,
often with trembling lip,
wavering voice,
and with tear-filled eyes,
Come soon, Lord Jesus, come soon. 
 

Brian Walsh, Advent Pain, Aching Hope

 

I sit in a sterile hospital room with a dear old saint who will be spending this Christmas where nobody wants to spend Christmas. Outside is a gloriously clear, crisp, winter day full of snow and lights and pre-Christmas goodness. Inside, there are bare, yellowing walls, cracked ceilings, cheap, generic pictures on the wall. We speak of what the doctors say, of what the next steps will be, about what is going on at church, about who has visited and who will be coming. We speak of what her kids are doing for Christmas. Read more

Dec 11

Here is Your God

This morning I sat in a dark hospital room with someone I love who is in a dark place. Months upon months of crushing, debilitating, body and soul-sucking migraines. Often she can barely open her eyes. The smallest shaft of light makes her skull feel like it will explode; the most innocuous of everyday sounds assaults her ears like the trumpets of Armageddon. She spends day upon day of groping around in a morphine-tinged fog. My heart aches for what she is going through. I pray for her often. Read more

Dec 14

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“We Pray to You Only Because We Do not Know What Else to Do”

Like many this afternoon, I am staring blankly at a screen, my eyes numbly moving across words and images of the horrifying scenes from Connecticut today. There are no words, and yet we somehow need words. I need words. Words to make sense?  As if that were possible… Words to explain or justify or bring meaning?  No, not that… never that… Words to express anger and sadness and fear and confusion… Words to express that we somehow, in some way hurt deeply for these parents who have lost their children, for these students who have lost their friends and teachers, for these families who have been ripped apart, for these precious little lives so cruelly snatched away, for a world still so painfully soaked in violence and inhumanity? Yes, I suppose… something like that…

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