A Free “Yes” in Adversity
In his book Falling Upward, Richard Rohr helps us come to terms with the suffering of life:
Carl Jung (1875–1961) believed much suffering occurs unnecessarily because people won’t accept the “legitimate suffering” [1] that comes from being human. He wrote, “Behind [mental conflict] there is so often concealed all the natural and necessary suffering the patient has been unwilling to bear.” [2] Ironically, refusal of the necessary pain of being human brings a person ten times more suffering in the long run. It’s no surprise that the first and always unwelcome message in the male initiation rites that I have helped lead is “life is hard.” We really are our own worst enemy when we deny this.
Episcopal priest and researcher Alice Updike Scannell (1938–2019) identified radical resilience as the ability to endure, grow, and thrive through adversity:
We usually think of resilience as the ability to recover from an adverse experience and pick up our lives where we left off. It is that too.… But there are times when adversity permanently changes our reality and we can’t go back to the way things were.…
Resilience then becomes the work of coming through the adversity so that, at least on most days, we see our life as still worth living. With this kind of resilience, we come through the adversity knowing that we’re still ourselves, even though things are very different for us now. I call this radical resilience.[3]
Richard sees suffering inherent in all of reality, but only humans have the choice to accept or deny it:
What I call “necessary” suffering goes on every day, seemingly without question. As I wrote this in the deserts of Arizona, I read that only one saguaro cactus seed out of a quarter of a million seeds ever makes it even to early maturity, and few reach full growth. Most of nature seems to totally accept major loss, gross inefficiency, mass extinctions, and short life spans as simply the price of life. Ironically, feeling that sadness, and even its full absurdity, pulls us into the general dance, the unified field, and an unexpected deep gratitude for what is given—with no necessity and so gratuitously.
Reality, creation, nature itself, what I call “the First Body of Christ,” has no choice in the matter of necessary suffering. It lives the message without saying yes or no to it. It holds and resolves all the foundational forces, all the elementary principles and particles within itself—willingly, it seems. This is the universe in its wholeness, the “great nest of being,” including even the powerless, invisible, and weak parts that have so little freedom or possibility. The Second Body of Christ, the formal church, always has the freedom to say yes or no. That very freedom allows it to say “no” much of the time, especially to any talk of dying, stumbling, admitting mistakes, or falling. Yet God seems ready and willing to wait for, and to empower, free will and a free “yes.”
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From John Chaffee’s Friday Five
“The status quo will never invite itself to be disrespected, disrupted, or overthrown.“
– From My Own Journals, 3 Years Ago
I hope it doesn’t seem too presumptuous to quote myself. Facebook reminded me of a memory from 3 years ago. If you remember, we were in the thick of Covid and there was a terrible amount of political upheaval.
Organizations, schools, churches, and schools were struggling with the world as we found it… and some chose to be innovative while others dug their heels in and defaulted back to old paradigms.
Hence why I wrote what I did.
Sometimes the status quo/the old paradigm of how to do things needs to be completely upended or overturned in order for any progress or innovation to happen. And, I think this is why the prophets of old were killed or scapegoated back in their day… they disrespected, disrupted, and overthrew the status quo because it was what the Good Lord inspired them to do!
