Table Talk

Themes: On Suffering

Some clarifications from the previous post: this is definitely not a finished reflection on Christian counselling strategies. There is an immeasurably important place for careful, well chosen words that draw out pain and provide comfort for suffering people. I guess we could all work harder at learning the art of using those kinds of words. I’m working here to try and trace the foundations upon which we can speak those words and which make them comforting in a real and genuinely Christian way.

What I’m wondering about here is how our basic form of communication seems to be withdrawn from the person who suffers. We find that the only kinds of words that we can appropriately share with a suffering person are words that refer constantly to their suffering. We have a sense that to not do this would be to ignore the most significant fact about this person. But this means that in every conversation the sufferer is continually being marked out as different, separate, not part of the rest of us. No matter how much we are seeking to comfort, we are also fixing them in their pain, and excluding them from our blessing.
I’m also suggesting that our ordinary talk is perhaps under-recognised as our most comforting kind of talk. The ability to talk about ordinary things is an extra-ordinary act of trust in the simple goodness of God in sustaining and providing for our common life, and its an act of trust in the people we talk with, that we have shared interests, loves, and that we will stand and fall by them together. The suffering person has been wounded in this trust, and whenever trust is broken in one instance it threatens to overthrow all acts of trust. Which is why we are so keen to exclude the sufferer, to make him or her exceptional in some way. The question is, how do we talk to suffering people in a way that acknowledges their suffering but re-affirms that the promises of our community have not been withdrawn from them? The problem is intensified by the fact that the definitive word/acts that would re-affirm the promises of community cannot be spoken by us. We don’t have the strength to make that kind of guarantee. In fact, one of our most serious mistakes when confronted with a sufferer is to try.
What we need is to be able to say to the sufferer: “I see your suffering, I care about it. It is particular to you but it is also mine because the wound you have suffered to your trust also wounds mine. I also am a man of sorrows, the suffering I bear is particular to me, but my wound is also yours. I dwell in the eternal ‘yes’ of my Father, I have heard the word of affirmation whose writ runs right to the outer limits of hell. And I have believed it for us both. Would you like to come over for dinner?”

Only He can say it, but we can repeat it in him. Especially the bit about dinner.
For Christians, the word of affirmation spoken in the death and resurrection of Jesus enables us to gladly begin a new conversation, a ‘holy small talk’, which is the sharing of our common life in him. Through him we have a new foundation for our trust, a new hope, and thus a renewed ability to give ourselves in conversation. Actually, ‘holy small talk’ should be more properly thought of as ‘table talk’, the kind of words spoken over a shared meal. We can acknowledge suffering and still talk about our common joys. We can walk through the valley of the shadow and remark on the beauty of roses. We can be locked up in a Philippian gaol and singing choruses.

Image by the sea the sea

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Avert your eyes

Themes: On Suffering

as one from whom men hide their faces he was despised, and we esteemed him not. (Isaiah 53:3 ESV)

I was chatting with a friend a month or two ago about the difficulty I find talking with people who are affected by deep suffering. I know I’m not at all unique in this experience. Our ordinary conversation consists in the transaction of ordinary objects, the giving and receiving of plans for the day, eyes on the weather, stories of times when this or that happening happened to me. It’s easy in our sillier moments to disparage these mundane exchanges, to say we long for deeper, more heartfelt talk, for a discourse of epiphanies. I have nothing to say against these desires other than that they are about as sustainable as my desire to eat cheese for every meal.

Don’t despise the days of small things, or the conversations about small things that such days hold forth. Small talk is the patois of our common existence, a currency that implicitly speaks of the promises that bind us together. If you could flip the words and examine their undersides, I’m sure you would find a King’s head printed. Even a passing nod in an alley way is a moment of recognition by which I come to know myself as present for you. The exchange of small change over a counter is a tacit sharing of our common loves: here is a coin for our love of family; here is one for our love of beauty; here is one because we like to sleep in on weekends.

