Suffering: To alleviate or to embrace?
That is the question! Vince reflects personally and intellectually on how a good, full life seems to involve BOTH a commitment to alleviating suffering AND an embrace of the inevitability of suffering. What do we do with that? How does one hold that tension? Jesus' life and ministry offer needed insights.
SPEAKER NOTES
Suffering: To alleviate or to embrace?
Starting point
As our kids get older, I find myself thinking about my and my wife Keziah’s freshman years of high school.
My freshman year:
- mom dying of cancer, and I just sort of began drifting.
- No one who is 15 years old knows how to grieve.
- I got the worst grades I’d ever get in high school that year.
- A lonely self-reliance became a core part of my identity.
- Those who are there for me may not be here tomorrow, so I need to take care of myself.
Keziah’s freshman year:
- having lived abroad for middle school, she moved across the world, back to Chicago, leaving all her friends
- suddenly thrust into a Chicago Public high school culture being totally uninitiated in pop culture (which determines whether you’re an insider or an outsider when you’re that age),
- long, lonely train ride commutes,
- probably clinically depressed without knowing it.
Extremely hard, AND YET our freshman years formed us in huge ways toward who we are today — as people who are resilient, who are attentive to suffering (around us, around the world), who are able to find perspective in the midst of our own hardship.
- Today, as someone nearing 40, I can experience what feels to me like an extremely difficult season or year, and not be scandalized by that, not become bitter or resentful —
- I don’t feel entitled to a life free from suffering (a uniquely modern phenomenon) because I’ve been there before, and I know I can get through it.
- I can see what is happening in Gaza, and hold space for that horrifying reality — not try to hide from it because suffering makes me uncomfortable.
Those are capacities I want my kids to develop, and values we want to intentionally pass on.
BUT the number one thing that formed those in us was suffering.
OBVIOUSLY I don’t wish for my kids to lose one of us or go through a long bout of depression or live in a war zone.
OBVIOUSLY I’m glad to live in a time when there is relatively less suffering than ages past because of science, technology, medicine, and a greater understanding of prejudice and power and oppression.
OBVIOUSLY I would do whatever I can to protect my kids from what feels like needless suffering, because that’s an innate part of being a parent.
But there IS a tension.
Because, one way or another, we all will experience suffering, my kids included. We must learn to embrace that inevitability and not be doomed to bitterness or resentment or despair when it comes our way.
A good, full life is a tension of “alleviating suffering” & “embracing suffering”.
Exploring the tension
This tension is all over our lives (beyond just parents thinking about their kids).
The hard part of the tension for Modern Americans is more the “embrace” side than the “alleviate” side.
- People who are trying to pursue a good life in our society don’t need to be convinced to try to alleviate their suffering —
- That comes naturally to us in our medically and scientifically and technologically advanced age
- BUT we can feel uncomfortable with the suggestion that embracing suffering is necessary for a full life.
- That’s more of an eastern insight than a western one
- Embrace chronic illness?
- Embrace the death of a loved one?
- Embrace the failure of a relationship or dream?
- Embrace an experience of abuse?
- No! We might think. Suffering should always be evaded! Or fought! Never tolerated!
- In progressive circles, we may feel uncomfortable with this because we’ve learned to center the experience of victims,
- we might feel worried this is telling abused or oppressed people to “just keep being good victims and embrace your suffering”
- we might feel worried this is telling despairing people “there’s nothing we can do for you”
- Is that what is meant by “embrace suffering”?
- I don’t think so, but that’s a legitimate worry! What is the difference?
- Or another question really important to me as a person of faith is
- Does embracing suffering mean we are accepting instances of suffering as God’s will?
- Like, is the reason I should embrace the suffering of losing my mom to cancer because God willed it, and so, mysteriously, it’s actually a good thing? It’s just that God’s ways are not our ways?
- I DON’T believe that! But then what DO I believe about suffering and God's relationship to it, if it’s not that?
Caveats to possibly address
- Statistically average person vs. the small number outside the bell curve
- Harm/abuse/suffering vs trauma (a word we use a little too freely, so it loses its clinical meaning — I’m definitely guilty of this)
- Part of poverty in America (Desmond) is the privileged alleviating some of their suffering by forcing the poor to embrace more
I wonder how we all relate to this?
- As you think about your life.
- Or as you think about people you love, young or old.
Was there hardship in your youth that you had to learn to embrace, and formed in you resilience, empathy, or perspective? Or were you mostly protected from hardship?
How did that go? What was positive about your experience? What was under-represented in your experience?
What is your knee-jerk emotional response to suffering today?
- Does it feel like something that should be alleviated?
- Does it feel like something that should be embraced?
- Does it feel like a bit of both?
What questions does this bring up for you? (Please share in the chat!)
Jesus as a model
So I wanted to make this tension our topic at church for the next month or so, because Jesus strikes me as a such a compelling holder of the tension.
