On Suffering (3)

Why did so many people die in the Haitian earthquake? Because for these poor black descendants of slaves who have had a history of corrupt rulers, economic justice doesn't exist.

What does their suffering have to teach us? Certainly not that this was a punishment that they somehow deserved, as the fundamentalists have hatefully intoned. But I also don't buy the stupid platitudes of Anglican bishops: "God is suffering right along with them." This is infantile.

I stopped believing in a theistic God - an omnipotent being "out there somewhere" who has the ability to intervene (positively or negatively) in our lives and decides whether to do that or not based on his (definitely male, this God) judgment about our worthiness - quite a long time ago. I don't see how anyone who has observed the arbitrariness and unfairness of suffering can possibly accept, let alone pray to, this kind of God, and once you let go of that, then a great deal of religious dogma becomes meaningless.

When I look out at the Montreal skyline and all those spires above the empty churches, I remember what a Quebec friend, a former Roman Catholic, told me recently. He said that he has a sister who is quite poor. When she asked a priest why she was poor, when other people were much richer, the priest told her, "It's God's will." "She accepts that!" he said. "And for a long while in my own life I accepted it too. But not any longer. That's the way the church was, here, for centuries - keeping people docile, like sheep, with these kinds of statements." Is it any wonder that when people finally woke up and realized this sort of teaching was not only insupportable but deeply damaging to them and their society, they deserted the churches and abandoned the clergy? But equally empty are the words of religious leaders who refuse to go deeper than "God shares our suffering" and really grapple with the teachings that made Jesus  the radical he was and, in the end, got him killed. If religion can't say anything meaningful about suffering, then, frankly, its temples deserve to be empty.

Jesus' parables about economic justice are at the very core of his teachings, and they basically say that all people are equal and the rich need to wake up. There would be a lot less suffering in the world if the resources and wealth were more fairly distributed, but we, like the rich young man in the famous parable, are incapable of giving completely so that that might come to pass. My $100 or $500 to Haiti is essentially meaningless; it may make me feel better, it may help a little bit, but in a larger sense it does almost nothing to address the fundamental inequality between my life and the lives of the poor and struggling. Responding to suffering with a gift that doesn't change me in any real way is too easy. If suffering has any "meaning" then it's to transform us from people who go around with a shell on, sticking a hand out now and then with a few coins in it, to people who are willing to see things as they really are, to be vulnerable to life and to others, and to change over time as a result into people who believe in justice and equality and live that out in our lives - not perfectly, probably, but as best we can. This thing we call "God" -- what I might prefer to call Love, or the "Ground of all Being" -- isn't going to produce change in the world, except through us, and the "eternal life" where suffering "shall be no more" isn't a paradise to come, but right now.

And if we think we're protected by our wealth, our education, our geography, our whiteness, our youth -- it's an illusion. Suffering comes in some form to all of us. Watching my completely undeserving mother die of cancer rid me of any vestiges of Theism. But I did experience, as I have before in my life, moments of interpenetration where "she" and "I" ceased to exist as separate; I know with complete certainty - not just intellectually - that we're all interdependent, all connected, and all equal. I've seen that Love is the most powerful thing there is, and that we all hold it in our hands, never more so than when we're stripped of everything else. Going through suffering with others has the potential to teach us a great deal; maybe we'll be able to help the next person, or go through our own illnesses and death with a little less fear and greater wisdom. But I think for most educated and religiously-skeptical people today, this requires meditation, reading, and a lot of work and preparation that takes place mainly in solitude. I wish Christianity had done better job of preserving (other than in monasticism) its own mystic tradition, where meditation is at the heart. But that's never been seen as the way to preserve the institutional hierarchy and power, or to fill the pews and the coffers. Nor is it a way to keep the faith separate from the others, whose mystic traditions blur all the distinctions between them and neutralize the fear of "doing it wrong and risking damnation" which has been religion's (not just Christianity's) most powerful means of keeping people "inside" the rules.

So, descending from the roof-top view, where this kind of theorizing is so tempting, let's come down into the street. That's where I found the image in the photograph at the top of this post, one grey day when I wandered into a snowy alley and was stunned to find paintings like this on all the surfaces of the sheds and garages that backed up onto it. Seeing these light- and color-filled paintings, in the dead of midwinter, moved and mystified me: who was this life-filled painter? Why here? What did these images have to teach me?

Comments

[Dave]

Those paintings are wonderful! Are those Syrian licence plates at the top?

Your thinking is even more like mine than I thought, but it seems as if you arrived there via a lot of hard-won experiences and observations, while my own positions are much more theoretical. So I bow three times in your direction. :)

As for why Haitians in particular are suffering, Boing Boing linked to a handy overview on the London times from last May, Haiti: the land where children eat mud.

