Richard Rohr has learned from alcoholics and the Twelve Steps that it’s when we hit rock bottom that we realize how our suffering and God’s suffering are connected:
Only those who have tried to breathe under water know how important breathing really is—and will never take it for granted again. They are the ones who do not take shipwreck or drowning lightly, the ones who can name “healing” correctly, the ones who know what they have been saved from, and the only ones who develop the patience and humility to ask the right questions of God and of themselves.
It seems only the survivors know the full terror of the passage, the arms that held them through it all, and the power of the obstacles that were overcome. All they can do is thank God they made it through! For the rest of us, it is mere speculation, salvation theories, and “theology.”
Those who have passed over to healing and sobriety eventually find a much bigger world of endurance, meaning, hope, self-esteem, deeper and true desire, and, most especially, a bottomless pool of love, both within and without. The Eastern fathers of the church called this transformation theosis, or the process of the divinization of the human person. This deep transformation is not achieved by magic, miracles, or priestcraft, but by a “vital spiritual experience” that is available to all human beings. It leads to an emotional sobriety, an immense freedom, a natural compassion, and a sense of divine union that is the deepest and most universal meaning of that much-used word salvation. Only those who have passed over know the real meaning of that word—and that it is not just a word at all.
It is at precisely this point that the suffering God and a suffering soul can meet. It is at this point that human suffering makes spiritual sense, not to the rational mind, the logical mind, or even the “just and fair” mind, but to the logic of the soul, which I would state in this way:
Suffering people can love and trust a suffering God.
Only a suffering God can “save” suffering people.
Jesus is, more than anything else, the God of all who suffer—more than any god that can be encompassed in a single religion. Jesus is in competition with no world religion, but only in nonstop competition with death, suffering, and the tragic sense of life itself. That is the only battle that he wants to win. He wins by including it all inside of his body, “groaning in one great act of giving birth … waiting until our bodies are fully set free” (Romans 8:22–23).
The suffering creatures of this world have a divine Being who does not judge or condemn them, or in any way stand aloof from their plight, but instead, a Being who hangs with them and flows through them, and even toward them in their despair.
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5 for Friday John Chaffee
1.
“Most of the trouble in the world is caused by people wanting to be important.”
- TS Eliot, English Poet
If we take a moment and remember that TS Eliot was considered the first post-modern poet, who wrote during and after the fallout of World War II, this quote takes on a deeper meaning…
The Second World War was atrocious and dehumanizing in the West. It included concentration camps, exterminations, human experimenting, and the creation of atomic warfare, all while being the most documented war in human history. Was it caused by the hubris of one man who sought to be important? Was it the result of many people who sought to be important?
What about our small offenses? Do we cause harm on a small scale by our insecurities? Probably. We may not start world wars but we can certainly cause collateral damage to those around us.
Perhaps this is why the early Church emphasized humility as a vitally important virtue. Did they see what happens within a person when humility is not present? I am sure that they did.
2.
“Between God and the soul, there is no between.”
- Julian of Norwich, 14th Century English Mystic
This whole religious myth that we are separate from God until we do something, pray something or believe something is not true.
After all, nothing can separate us from the Love of God (Romans 8:38-39), in whom we all live and move and have our being (Acts 17:28).
3.
“To know all is to forgive all.”
- Early Church Saying
Within classical Christian theology, there are the three attributes of the omnipresence, omnipotence, and omniscience of God. Respectively, they describe the universal presence of God, the boundless capabilities of God, and the unlimited knowledge of God. Although these three terms come to us originally from Aristotelian philosophy, the early Church believed them to be true and formalized them officially after Thomas Aquinas published the Summa Theologiae.
Let’s focus on the all-knowing capabilities of God.
The omniscience of God means God knows your genetic makeup, and how it was the result of countless generations of parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents. That means God knows what household raised you, all the good and all the bad. That means God knows what mentors and dementors were over you. That means God knows every single hurt, disappointment, regret, shame, glory, failure, success, tear of joy, tear of pain, grief, loss, gain, embarrassment, victory, addiction, destructive habit, self-loathing, delusion of grandeur, belonging, attachment, community, exclusion, birthday, laugh, gift you have ever experienced. God also knows all the same details for everyone else in the cosmos.
The early Church believed that to know all is to forgive all.
Once you understand where someone came from, with all the scars and traumas, it is easier to forgive them. To discover that a school bully goes home to a violent household and feels threatened every evening and morning by simply existing, helps us to forgive them. Extrapolate that same idea out to every person who has ever existed and you can see what the early Church meant. For God to know all, actually makes God most able to forgive!
To be God is inherently to know all, to forgive all, to love all, and to reconcile all. We are sitting here, on the other side of omniscience, and have to work through faith and love to stay open to forgiving the other (which is no simple feat!). However, if we seek to be like Christ, there is no higher goal to strive for.
4.
“If you are a friend of Christ you should have as friends persons who are benefit to you and contribute to your way of life. Let your friends be men of peace, spiritual brethren, holy fathers.”
- St. Theodoros the Great Ascetic, 9th Century Syrian Monk
Be mindful of who you spend the most time around. Just as bad company corrupts good morals, so does good company restore them.
5.
“You’ve survived too many storms to be bothered by raindrops.”
- Unknown
It was 2 am in the forests of southern Maine near Rangeley, I looked up and saw a moose staring back down at me. Its nostrils snorted out a puff of air that I could see in my headlamp. I remember yelling, “NIGHT MOOSE!” Our whole crew of night-hikers bolted out of there, running into the black night because what was out there seemed safer than playing a game of chicken with an awkward 1.5-ton horse-like beast with antlers.
There are times when I forget what I have already lived through. On these days, I sometimes allow my fear and anxiety to get a hold of me. As a head-oriented person, it is easy for me to overthink to the point of ruminating and thereby doomcast what might happen. It’s a problem that I have, and fortunately, it does not happen often. Plus, now that I can admit it about myself I am less likely to get trapped in that way of thinking.
All that goes to say, there are also times when I remember what I have been through. I forget how tough I can be. I forget how I have been within 10 feet of multiple moose, scared off bears, quit unhealthy jobs, been in 2 car accidents, broken a tooth on the dance floor, stared down a mentally unstable drug addict in college, stepped into the ER multiple times, taken buses across the US alone, danced in the rain in Ghana during the dry season, been to the Bergen Belsen concentration camp in Germany, done the longest zipline in the northeast, and so much more. Hopefully, I can keep adding to that list.
Sometimes we forget how much we have been through. Sometimes it’s good to remember that what we are going through is just some raindrops, compared to the earlier storms of life.