Much of what is good in this life is ephemeral and apparently trivial, it derives its only substantiality from a word of promise. It has precisely the same reality as a piece of paper money: a fragile little note that circulates trust. It’s hard to talk to a person who’s suffering precisely because the implicit promises that underwrite our daily conversations appear to have been broken in their particular case. In this case, the difficulty we feel about small talk is a pointer toward the threatened failure of our Big Talk.

The presence of the sufferer feels like a silent word of judgement upon the inadequacy of our common life. We were not able to protect this one, we could not ward off the predation of death from him or her. A black light radiates from them relativising and trivialising our common ends and means, unleashing the possibilities of desperation that would unravel our bonds of trust. Whatever the particular character of a sufferer’s affliction, it has this universal character of threat. Is it any wonder that I can’t look him in the eye?

Suffering gives birth to the individual. It is in the context of wrong that a person comes to understand him or herself as set apart from the community. The sufferer marks the frontier beyond which the currency of trust does not circulate. The promises which are foundational to community have not been honoured here and the inevitable impulse toward exclusion is the communal attempt to preserve trust by preserving imagination. It’s hard to look a suffering person in the face when they are a living word to you that speaks of your powerlessness and a universe of broken promises.

What is needed is an affirmation that comes first of all to the sufferer, the word of explicit and personal comfort, but also, without taking our eyes from his face, through the sufferer to all those watching on: to the mourners, the inarticulate friends, the fearful bystanders, and even the perpetrator. An affirmation that the promises upon which we base our daily acts of trust will be honoured, and will be honoured here. Who could say that word? Who could say it and be believed? Who could say it in such a way that we could repeat it, believing it and being believed?

We lament the distressing individualism of our Western societies. What we should mourn is the nature and depth of the wound which gives birth to the individual. And from this understanding we might be able to begin to realise the conditions under which we can hope and pray once again for the birth of the social.

“Rejoice, barren one, who did not give birth; burst into song and shout, you who have not been in labor! For the children of the forsaken one will be more than the children of the married woman,” says the LORD. “Enlarge the site of your tent, and let your tent curtains be stretched out; do not hold back; lengthen your ropes, and drive your pegs deep. For you will spread out to the right and to the left, and your descendants will dispossess nations and inhabit the desolate cities. (Isaiah 54:1–3 HCSB)

Image by D Sharon Pruitt

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The God of Hell

Themes: Doctrine, On Suffering, Selections

Someone I love has been deeply troubled lately by the thought of hell. It troubles me too.

Hell is an awful thing to believe in. It’s no wonder that most Christians, most of the time shy away from looking the doctrine full in the face. Does it mean that so many of the people sitting in the cafe with me, walking past on the footpath, pursuing their Saturday morning lives, are walking, shopping and sipping their way toward a place where they will be tortured forever? I can’t stand to watch even a dog being tortured, let alone allow myself to conceive of such horror.
I guess that’s why we tend to relegate Hell to our peripheral vision. The problem with such a stance is it’s easy to lose sight of the real Christian doctrine of hell, and get slipped a substitute instead.

There are all kinds of substitutes, lots of different ways of populating, depopulating, colouring, shading, and most importantly, relating God to Hell.

The worst kind of substitutes however, are those which leave nothing written upon the face of God other than hate and torture. That is a badly dehumanised God. It leaves him with nothing but naked violence, an emotionally dysfunctional cosmic sociopath. It leaves me afraid of his violence, like a child avoiding an abusive Father. How could he be so much less than us? That is a God with no glory. That isn’t God,
that’s a demon.

But is hell the absence of God? I used to think that, but no, that’s another inadequate substitute.

Hell is full of God.

However, we don’t start our thinking about Hell by reading whatever terrifying passages we might discover in Revelation or Isaiah. The Christian doctrine of Hell, like all our knowledge of God, starts with Jesus and finds its centre in The Cross.
There is a God in Hell, because first and above all else, Jesus went to Hell.

Whatever the wrath of God tastes like, Jesus has drunk that cup all the way to the end because that was his Father’s will (there’s no good God/bad God here).