[Marja-Leena]

As Dave said! A deep and thought provoking series of essays, Beth, thank you!

[Jan]

Well said, Beth. Well said.

[Beth]

Dave, yes, the license plates really intrigued me and I decided (though wasn't sure) that they went with the paintings. There were plates from both Syria and Lebanon, and the aloe plant also seemed like a clue - my father-in-law grew aloes right up to the end of his life. And I solemnly return your bow.

Hi Marja-Leena, thanks for writing - I'm really glad you enjoyed these essays.

Hi Jan, thank you very much!

[Paul]

Thank you Beth. As a lapsed Anglican who is now probably an atheist, I do very much enjoy your writing. I often wish I'd moved to Canada during the Vietnam war era, instead I flunked my draft physical and stayed in the States. Best regards and keep up the good writing and singing. Paul

[Beth]

Paul, I'm delighted to hear from you. Thanks for telling me a little about yourself, and for reading. I appreciate your kind words very much.

[Beth]

The BBC Magazine explores the question "Why Does God Allow Suffering?" from the religious-philosophy side, and comes up with no satisfactory answers, at least in my opinion. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/8467755.stm

[James]

I enjoyed reading your thoughts on suffering in the last few posts, but this one is one that really connects with me. I think Jesus's economic justice teachings are too easily forgotten, probably because they are the hardest to live up to.

[Beth]

Hi James, thanks for the comment. I couldn't agree with you more. Those teachings certainly make me uncomfortable, and I've listened to so many sermons over the years that attempt to wriggle out of what's really being said, or at last give loopholes that gape a lot wider than the eye of the needle!

[Natalie]

Beth, a great post that merits long discussion far into the night and most likely into the next day and beyond, of course without ever reaching any conclusion! Dick Jones has just been writing on the same subject and I'll duplicate this comment over at Patteran Pages.

What bothers me about the question "Why does God allow....." is not only what follows but the question itself. In relation to natural disasters, the questioner is assuming that nature, whose 'tantrums' are so devastating to us, should be trained by God, the fathermother of this violent child, to behave itself, be docile and perfect. The questioner also assumes that if the Creator is perfect, his/her creation must also be perfect. When events prove this assumption to be wrong, the questioner then makes another assumption: God does not exist. Or if he/she/it exists, then it's an evil god.

But since unproven assumptions are all that we can ever make concerning the G-word and the G-Being, why not try a whole range of other assumptions that our imaginations may suggest? For instance, what if G is an artist and G's oeuvre, nature, works amazingly well but the system has stresses and strains and discrepancies. And what if humans, another aspect of G's art, are a work-in-progress and flawed too, but it's G's hope that they'll eventually get it together. And so on!

[Miguel]

Perhaps if people would get away from spending so much of their lives living detached from the world and trying to justify abstract ideas less tragedies like Haiti would occur. Any time a philosophy blames what happens here on Earth on something of our imaginations then there is bound to be negligence of our world, with disastrous consequences. And there is hubris in the assumption that we are that important in the scheme of things. Personally I think there is something poetic and sublime in the ultimate responsibility we have for ourselves and one another and the Planet. Don't blame our immaturity and callousness on God!

[Anne Gibert]

When I observe the little we know of the universe, how could I come to any conclusion other than that humans are a minuscule accident in the continuum of time and space. A human centered universe makes no sense to me, and so asking these why questions about disasters and suffering makes no sense. We need to ask ourselves not why did this happens to us, but what shall we do about this. To ask an imaginary supernatural being to save us will not help. The important things Jesus taught us were about loving, helping and sharing with each other.

[Mouse]

I don't believe in God.
But I do believe that we are all linked by a spark of spirituality and that the actions of one, good or bad, ripple out and touch many others
A kind of Buddhist chaos theory if you like

[Susan]

I have been SO INCREDIBLY infuriated at the thrashing attempts of certain religious people to explain the events of Haiti, or suffering in general, that I am very grateful to you for exploring the question theologically AND reasonably. I've been much too angry at the arrogance of people who have claimed God picks some and not others, for both suffering and to be spared, to express myself on this topic with anything like rational words.

A young man here in Portland, apparently one who works around some mental impairment, seemed to see the tragedy clearly enough to have donated half his life savings, $20,000, to a group providing aid. I wish I was so selfless. I also wish I truly believed that his money will make a difference to the ongoing suffering there. But he makes me ashamed, coming from very little, he shared selflessly, much the way I've heard that many Haitians have reached out to help the Americans there who were affected by the earthquake.

