Sermon: 7 Ways to View Suffering
They were married 65 years. She had a quiet faith, a subtle generosity. A love of learning. And every once in a while, her husband told me, she’d wheel around and look at him and he knew in that moment that he had gone on too long. In such moments and when he was feeling sorry for himself, she’d say: Get over it already. Forget about it.
He was telling me this, at a funeral home, and he was laughing and crying all at once. And then just crying. And then, his whole body, convulsed and he had a coughing fit. His body was in an uproar, his grief was so great. He was suffering, unabashedly, without shame. His wife was dead and the world was this open vast sky that he couldn’t imagine how to live under.
He composed himself quickly. His sons held him and he wiped his eyes and told more stories.
Suffering. Those of us who are privileged to walk with others in their suffering know that it is one of the deepest mysteries of life. A privilege to witness. Hard and difficult, but important. What to do with suffering?
Fix it? Accept it? Struggle? Ignore?
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Confucius had a student, Yan Hui, who truly loved learning. Unfortunately, he was to die young. Nowadays there is no one.” And suddenly, the great teacher is in a wild grief. Heaven is the ruin of me, he keeps saying. His students are bewildered, even angry. They push back at his display of emotion. They chastise him for grieving with abandon. “I grieve with abandon? If I don’t grieve with abandon for him, then for whom?”
He doesn’t offer any cryptic saying. He doesn’t utter wisdom of any kind. He just offers up the same kind of untutored raw grief that you and I know all too well.
He refuses to refine tragedy into anything other than tragedy. Out of this place of the humanity within suffering, comes his philosophy. Loyalty and empathy are at the heart of his philosophy.
The fundamental principle of Confucianism is rooted in our shared experience of suffering. We find those vulnerable parts of ourselves and use it as a way to treat others and address the imbalances built into our nature. Confucius with his student’s death Yan Hui does not say: he’s in a better place. Or he’s at peace. Or everything happens for a reason. He simply stands in the lamentation. No explanation, no fancy words, no simple words. He just shows up and grieves. For confucius, suffering evokes our humanity.
This is just one very brief summary of a chapter from a remarkable book called Seven Ways of Looking at Pointless Suffering. Written by a fellow who teaches philosophy at a prison and at a community college.
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If Confucius evokes our humanity, the book of Job in the Bible says something about God. I can’t capture the depth and power of the book of Job. It involves a bet between The Devil’s Advocate and God about Job, who every one knows to be a really good guy. But is he a good guy because he’s a good guy or is he a good guy because his life is super cushy? God is like: well I guess there is only one way to find out. And they hammer the dude. Take away his business, off his kids, make him sick. He has some friends, who get it right sometimes in the face of Job’s suffering and get it awfully wrong sometimes. (We’re the friends, friends!) And also there is a dude named Elihu, God doesn’t even bother addressing him when God bothers to speak, because Elihu says: God has already explained pointless suffering to you. And second, there’s no suffering to explain. And third, pointless suffering will make you into a better person. And fourth, stop talking cause God might be listening and punish you with more pointless suffering.
Elihu is not a good look.
Scott Samuelson the author of this book says reading the Bible gives you the distinct impression that the Bible is especially hard on religious people. They are being stupid or mean, more often than not.
Job doesn’t curse God, but he brings forth lots of questions about God’s sense of creation. What were you thinking, exactly?
And God affirms the questioning. The whole book of Job is an insistence that good honest questions are better than easy answers, or any answers at all!
The Book of Job demonstrates a kind of spooky freedom of God and the importance of philosophy born of suffering and the grandeur of the universe.
God offers no explanation: instead of proving to Job that it is an explicable world, God insists it is a much stranger world than Job ever imagined. God takes Job’s puzzlement and squares it, then cubes it.
Scott Samuelson comes to this conclusion: Because Yhwh is free to be God and Job is free to be human, then a relationship can ensue. If God was obligated to reward our good behavior, then God would be our slave. If our task was simply to get rewards for good behaviour, we’d be like my dog Gracie who is at the end of a leash.
God shows up in the Book of Job to elaborate upon the paradox that the universe and life is beyond explanation and yet the fact of our being alive makes us strive for meaning and meaning-making.
Samuelson concludes that the Book of Job is reading that insists we work for morality and understanding, asking good questions. We do not throw up our hands in despair. And that God is not the answer to our unanswerable questions, but the site of them. God is our way of talking about a complex set of things: the grand universe, our ability to seek meaning in it, our hope for goodness beyond what’s given, the bitter existence of injustice.
And so, at the end of Job, after the friends have gotten it wrong. After God rewards Job’s insistence on putting god on trial, what do we come to. Job recognizes his humanity, after God is revealed. The Jewish Publication Society version has Job saying: Therefore I recant and relent, being but Dust and Ashes. The King James Version (God bless em) has Job saying: Wherefore I abhor myself and repent in dust and ashes. Stephen Mitchell the contemporary translator has Job saying: Therefore I will be quiet, comforted that I am dust.
Beautiful. Beautiful.
Scott Samuelson has Job saying: Now I truly know I’m human and I’ll shut up.
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I asked a few friends and acquaintance, at the hospital, a place where we see suffering a lot. I said: what do you do with suffering? What has it taught you?
Let’s take a moment to ponder that.
