Spirituality of Suffering Sermon by Blanca Rodriguez August 28, 2016 All Souls Church, NYC In my work as a chaplain, patients frequently try to make sense of unmerited suffering. Why do bad things happen to good people? In theology we call this the theodicy conundrum. It goes like this: if God is all powerful, all good and all just, then how can God allow bad things to happen to good people? Now, I know that as Unitarian Universalists some of us identify as atheists, some as humanists, some as panentheists, and some as monotheists. But we do have a faith. We have core values that we covenant around. We have our individual understanding of what is the sacred and the meaningful. We agree that there is something larger than our personhood that we serve and to which we are inextricably connected. And, we all search for meaning and purpose in our lives. I think everyone here would also agree with the Buddhists that life is suffering, meaning that suffering is inescapable. So, the question why is there unmerited suffering, such as from rape, genocide, incurable diseases, and/or natural disasters, is by no means an idle question. To give some real-life context to this question, let me tell you about Clara, the mother of one of my pediatric patients in my work as a chaplain. Clara, my made-up name for her, is 46 years old. When she was born, her mother didn t want her and gave her away to the maternal grandparents. At 16, Clara rebelled against her strict grandparents, dropped out of school and gave birth to a son. In her 20s, she had a daughter, earned her GED, completed two years of college, and became a paralegal. Her son began to get into trouble at school, and Clara lost her job. She ran out of money and became homeless. With her two kids, she moved in with her estranged mother and in desperation slit her wrists. Her mother threw her and her children out, and Clara wound up in a shelter and lost custody of her two children. Her daughter would later be sexually molested while in the custody of her biological father. While in the shelter, Clara discovered she was pregnant. She gave birth to a son, Jay, who has the most severe form of cerebral palsy. Jay is now 11 years old. He is blind, has spastic quadriparesis, cannot do anything for himself, and is severely intellectually disabled. Clara told me that in the aftermath of becoming homeless and losing custody of her children, she felt immense guilt and felt rage at her daughter s abuser and the courts, and she felt abandoned and punished by God for her attempted suicide and prior mistakes. When she learned 1
that Jay had the most severe form of cerebral palsy, much like the biblical Job, about whom we will talk soon, she asked God, why me and why Jay? She fell into a deep depression. But she kept talking to the God of her understanding. She prayed for forgiveness and for strength and hope to focus on what truly gave her life meaning regaining custody of her children and taking care of Jay to the best of her ability. This is what she told me about her spiritual journey through suffering: I realized that the why me? and why Jay didn t matter. That s not what it s about. It s about what I do with what life gives me. God helped me turn my life around from all that brokenness. Having Jay was one of God s ways to help me. Because of Jay, I had the strength, hope and motivation to take care of him and get my children back and take care of them. I was able to see in that first year with Jay that I was strong enough to take care of him, and that gave me back my self-esteem. God gave me a special boy that I love so much. I came to see what was good in something so hard. God sent me Jay to save me from feeling worthless. I m not saying it s ever easy. But, taking care of Jay is never a punishment. Jay is a blessing. I also feel blessed to have a good relationship with my older children. I have everything that I need: my children, an apartment, doctors that care about Jay, a health care aide that loves Jay and is my closest friend, and therapists who come to my home and work with Jay and love him. God is everything to me. I am blessed. To get to where she is today spiritually, Clara struggled her way through major suffering. And, her way through that suffering mirrored in many ways the story of Job from the Hebrew and Christian bibles. Ironically, while the Book of Job is the biblical book that focuses on unmerited suffering, the book offers no theological explanation for why evil exists and why the innocent suffer. Strange, isn t it? Let me briefly summarize the Book of Job with my interpretive gloss added. Job is a wealthy man from the land of Uz who has been pious all of his life, conscientiously observing the dictates of his faith. He has good health, a wife, children, and lots of land and livestock. Now, Satan makes a wager with God that Job has faith in God only because he is what we would today call privileged. God lets Satan take away Job s wealth, children, health and social status to see whether Job has an authentic or only a reward-based faith in God. (I should point out that in the Hebrew bible, Satan is God s agent, with the role of being a stumbling block to be overcome as part of humanity s spiritual journey. 2
Well, after Job loses his wealth, children and health, he curses the day he was born and insists that he has done nothing wrong to merit such suffering. Friends visit Job and offer the conventional theological wisdom of retribution justice: God is all-powerful, good and just and therefore rewards the good and punishes the wicked. They insist that Job, therefore, must have committed some wickedness, even if he can t figure out what. So, Job should humble himself and seek God s forgiveness. Well, Job would have none of that! You see, the problem for Job was that he did believe in a reward and punishment God, but this time God was wrong! Job was not wicked! Job was so outraged that he demanded that God appear before him so that he, a mere mortal, could put God on trial. Now that s pretty radical. For one thing, Job was subverting the theological order by trying to outwit God and control the outcomes in his life, as if saying, We made a deal God, you and me, and you re breaching it. You strike me, the innocent, and you let the wicked live. That s wrong! And, Job is pretty radical in another way. He unwaveringly affirms his inherent worth and dignity, demanding a personal encounter with God so that God could really pay heed to what Job has to say. This is like people who say, I want my day in court, even when they believe they will lose. Well, guess what? God s voice does appear to Job. For many readers, however, this is where the story seems to become rather anticlimactic. Rather than answer Job s question about why the innocent suffer and the wicked live, God instead asks Job question after question, basically saying, How dare you question me! Where were you when I created the world in all its majesty and mystery? And, what does Job do in response? He humbly says to God, I have heard of you by the hearing of the ear, but now my eye sees you, which is metaphoric biblical language for I now experience you. After this experiential reality of God, Job submits and calls an end to his mourning. God then more than restores Job s good fortune, and Job lives a long life. What, then, is accomplished in this Book, given that it never answers why the innocent suffer and the wicked live? I believe several important things. One, it soundly rejects as false a reward and punishment theology for how the cosmos is ordered. God proclaims that the friends spoke wrongly about Job s suffering and that only Job had spoken what is right presumably that there is unmerited and unfair suffering in the world. Such is the world. 3
