Suffering & Perspective

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What is it behind the most inspiring stories we know of people embracing suffering? Vince wonders if it's a certain kind of perspective that's hard for modern Western people to learn. But it still can be! (Photo by Adrian Swancar on Unsplash)

SPEAKER NOTES

Suffering & Perspective

Intro

I wanted to start today sharing a handful of memories with a common thread.

I remember driving a friend to chemotherapy.

And asking them “how are you?”
And I remember them just exuding peace. “I’m really okay. I can’t explain it. It feels like it must be God. Because I feel okay. It’s scary. But I’m okay.”
That simple car conversation will forever stay with me.

I remember eating at Fireside on Ravenswood with a friend, talking about the worst failure of their life

And the remarkable comfort they displayed talking about their worst decisions, their biggest regrets, their deepest hurts.
The realness yet gentleness and hope in their voice.
And hearing how they’d discovered at the end of themself more love than they ever imagined — from God, from themselves, from the people who stayed with them through the failure.
I think it’s the most genuine humility I’ve ever experienced in person from someone.

I remember pacing in my room on the phone with an old mentor

I was in a season of feeling betrayed by people who were once close friends
And my mentor shared with great calm about a time he had experienced the same, and how deeply painful it was,
and yet here he is
There was no minimizing of my pain — no “you’ll get over it”,
No attempt to explain away the problem with religious-ey language, like “God must have allowed this for some greater purpose”
Yet there was also no wavering in his resolve that I would eventually be okay.
How did he do that? How did he neither spiritually bypass my pain? Nor leave me settling for despair?
What had he learned?

I remember hearing Fr. Greg Boyle speak once

Anyone know Fr. Greg Boyle?
Jesuit Priest in LA, founder of Homeboy industries. A hero of mine.
He passed on the story of a young man he’d come to know who, after years of being abused and passing on that abuse in gang-related activity, experienced encounters with Jesus
And the young man’s incredible reflection was:
“I used to be afraid of my wounds. Now my wounds are my friends.”
I remember immediately that beautiful turn of phrase lodging itself in me — it has been a guiding principle for me since

What is behind all these memories is what I want to talk about today.

Context

Our series of messages right now is trying to intentionally engage the difficulty, yet beauty, of stories like these —

To talk about suffering
And the way we’ve tried to do that is to talk about how there is a tension of response to suffering inherent to a good, full life
- To Alleviate suffering
- To Embrace suffering
We’ve used the concept of a dialectic to talk about that tension ::dialectic::
Truth is not choosing one side or the other but letting deeper truth emerge from holding the tension
And we’ve talked about Jesus as a model of a synthesis of the two
- Jesus’ self-professed mission is the Kingdom of God — a mission of alleviating suffering
- And yet, in his crucifixion, Jesus profoundly embraces the inevitable suffering that comes his way that can’t be alleviated or prevented
- Responding to BOTH calls is where we find a good, full life — where we find God

I have suggested multiple times so far in this series that “alleviate” comes more naturally to people like us in the modern Western world

Our usual knee jerk response to suffering (our own or somebody else’s) is to alleviate it, or to try problem solve to prevent it happening again in the future
With medicine, with technology, with life hacks, with charity, with a meal train, with social justice efforts…
if we’re a praying person, probably our instinctive concept of prayer is prayer for the alleviation of suffering
Alleviate comes very naturally to us Modern people
And it is SO good and important! It is one side of the dialectic
But what doesn’t come as naturally is “embrace”
When we see it or hear about it, like in these memories I’ve shared,
- we intuitively get how important and needed and beautiful and powerful it is…
- but it doesn’t instinctively flow out of us modern Westerners.
This is NOT JUST because it’s a universal human challenge that is always a struggle, no matter what era or culture we’re talking about
- that IS the case, but that’s not the whole story
- It is important to understand why uniquely the Modern West has difficulty embracing suffering
- What is it about our culture? ::dialectic OFF::

