For who that has read the Gospel does not know that Christ counts all human suffering his own? —Origen, On Prayer 11.2
Richard Rohr considers the presence of so many evils in the world and God’s solidarity with suffering:
Theodicy is a branch of theology that has developed many arguments on how there can be a good God, or a just God in the presence of so much evil in the world—about which “God” appears to do nothing.
The evidence is overwhelming that God fully allows and does not stop genocides, child abuse, brutal wars, unspeakable human and animal suffering, the imprisonment of the innocent, sexual assaults and enslavement, the death of whole species and civilizations, and the tragic lives of addicts and their codependents. Further, God seems to at least “allow” the “natural” disasters of drought, flood, hurricane, tornado, tsunami, plague, famine, and painful diseases of every kind, many of which we call “acts of God,” and all of which have made much of human life “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” [1] What are we to do with this?
For me, there is a workable and loving way through this. If God is somehow in the suffering, also participating as a suffering object, in full solidarity with the world that God created, then I can make some possible and initial sense of God and this creation. Only if we’re joining God, and God is joining us, in something greater than the sum of all its parts, can we find a way through all of this. Trust in the crucified—and resurrected—Jesus has indeed “saved” many. [2]
Theologians Grace Ji-Sun Kim and Susan Shaw show how Jesus is a survivor of violent abuse who leads the way for other survivors to find transformation:
For Jesus, the way of God is the way of feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, helping the stranger in a ditch, and demanding equity and justice, whether from judges, religious leaders, or politicians. Surviving with Jesus can redirect our anger, our han, our despair. [3] We can learn to accept ourselves, and we can work to create a better world. Things won’t just be hunky-dory. Transformation is a process. The accurate language for faith is not that “we are saved” but that we are “being saved.” Susan once heard poet Maya Angelou tell the story of a young man who asked her if she were “saved.” “Are you?” Angelou responded. “Yes,” he replied. “Really?” she countered, “Already?” Transformation is a process—and for survivors, it’s a process with its ups and downs, flashbacks, and panic attacks. But, as the resurrection confirms, it is the better way; it is God’s way.
Surviving with Jesus gives us hope that a different kind of world is possible—a world without sexual abuse, without misogyny and racism, and without violence. That’s a world worth surviving for and working toward with faith that in each of us God truly is making all things new. [4]
God’s Sustaining Presence
In today’s meditation, CAC teacher James Finley shares his personal experience with domestic abuse. We invite readers to ground themselves as Finley describes growing up with a violent, alcoholic father. Beginning at age twelve, he stayed awake at night, terrified for his mother’s safety.
If my father was in a good mood when I went upstairs to bed, I felt it was safe for me to go to sleep. But quite often he would already be in an angry mood when I and my younger siblings went to bed. And so I would keep my vigil, sitting at the top of the stairs, listening, trying to figure out if he was just hitting [our mother] again, grabbing hold of her, pulling her hair, or if he was starting to kill her.…
It was in these ongoing traumatizing conditions that I learned to survive by being hypervigilant, looking for the first signs that my father was beginning to become angry at my mother, my younger brothers, or me. I learned to survive by being as passive as I could, doing my best to do whatever my father wanted me to do, so as not to trigger his rage…. Most of all, I learned to survive by being as interiorly grounded as I could be in God’s sustaining presence, which protected me from nothing, even as it inexplicably sustained me in the ongoing, atmospheric traumas that pervaded my life in those days.
Seeking solace, Finley created an altar with the Bible, and images of Jesus, Mary, and the saints, at which he prayed every night.
As I look back at these experiences now, what most stands out to me is a truth of the awakening heart known to those who have been fortunate enough to have experienced it. This truth being the surprising realization that from the hidden depths of a darkness too terrible to name or explain, God can emerge as a sovereign, silent presence that carries us forward, amazed and grateful, into realms of clarity and fulfillment that we could scarcely have imagined.…
I recall how I would go to my room in the evening to pray. As I knelt on the floor with my rosary wrapped around my hands, the darkness in which I was kneeling was, at the surface level, merely the darkness of the room illumined by the blue light of the vigil candle shining through its glass container…. At an infinitely deeper, more interior level, the darkness in which I knelt in prayer was the primordial darkness in which God’s hidden presence was sustaining me in ways I could not and did not need to comprehend.…
In looking back at these moments, I can see how I was being led by God into enigmatic and paradoxical waters in which I was invited to realize that ultimately speaking there is no wall, no barrier between the polar opposite realms of trauma and transcendence that meet and merge and interpenetrate each other in endlessly varied ways throughout our lives.
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| The Table is a Time Machine |
 Click Here for AudioJesus commanded his followers to break bread and share the cup “in remembrance” of him. Using commonly available items like bread and wine to remember Jesus made sense in the ancient world, but today we have far better tools available. We have video screens, streaming sermons, and mass publishing. We have Christian t-shirts, bracelets, and avatars. We have little Jesus fish on our cars eating little Darwin fish. We have so many things to remind us of Jesus; do we really need the communion table anymore?Well, that depends on what Jesus meant by “remembrance.” If remembering is merely a mental act of recollection, which is how modern people understand it, then the Lord’s Table seems unnecessary and redundant. The ancient Jewish understanding of remembrance, however, was very different than ours. Theologian Paul Bradshaw puts it this way: “In the Jewish world, remembrance was not a purely mental activity…it was not simply about nostalgia for the past…but about asking God to remember his people and complete his saving purpose today” (emphasis added).In the ancient world, remembrance was not merely the mental recollection of past events. Rather, it meant recalling a past event so that the power of that event may enter the present. For Jesus and his disciples, the redemptive work of God was not something to reminisce about. It was not just a story to be mentally recalled. The redemption of God, and his power to deliver his people, was continuing right into the present.This is why Jesus celebrated the Passover meal with his friends. The Passover was a symbol of how God saved his people from slavery in the past, but Jesus appealed to that power and applied it to their present circumstances. He used the unleavened bread from the Passover meal and gave it a contemporary meaning. “This is my body, broken for you.” And the same with the wine. “This is the new covenant in my blood.” The meal was not just about remembering what God had done in the past—Jesus was inviting that saving power into the present.So when Jesus told his Jewish followers to take the bread and the cup in “remembrance of me” he was instructing them to do something more than a mental exercise. The table was to be more than an edible history lesson. When we come to the table we are not just recalling a story from 2,000 years ago. The table is a time machine through which God’s saving power from the past is transported into the present. If we believe the table is just a mental exercise, then it’s no surprise why we’ve ignored it in our worship in favor of hypnotic videos and loud music. But, what if we’re wrong? What if the table isn’t just about remembering God’s past redemption? What if it’s about experiencinghis redemption today? What if, in remembering, we bring the salvation of the past into the present? If that’s what Christ intended the table to be, then by marginalizing it in our gatherings we have unknowingly marginalized the power of God and replaced it with a performance by mere men. DAILY SCRIPTURE EXODUS 13:3-10 LUKE 22:14-20 WEEKLY PRAYER From Thomas Ken (1637 – 1711) Glory be to you, O Jesus, my Lord and my God, for feeding my soul with your most blessed body and blood. Oh, let your heavenly food transfuse new life and new vigor into my soul, and into the souls of all that communicate with me, that our faith may daily increase; that we may all grow more humble and contrite for our sins; that we may all love you and serve you, and delight in you, and praise you more fervently, more incessantly, then ever we have done before. Amen. |