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A nurse, who works with the most marginalized patients imaginable, says: suffering whittles away at you so that the thing that matter will be the things you focus upon.
I asked a patient, who had been through a lot, and I mean a lot.
That person said: the small stuff doesn’t even bother, like at all. It is completely inconsequential. And I’ll tell you what: singing saved me. I sang with my sisters. Music surrounded me. It was the best and it saved me. Now, I try to stay positive. I try to focus on the good. And the secret to that is, it is a daily decision. It’s in my hands. Totally my choice and sometimes I get it right and sometimes I fail miserably. But then I decide again.
Another said: Suffering humbles me, in a really good way. I see myself in a larger perspective, in a larger narrative. There are some things I can’t control. There are somethings I can’t fix. And still I think: How lucky I am. How grateful for this crazy ride.
It has taught me, in a deep powerful way, to be more compassionate. We all suffer and I think I do so with as much grace as possible. But I look at others and I see their resilience and I am inspired and I strive to be even more compassionate.
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I assume Samuelson wrote this book because the University of Chicago Press told him they’d publish it and gave him some money to do so.
But what motivates the book is this idea that we experience suffering and we’re tempted to fix it or face it. And with certain advances in technology and progress, he’s afraid that we are hyper focused on fixing it.
“Our power is such that we’ve begun, however irrationally, to believe that we can — or soon will be able to — dictate the terms of suffering. When we can’t fix a problem, our impulse is to ignore it, lock it away, or even destroy those who have it. A surprising number of people in the developed world now go through life not just hoping but seriously believing that they’ll be able to acquire and enjoy the uninterrupted goods of a comfortable existence, overcome their diseases and pains, and cruise into a ripe old age.”
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So he explores all these different thinkers and ideas.
John Stuart Mills and his question: What if I got everything I wanted? What if you did? He wrestled with the utilitarianism of his upbringing. And he came to a place that looked something like this: Mills ideal world isn’t one of vanishing pain and maximizing pleasure; it is a world of freedom, vulnerability and conflict, such that the human character can be enlarged. Mills is especially interested in the idea of flourishing, marked by pleasure but also by sorrow and strife.
Now, Nietzsche. I mean. Whew. I’ll just lift up this idea. What Nietzsche really doesn’t want you to do is be a punk or a wimp or lifeless, in the face of the absurdity of life, the power inherent in life, the conflict and the animosity. He doesn’t, really really doesn’t want you to fall asleep.
The human project is to grow, to assert, to overcome. The will to power, he calls it.
What bugs Nietzsche? The last man. The last man gets rid of grand ideas, loses higher sets of values, justice, rights, truth, and pursues happiness. Creature comforts. Mindless entertainment. Extends life by doing nothing.
“The last men prefer comfort over aspiration, formalness over greatness, immediate gratification over long term struggle, insurance over risk. Because they have little fight in them and are driven by gratification they’re easily herded and manipulated by charismatic leaders who promise them security and prosperity.”
Nietzsche insists that pain, misery and death aren’t just occasional screws up in the system, they’re the system. So what to do with that? The last men escape through lifelessness. Certain types of religious folks just think this life and this earth is a first step towards the paradise that is heaven. Certain odernists want to bring heaven to earth.
Nietzsche begs for self-awareness. All life involves conflict. The universe is going to get in your way of whatever path you wish to take, so be aware. Don’t be mediocre. Be honest brave magnanimous and even polite. But be. Be something. Do something.
He says there is no other world, so embrace what you can of this one. “And like the grape, grow and be crushed, year after year, so that the world becomes more beautiful, more intoxicating.”
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OK. Last, but not least. I’d say last but most important.
Hannah Arendt.
Auschwitz and the nuclear bomb stand for a new kind of suffering, a terrible vast self inflicted suffering: the liquidation of humans by humans that leads to a peculiar kind of loneliness, abandonment by our humanity. (I will tell you, as a chaplain I am obsessed with the idea of loneliness. I believe it is behind so much of what ails us.)
The elimination of the human being and the control of the human animal were at the heart and soul of nazi ideology. Pointless suffering.
What remains? Language. She believes there is still yet a language that will remind us of our common humanity.
She has no political or ethical program. She reminds us that we are still human. We can think for ourselves. Find and preserve public forums. act in those public forums. Find real work. Forge our identities. Take responsibility.
In our suffering. In our loneliness. We can renew the world.
That is where you come in. Where we come in.
That is our call, as religious liberals. To find the language for the renewal of the world.
The human condition is always open, always rekindling itself. Is that not the liberal religious project? I think so.
There is an amazing chapter on the stoics and Whitman and there is an amazing chapter on the blues.
I can’t address those today.
It’s all a paradox. To fight and struggle and strive and to accept and be at peace, dust and ashes as we are.
I’ll leave you with the very first part of the book, a quote from James Baldwin.
It began to seem that one would have to hold in the mind forever two ideas which seemed to be in opposition. The first idea was acceptance, totally without rancor, of life as it is, and men as they are: in the light of this idea, it goes without saying that injustice is commonplace. But this did not mean that one could be complacent, for the second idea was of equal power: that one must never, in one’s own life, accept these injustices as commonplace but must fight them with all one’s strength. This fight begins, however, in the heart and it now had been laid to my charge to keep my own heart free of hatred and despair.