The Contraction of the Present

To explain… welcome to another “history corner” with Vince…

Today’s “history corner” is the history of what people mean when they talk about the “the present” ::present::

as in “the present” not “the past”
- did you know that that has profoundly changed over the last 500 years?
- you may recall from our series last fall we talked about how the story of the Modern World (the last 500 years) is a story of time speeding up.
- This is part of that story
- Sociologist Hartmut Rosa calls a society’s concept of the present “the rate of social decay” —
  - how fast it feels like the present decays and becomes the past
Pre-Modern world (all of time before like 500 years ago)
- The sense of the present was Intergenerational
  - It took a LOOONG time for the present to decay and be considered the past
  - The present was not just my lifetime, but my parents’ and grandparents’ lifetimes and maybe even beyond — all those lifetimes that made up the current age of my people and heritage
  - My life is about preserving the legacy of my people.
  - Land is passed down and marriages are arranged to facilitate that.
  - When the present is intergenerational, the stories of highest importance are those chronicling our ancestors’ cycles of struggle and overcoming, and how they mirror our own
Modernity (starting about 500 years ago)
- The sense of the present shifts to Generational
  - With the dawning of a money economy and then capitalism, and the industrial revolution speeding up society,
  - the “present” starts decaying and feeling like the past faster
  - Now status and wealth are not perceived to be about what is passed down, but about the money I earn in my lifetime
  - (this is "The American Dream” narrative of “anyone can make it big”)
  - Love marriages for the sake of my lifetime become the norm, replacing arranged marriages for the sake of an intergenerational legacy.
  - The stories that matter are not the stories tying the current generation to their ancestors, but the stories about heroic single lifetimes! The one who worked long and hard to pull themself up by their bootstraps, who found true love.
  - Now when I speak of the present, I’m speaking of my lifetime, not the legacy of my parents’ or grandparents’ lifetimes — that’s the past!
Late Modernity (post WW II and post 1960s cultural revolution)
- The sense of the present shifts again to Intragenerational
  - The rate of the present decaying and feeling like the past is getting even faster
  - Unprecedented consumer prosperity changes the calculations for “what a full life” looks like for Americans
  - The advent of birth control separates sex from generational commitment
  - The pace of transportation and communication and production is getting so fast, and the draw to the “new” is becoming so strong (a new car, a new career, a new home)...
  - We start to get the phenomenon of the mid-life crisis... the length of time of a whole generation now feels way too long a unit to consider the “present”!
  - Are you crazy!? That’s too stifling — The stories we tell now are about reinventing ourselves midway through life, how someone courageously threw off duty and expectation to forge a new path, started a whole new life
  - The present is a unit of time among many other units within one generation — not my whole lifetime!
Trace this down to 2024,
- the age of the Internet and social media and the ever-accelerating news cycles, what do we consider “the present moment” now?
- I mean, more than intragenerational… I don’t even know what the word would be… the present is this year, this season, this week even!

Hartmut Rosa summarizes this history saying our sense of “the present” has contracted