- Jesus’ self-professed mission, the Kingdom of God, is a mission of alleviating suffering —
- to heal the sick, set the captives free, include the outcast…
- Jesus picks grain on the Sabbath when he and his disciples are hungry, even though he is not supposed to, he retreats from the crowds to refuel
- And yet, at the same time, one of the key things that makes Jesus inspiring, faithful, credible to take seriously is how he embraces the inevitability of suffering —
- particularly in his crucifixion
So we’re going to meditate on Jesus’ holding of this tension over the next several Sundays to help us do the same.
On dialectics, and Jesus as synthesis
Meditating on a tension to arrive at a new, deeper truth is sometimes called a “dialectic”
- Dialectics are used in the social sciences and in debate
- Also in psychology — perhaps you’ve heard of dialectical behavioral therapy or DBT
- In a dialectic, there is a thesis, then an antithesis, and a deeper truth is found in a synthesis of the two — not a choosing one or the other, but using both to develop something new
- That’s what we’re going to do ==dialectic visual==
- “alleviate your suffering” is the Modern Western World’s usual thesis
- “embrace your suffering” is the antithesis (from Eastern thought, or that life seems to teach us sometimes, like my and Keziah’s freshman years… or your own stories of this)
- Jesus is going to be our synthesis of the two —
- showing us how to hold the tension to arrive at a new, deeper truth
- showing us how a Living God helps us do that
==Hayley on systhesis?==
Jesus’ prayer in Gethsemane the night before his crucifixion is the perfect example:
- “Not my will but yours be done,”
- That's embrace suffering language
- To be clear, from our view, what Jesus is embracing is NOT that God's will is for Jesus to die to appease divine wrath (which unfortunately is often implied in church settings)
- This is Jesus acknowledging that it is, sadly, the people’s will for someone to die to appease the human desire for a scapegoat,
- and Jesus accept God’s call on his life even if it includes choosing to be a scapegoat willingly so that the poor and marginalized of his day aren’t scapegoated instead.
- So, in his embrace of his suffering, Jesus alleviates others’ suffering.
- That’s the tension held together right there
- (I mean, what if there was a self-sacrificial model in Palestine right now like Jesus’ model in 1st century Palestine? — Rather than the “our suffering is more justified than theirs” models we see — How would things be different?)
- We also see Jesus holding the tension in Gethsemane with his prayer: “if it is possible, may this cup be taken from me…”
- He prays honestly from the heart for the alleviation of his own suffering
- It’s not possible in this case for his prayer to be answered, because the demand for a scapegoat has gotten out of hand
- But in praying this honestly, he experiences a profound connection with God and consolation
- Jesus’ prayer is honest and bold, yet open handed and mature,
- Not pinning his hopes to an imaginary future free of suffering, or to a fragile image of God
- (who better answer or else!)
- But also not pretending to not be affected by his pain or anguish
- (like us, when we’re passive aggressive about our suffering)
- It’s a model for praying the dialectic
Prayer
Maybe one of the biggest things that makes it hard for modern Americans to embrace suffering, and not only work to alleviate it, is that we just don’t have enough opportunities to slow down and experience the time it takes to feel God meet us in our acts of “courage to be”.
- Because everyday modern life is so fast and demanding and driven by winning and ascending in the marketplace or on social media
- There’s no time for suffering
- Because everyday modern life is a barrage of opportunities to alleviate our suffering
- in lots of good and important ways
- but also in lots of unhelpful ways that are actually empty promises
- we see 4 to 10 thousand ads a day! And often this is the formula: describe something as suffering (even if it’s more of an inconvenience) and here’s how to alleviate it
- Or maybe because we just don’t know what “embracing suffering with God” looks like,
- Often the pictures of God or spiritual experience that have been painted for us don’t seem believable in light of modern science,
- or aren’t attractive enough to have yielded a strong prayer life for us
- Those are very real challenges
- And we want BLC to be a place that meets people in those modern challenges
So, as always, I’d like to pray for us.
- To give us some space RIGHT NOW where we can experience, whether for the first time or for the n’th time (because we will always continue to need it),
- a God who you can actually perceive in your mind and body carrying you through suffering if you embrace it.
- that God is worthy of your prayer life
- and that God is NOT an affront to modern scientific understanding
- I’d like you to call to mind a loss or meaninglessness or failure or betrayal or relational strain or ailment or limitation
- that feels unresolved, unfinished, unprocessed
- Could be current, could be from a long time ago
- I encourage you to try to identify something that is
- larger than a circumstantial stress —
- when we’re talking about suffering today, we’re talking about things that rock you existentially —
- the things that feel like they threaten your identity
- but not something so large that it isn’t deeply personal…
- so don’t call to mind right now a massive global suffering like the war in Gaza, unless you know someone personally who is in danger in Gaza - then that is personal
- NOT because we don’t care about that, or because we don’t want to pray for that
- Of course we do! But we can’t embrace other people’s suffering for them, we can only embrace our own suffering
- And we’re believing that if we do, that will fuel any prayer or action God is calling us to for alleviating suffering for others
- So let’s stay deeply personal for the moment…
- larger than a circumstantial stress —
- I’ll give us a minute to call something to mind, and then I’m going to pray for us.