Yes, he did that to substitute himself for us. He did it so that in his death those who trust him would have life. But that means that Jesus experienced something on the Cross that those who trust in him never will. He shared with those in Hell the truth of God’s wrath. He was abandoned by God and set among the sinners. He was their brother in death, just as he was their friend in life.

There is nothing more true, in life or death, than this:

God loves the damned.

He has demonstrated his own love for us in this, whatever hell there is, in this world or the next, whatever world of torment, you cannot suffer in a way that God has not already suffered. Even in Hell he has suffered with you and for you. You cannot escape him, you cannot go beyond him. NEVER EVER will you be greater than his love.

That is his glory.

Do not worship any other god, for the LORD, whose name is Jealous, is a jealous God. (Ex 34:14 NIV)

Your problem is that, probably because you’ve been a Christian for too long, you think that God loves you because you’re saved. But that’s not the gospel which you first heard. God saved you because he loves you with a love that’s entirely from within himself, and ultimately beyond comprehension. His love comes long, long before the saving. It was while we were still sinners, that Christ died for us.

That’s why I can believe in the God of Hell.

And that’s why I can keep holding on to hope for our family.

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Zen Bishop

Themes: Doctrine, On Suffering

The news has come rattling over the wires in the past week that a diocese of The Episcopal Church (part of the Anglican Church in America) has elected a Buddhist as Bishop-elect of the Diocese of Northern Michigan. The reality is probably not quite as exciting, here are his words,

I am quite honored, as an Episcopal priest, to have been trained in the art and practice of Zen meditation. I am not an ordained Buddhist priest. I am an Episcopal priest eternally grateful for the truth, beauty and goodness, experienced in meditation.
Kevin Thew Forrester, My Christian Faith & the Practice of Zen Buddhist Meditation, 25 February 2009

I have to admit being rather attracted to the idea of a Zen Bishop, particularly if he has awesome ninja skills, but that’s probably not the point.
So what is the point? (Other than that the Episcopalians are crazier than a crate-full of coconuts, which we already knew).

I’m interested because I’ve been thinking about the Christian understanding of suffering, and addressing suffering is at the heart of Zen practice. If being a Zen Christian really just meant embracing a series of meditation practices designed to promote focussed attention, I’m not sure that we shouldn’t all get on board. Retaining focussed attention and ‘slow consciousness’ (I made that up!) are fundamental challenges to those of us who live wedded to the endlessly branching and thus dissipating interweb.
I definitely need more Zen in my day.

The Zen Bishop again,

Literally thousands of Christians have been drawn to Zen Buddhism in particular because, distinct from western religions, it embodies a pragmatic philosophy and a focus on human suffering rather than a unique theology of God. “Lay ordination” has a different meaning in Buddhist practice than in the Christian tradition. The essence of this welcoming ceremony, which included no oaths, was my resolve to use the practice of meditation as a path to awakening to the truth of the reality of human suffering. Meditation deepens my dwelling in Christ.

Here is the problem: thinking that we can plug a Zen conception of suffering and its solutions into a Christian theology. It won’t work because the space isn’t vacant. Christianity already has a theology of suffering, more importantly, it has a theology of suffering that is an integral aspect of the Christian doctrines of God, humanity, and salvation, and is a key co-ordinate in Christian ethics. Further, the Zen conceptions of suffering, and the Christian understanding, while actually quite similar in their diagnoses of the problem, are worlds apart in their solutions.

I’ll come back to this but here’s a taster from the First Epistle of Peter. Peter is writing to a group of people who have likely been expelled from Rome by the Emperor Claudius. They are refugees, probably ethnically and religiously distinct from their host community (and thus a prime target for vilification and persecution). In the middle of the letter he begins to address particular groups within the Christian fellowship, he begins with the Slaves. You can’t get much lower down the food-chain than a homeless, ethnic, weirdo-religious Slave in the Roman empire.
And for their comfort and encouragement he writes:

For you were called to this, because Christ also suffered for you, leaving you an example, so that you should follow in His steps. (1Peter 2:21 HCSB)

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