This is not bad or good. It just is. There are lots of positives about our contracted present.
But one challenge is: it’s hard to have a long perspective on our experiences of suffering ::present OFF::
- to step back and see what’s happening now as part of a longer timeline, of ups and downs, trials and triumphs
- not in a way that minimizes our current experience, but in a way that builds a foundation for it to stand on
- that helps us contextualize and imagine the future more creatively
- I asked earlier about these stand-out stories of embracing suffering I shared:
  - what had they learned? what is behind their inspiring peace and equanimity?
  - I think it’s long perspective on their experiences.
- If you come from a marginalized ethnic or cultural background,
  - that is something that can mitigate the contraction of the present and keep long perspective in your life,
  - because it’s so vital for marginalized identity formation to stay tied to one’s past
- But, in general, long perspective is hard to learn in our culture
It's easy to have wide perspective on our current moment ::long vs wide::
- That’s for sure! No current event or happening in our circles escapes our eye today because of globalization and the Internet and social media
- BUT wide perspective doesn’t necessarily help us embrace suffering,
  - Travel and cross-cultural experiences, especially encountering severe poverty, can be a version of wide perspective that can form us toward embracing suffering
  - IF we’re privileged enough to be able to have access to such experiences
- In general, though, the wide perspective of the modern world (where anything can be googled) makes us more frantic not more accepting,
  - It inflames comparison and reactivity and hyperbole
  - The opposites of equanimity and wisdom
- We feel like we have SO MUCH perspective, but it’s only one-dimensional
- It’s only a wide perspective on the current moment, not a long perspective on life over time
We have a hard time seeing the larger picture of a whole life lived
- that inevitably includes things like death, failure, tragedy, setbacks
- which people saw more readily when the present was generational,
Let alone the larger picture of a legacy or heritage
- that inevitably includes things like conflict, strife, evil, struggle, cycles of life
- which people saw more readily when the present was intergenerational.
It’s uncomfortable to acknowledge, but part of this is war not being a close-at-hand fact of life for late modern westerners like us
- Witnessing up close the horrors of war ties you to the existential struggles of the generations that came before you
- I’m personally SO thankful to live in a time and space in which war is not in my immediate proximity, in which I and my kids are very unlikely to ever be required by law to do military service
- But there is, in an uncomfortable way, a loss there - of long perspective
  - We’re aware of war (all too well right now) with our wide perspective.
  - But we don’t know it by proximity, by experience ::long vs wide OFF::

And so,

In our lack of long perspective,
- We are unpracticed in considering the inevitability of struggle, conflict, death, failure, tragedy
- Combine that with our good ability to alleviate suffering,
  - which again is great!
- but then we can, without realizing it, turn our instinct to alleviate into an instinct to avoid
- We can reflexively operate as though any suffering is to be run from
- or managed away
- or prayed away
- or explained away
- We shelter young people from its existence
I wonder:
- Do you notice avoiding in you? (I often avoid by coping with food or drink or entertainment or busyness on another task)
- Or do you notice a desire to avoid someone else who you know is in pain because you’re not sure what to say?
- Do you notice explaining away in you?
  - Like a discomfort to sit in pain too long, so you cut the tension with a line like “but, yeah, things are okay, really!”….
  - Or like a desire to “tie everything up neatly”? — with a scripture like “well, in all things God works for those who love him, so… this must be God’s will”
- Is the only conception of prayer you can imagine a “praying away of suffering” that maybe starts to feel inadequate and dissatisfying, so you don’t even want to pray?
- If you have kids, do you notice a drive to shelter your kids from scary or uncertain or bad news? (Like about a family member who is sick? Or violence in the world, like what’s happening in Gaza?)
The risk in these is that
- we or our kids hit some big turning point (adulthood or middle age or something) or face struggle or failure or the death of a loved one or evil or injustice for the first time on our own
- and feel
  - either utterly overwhelmed and unable to cope healthily
  - or bitter, having developed an entitlement to not have to suffer, so every difficulty is an offense to our being, or proof that life is meaningless and there is no hope or God or purpose
- Do either of those sound like places you’ve ever visited?

What’s a way forward?

Something important has been lost in Late Modernity — a long perspective,

which we want to recover,

But also it’s not like the world was grand and great and just and perfect in the past! We don’t want to go back — we want to move forward!

Are there ways (that aren’t proximity to war) that people today can more sustainably and nonviolently help our selves and our young people develop long perspective so we can better embrace the inevitability of suffering that can’t be alleviated or prevented?

If I can pass on one more memory, I’ve experienced a way spirituality can help.

I have a lot of history with a phrase from the Bible that we sang today ::scripture::

All flesh is like the grass, the grass withers and fades away. The glory of man like a flower, that shrivels in the sun and falls. But the word of the Lord endures forever.