I wonder, how could our globalization work to increase our heart's response to the poor around the world? At what point do people believe they can make a difference and at what point are they personally moved enough to act?

[Vivian]

Beth, if we are created by divinity, however we understand it, and have within us something transcendent, and if we suffer (as we all do) why it is so outrageous to you to say that divinity suffers (in, with, for) us? Julian of norwich had this vision of the crucified one in which the suffering turned into glory and bliss in an instant, a kind of reverse polarity or electric jolt.. As she beheld it (and she was actually at the point of death) she was healed. She spent the rest of her life writing about this vision. But if we go for the prize without being willing to do the beholding we are indeed both futile and somehow blasphemous. I feel there is a mystery at the centre that is not only true but wholesome and that it neither imposes nor shirks being present with suffering. Why is it different to say that "God suffers with us" than for you to say "I suffered with my mother" which i absolutely do not doubt? With one part of my mind I answer my own question...saying that you know yourself and we do not know god at all, even the idea of god being Knowable at all is, well, impossible, but on the other hand, our lives are a kind of laboratory of Love and in most cultures we use god language to describe the stuff at the edge. Who are we to disdain this?

[Beth]

Vivian, I do think that "what is holy" trembles every time there is violence, and "suffers with the suffering." What's perhaps different for me is that I feel this sacredness is something shared among all of us rather than being "out there" in the "person" of a Godhead who has the power to save or condemn and chooses whether to do it or not. I believe absolutely that suffering can turn to glory and does; it can transform us or destroy us, we can embrace it in ourselves or others or be totally lost (or abandoned) because of it. Julian's vision is very believable to me.

What I am mostly objecting to is that I don't think it's helpful at all for the Bishop of York to say, in effect, "God is suffering as much as his children" and leave it at that. In my view, we are responsible for one another, here and now, and the more the church avoids bringing that teaching to life and avoids dealing with the hugely radical economic and social justice changes it implies, the more ineffectual and hypocritical the Church appears to modern people and the more watered-down Jesus's teachings become. Who is going to "fix" the inequalities and injustice that cause Haitians to suffer so much in this earthquake would allow most San Franciscans to be OK afterwards, if not us? A religion of suffering that stays stuck at the foot of the cross no longer has meaning for me in a suffering world. And on a more personal level, if my mother's death had a meaning, it was through the love we shared in the midst of that suffering, and the transformation that love creates - for her, but also for me, continuing to this day, both in inner and outer ways that are manifested through action. I couldn't have done what I did without prayer and meditation and preparation, but the process changed my view of what God is, what we can ask for, and who we are in relationship to this thing we call "God."

Please argue with me if you think I'm wrong here!

[Beth]

A few hours later...just to clarify a bit more...I think the essence of what I'm trying to say is not to disagree with what you say about compassion -- of course we are called to com-passion, to be in solidarity with those who are suffering, and through that to learn something about suffering's transformative power. But when justice is involved, "being-with" is yet another way to be complicit, and I seriously object to the Church taking that position. It's not nearly enough; it certainly wasn't enough for Jesus, who was always going up against the authorities, the tax collectors, and the hypocrites primarily because of what they did to the poor.) Reflection, prayer, openness, honesty, and work on ourselves are certainly necessary in order for us to get to a place where we feel compassion, and some of that happens in quiet and in solitude. But I don't think that's where we're meant to remain. I agree with Merton's take on contemplation and action, and the need to move between the two (maybe some people are meant to be contemplatives and not out in the world, but even Merton himself had grave doubts about that); the problem is that the Church tends to be allied with the secular world and the Powers and this greatly limits its action, its integrity, and its prophetic voice.

[mike]

Nice post. I am sorry about the loss of your mom. When my mom died my spiritual principles really helped me. I don't believe in the cartoonish christian god but like you give a nod to universal love. i like to think of god as a distributed intelligence that all of us intelligent beings carry a piece of. I like to think of heaven like Plato's universe of ideas. my mom may be gone but not my love for her and many others. not our memories. not the idea of her. i believe those are eternal. i believe suffering occurs because of necessity and human greed. Its cool to live in a universe governed by laws we can discover and use even if it means some people get cancer and leave their children before their children wanted them too. Its necessary that the earth shake, thats how it works, and as a whole it works pretty good. the planet didn't kill those haitians, imperialism did. the 7.0 earthquake that hit northern california killed 43 people. the hundreds of thousands of haitian dead are because they have no rebar, amongst many things. the haitian's don't lack rebar because it is god's will but because we didn't want a successful neighbor of ex-slaves. gives the slaves the wrong ideas.