11/50: God and Suffering
What will you do with your one wild life? Gungor invites into the paradox of life.
“See it as a loss or as a chance
Is it random chemistry
Or is it poetry”
My friend who is a hospice chaplain once told me she couldn’t go to any church with a pastor who had a simplistic understanding of suffering. That has always haunted me. But I agree with her. A theology that does’t work in deep suffering doesn’t work.
One of the best classes I took in seminary was called “God and Human Suffering” in which we had to construct our own theodicy. Here is some of what I came to…
Life is a paradox of meaning and suffering. We experience meaning when we know love or receive the gift of a child or marvel at the miracle of nature. There are moments when we sense that our life has a purpose and has come together in ways that are beyond what we could have constructed on our own.
Suffering exists right alongside meaning. And all suffering is not created equal. There are four different kinds of suffering that I see. First, there is suffering that teaches. For example, I suffered for three years waiting for my husband to decide he was in love with me. But through those years, I learned patience. Second, suffering that helps us grow. Going with those years of waiting for my husband, I matured and experienced more of life so that I was ready for a lifelong commitment. Third, suffering that is a consequence. Sometimes we make mistakes or intentionally harm and there are natural consequences to those actions. Fourth, suffering that is random and senseless. A tsunami that kills 230,000 people has no real purpose. Any lesson or growth that happens from it does not counterbalance the loss of life.
It’s this last kind of suffering that is hardest to deal with. Random suffering stops us in our tracks and we can’t make sense of it. It serves death rather than life. Random suffering is what makes us question whether God is good or even there. It seems a good God would change weather patterns or mess with misaligned chromosomes or stop a gun from firing or keep children from dying from hunger or strike abusers down dead before they hurt someone.
And yet — meaning remains in our experience of love, the uniqueness of each creature and the mystery of our connection with God.
This tension between meaning and suffering is the human condition, but we all put it together in different ways. Tomorrow I’ll explore how we hold this paradox.