This is in the Hebrew Bible, in the Prophet Isaiah, and it’s quoted in the New Testament, in 1 Peter.
I remember my first experience of it was sort of like: “wow, kind of a killjoy” — I’m sure I had picked up subconsciously messages from popular American Christianity about humans being worthless worms, and on the surface this refrain can be taken to support that
But my experience of this scripture is like the song on the album that doesn’t immediately grab you but eventually becomes your favorite
Mostly through hearing Keziah, my wife, listen in our house from time to time to the sung version of this scripture (that she led today), it started to burrow it’s way into me
And one day, I remember, it felt like an encounter with God listening to the song — the power in it clicked for me.
It’s the power of long perspective.
I, and every person, am like grass, like a flower.
- Not at all ugly. Not at all worthless!
- Beautiful! Glorious!
  - Think of spring in Chicago! This scripture is not calling us worms; it’s calling us beautiful and glorious.
- But only for a short season in the grand scheme of time.
- Inevitably, grass fades and withers, flowers shrivel and fall…
- Inevitably, our lives include suffering.
  - Sometimes it’s understandable, like the limitations our bodies experience as we get older, or the death of our ego as we mature or get humbled, or the natural consequence of a bad choice we made
  - Sometimes it’s unfair; it’s just random chance, or it’s the result of genuine evil, or injustice, or others’ harmful choices
  - Inevitably grass fades and flowers shrivel
- And that is nothing to be ashamed of or afraid of.
- For the Word of the Lord endures forever,
  - the activity of God in the world,
  - the moment-to-moment loving attention and care of God,
  - demonstrated for me in the life of Jesus,
  - interacting with me by God’s Spirit,
  - That “word of the Lord” endures forever
- God is pleased to sustain me for my short season in the grand scheme of time,
  - is pleased to carry the memory of me forward to nourish those who come after me,
  - just as was done with the memories of those who came before me to nourish me
- I am a small yet beloved part of a long story
  - The tone of this is NOT a message of: Quit overblowing your pain, you whiner! You’re so small and insignificant, so just get over it.
  - It is NOT condescending: be a patient sufferer now because God is allowing this for your good
  - Just the opposite tone; it’s a message of: God, your fellow experiencer in everything, feels with you how much this hurts.
    - There is a long story arc here that can handle this kind of hurt,
    - God, the God Jesus shows who knows suffering well, has incorporated this kind of hurt before into the narrative — redeeming it
    - and God can do that again for you
This scripture has fed me so much
- The song comes on, or I come across the scripture somewhere, and I feel instantly a reminder to take a deep breath. My body relaxes. I feel calm.
- Meditating on this scripture has been a path for me to the kind of long perspective that has so inspired me in people I've known that have learned to embrace the inevitable suffering in their lives. ::scirpture off::

Ending

I wonder if you can think again of any ways you notice in yourself

avoidance of suffering
explaining away suffering
dissatisfying obsession with trying to pray away suffering
desire to protect the kids around you from any exposure to suffering

I wonder if spiritual meditation on ancient wisdom

(like I've just modeled with this scripture, or could with many others)
is one of the key ways people like us — in our age of a contracted present — can recover the long perspective we need to embrace suffering that can’t be alleviated or prevented.
It would makes sense, because meditation, as a practice, is the opposite of keeping pace with the speed of modern life.
It is an attempt to get off the conveyor belt, get behind the waterfall, for a moment.
Could you feel how this one short refrain could be opened up and reveal more and more layers of comfort, encouragement, and connection with God the more I stayed with it?
That’s meditation. Staying with something, getting all the juice out of the fruit. Like my 7 year old eating every last bit of a slice of watermelon up to the green rind.
This is a way people have experienced God for centuries, and perhaps it is a particularly important practice for the Modern West.

Let me lead us in prayer, in that meditative spirit…

PSALM 144

3 Lord, what are human beings that you care for them,

mere mortals that you think of them?

4 They are like a breath;

their days are like a fleeting shadow.

1 Peter, Isaiah, PsalmsVincent BrackettJanuary 30, 2024SufferingComment