Yet, how many of us still operate, subconsciously or consciously, under the paradigm of you reap what you sow and the good will be rewarded? The confusing thing is that there is much truth to you reap what you sow ; but there is also truth that the innocent will suffer. As in any significant spiritual question, paradox is always present. The truth is that you sometimes reap what you sow and you will experience unmerited suffering. For me, asking why the innocent suffer or why me is just the wrong question, even though we all go there. There is no answer that satisfies rationally or theologically. Since such is the world, we might as well ask, Who am I that I should never experience unmerited suffering? I believe that the most relevant question is, What is our spiritual response to the fact that unmerited suffering exists? How do we become active, not passive, participants in our suffering so that we can keep faith and hope alive in ourselves and in this world? For me, then, the Book of Job is about the spirituality, not the theology, of suffering. By spirituality I mean that aspect of humanity that refers to how we search for meaning and purpose and how we experience our connectedness to the moment, the self, the other, and whatever is the sacred to us. For Job, this spirituality of suffering meant steadfastly affirming his inherent worth and dignity, even as his friend pressured him to find fault in himself. How easy it is for us to slide into the mode of I, [or you], must have done something wrong for that terrible thing to have happened. Have you been there? I m wagering that many of us have. I know I have. Well, Job stood his ground that he was not to blame for his major suffering. Job s spirituality took the form of hoping against all hope that there was some way through the suffering, and that this way through would take courage to feel the suffering and reject a false theology that says both that God delivers suffering and delivers it justly. The way through his suffering also included confronting and demanding the presence of God so that God would see Job exactly as he was a broken man, but still with inherent worth and dignity. Job needed to be heard, seen, and understood. He needed and got an unembellished and authentic relationship with, and experience of, the sacred. And, in that encounter, Job underwent the humiliation of learning that humans are not in control of much. The implicit delusion in a theology of reward and punishment is that if we do good and follow the rules, then we have control over rewards and can avoid major suffering. Job was right that his suffering was unmerited, but he was dead wrong and arrogant to think that piously following rules meant that he could control things and escape suffering. 4
That s like us saying today, if I exercise and eat healthy, I won t have cardiac disease. Or, if I follow the best advice on parenting, my children will be healthy and get into Ivy League universities. Maybe. Maybe not! Let s face it: deep down inside we probably all think that we should have a cosmos that is predictable and rationally organized according to a law of reward and punishment justice. But, if the cosmos did operate that way, then wouldn t our good works being compassionate and loving to others scarcely have intrinsic value? Wouldn t our good works be motivated by fear and selfishness so as to guarantee rewards and avoid suffering. That would hardly be a spiritual life. I, for one, believe that a spiritual person is one for whom there is intrinsic value in striving to live according to one s highest aspirations and be in relationship with what one holds as sacred, regardless of what life delivers. This spiritual breakthrough for Job is evident in the line in which Job distinguishes having heard of God from the experiential reality of God. Having heard of God can mean that Job s idea of spirituality pre-suffering was to be pious and faithful to God for the sake of rewards. But after going through his major suffering and rage and using them as driving forces to reckon with what is really important and meaningful in life and after experiencing God, Job finally gets what is most important and meaningful. It is to be in authentic relationship with our suffering, our selves as we truly are, others as they truly are, and with the God of our understanding and experience, no matter what life hands to us. So when others we know experience suffering, or we ourselves, and ask why me or why my child or why my partner, they, or us, are probably not looking for a theological answer. There is none that satisfies. What they, or us, are probably seeking is a way through the suffering. Like Job, we want to be heard and understood. We might want to rant and rage and question anew what is the sacred and the meaningful for us now. We want others to be touched by our pain and carry the weight of that around for at least a little while so that true empathy emerges. We probably need courage to really feel our pain and courage to explore what faith and hope look like now. We need to not be alone in our suffering. We need to remain connected to what is sacred for us. I truly believe that when we deeply listen to and understand another s pain, and resist saying dumb platitudes, we affirm the other person s and our own inherent worth and dignity. We allow the other to maintain or refashion their faith and their hopes, and we lessen the other s pain, even if just a smidgen. 5
I m not saying that we must suffer in order to have meaning and purpose in our lives. And, I m not saying that suffering has intrinsic value. I am saying that we can still find meaning and purpose through our suffering, and that meaning and purpose carries us through our suffering. As Friedrich Nietzsche said, He who has a why to live for can bear with almost any how. AMEN 8/27/16 6