It is easier to give when we see pictures of disaster or when our heartstrings are tugged by someone forlorn. It is easy to understand the psychology of our reaction: seeing pain or suffering we want to alleviate it, and the closer the person suffering is to us, either spatially or in a relationship, the more our desire to help. But understanding why we are more prone to help our own doesn't relieve us of the responsibility to also help those who are not ours.
There are always people in need. We cannot escape our obligation to help them, even when we do not know who or where they are, or why they suffer. If we have received God's grace, we must share it. Not to share it would be to receive it ungratefully.
James Faulconer, "What Can I Do?", Speaking Silence
Showing posts with label Suffering. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Suffering. Show all posts
Thursday, July 11, 2013
James Faulconer - Suffering With God
Paul tells us that life in the Spirit results in becoming part of the family of God, joint heirs with his Son. He says, "The Spirit itself beareth witness with our spirit, that we are the children of God: and if children, then heirs; heirs of God, and joint-heirs with Christ; if so be that we suffer with him, that we may be also glorified together" (Rom. 8:16-17).
The glory of the divine inheritance provided to the disciple of Jesus Christ is wondrous, but the condition put on that bequest is puzzling: "if so be that we suffer with him." Divine glory requires not only the divine suffering in the Garden of Gethsemane and on the cross. It also requires our suffering with the Son.
The Doctrine and Covenants, a collection of revelations to Joseph Smith, tells us why the Lord suffered: "I, God, have suffered these things for all, that they might not suffer if they would repent" (D&C 19:16). Yet it responds to our demand for an explanation of our suffering, not with a method for escaping suffering or a claim that we do not really suffer, but with this rhetorical question: "The Son of Man hath descended below them all. Art thou greater than he?" (D&C 122:8). If even God himself, the Son of God, cannot escape suffering, how should we expect to do so?
God weeps at our pain and our death. He also, and probably more so, weeps at our sinfulness.
Enoch's response to God's sorrow—the way in which he becomes like God—is to weep like God.
To be like God is to suffer with him on the behalf of others. It is not to weep only with those who weep because they have been wounded (Mosiah 18:9), though that is essential. It also is to weep, as God does in Enoch's vision, for those who wound. It is to take responsibility for the sinner as well as the sinned-against.
Divine power is the power to feel pain with and for others, the power to feel pain and sorrow. To be in the family of God is to accept suffering as Jesus did. It is to respond to God's suffering as Enoch did. We too must stretch forth our arms. Our hearts too must swell wide as eternity. Our bowels also must yearn until eternity shakes. Like Enoch, like God, we must weep for humankind.
Only if we stretch and swell and yearn and weep as God does can we do what those who suffer need. Our righteousness requires our suffering. The redemption of anyone or everyone, whether temporal or spiritual redemption, requires our weeping.
-James Faulconer, "Suffer With Him", Speaking Silence.
The glory of the divine inheritance provided to the disciple of Jesus Christ is wondrous, but the condition put on that bequest is puzzling: "if so be that we suffer with him." Divine glory requires not only the divine suffering in the Garden of Gethsemane and on the cross. It also requires our suffering with the Son.
The Doctrine and Covenants, a collection of revelations to Joseph Smith, tells us why the Lord suffered: "I, God, have suffered these things for all, that they might not suffer if they would repent" (D&C 19:16). Yet it responds to our demand for an explanation of our suffering, not with a method for escaping suffering or a claim that we do not really suffer, but with this rhetorical question: "The Son of Man hath descended below them all. Art thou greater than he?" (D&C 122:8). If even God himself, the Son of God, cannot escape suffering, how should we expect to do so?
God weeps at our pain and our death. He also, and probably more so, weeps at our sinfulness.
Enoch's response to God's sorrow—the way in which he becomes like God—is to weep like God.
To be like God is to suffer with him on the behalf of others. It is not to weep only with those who weep because they have been wounded (Mosiah 18:9), though that is essential. It also is to weep, as God does in Enoch's vision, for those who wound. It is to take responsibility for the sinner as well as the sinned-against.
Divine power is the power to feel pain with and for others, the power to feel pain and sorrow. To be in the family of God is to accept suffering as Jesus did. It is to respond to God's suffering as Enoch did. We too must stretch forth our arms. Our hearts too must swell wide as eternity. Our bowels also must yearn until eternity shakes. Like Enoch, like God, we must weep for humankind.
Only if we stretch and swell and yearn and weep as God does can we do what those who suffer need. Our righteousness requires our suffering. The redemption of anyone or everyone, whether temporal or spiritual redemption, requires our weeping.
-James Faulconer, "Suffer With Him", Speaking Silence.
Monday, July 1, 2013
Adam S. Miller - Religion and the Two Faces of Grace
Religion corrects for our farsightedness. It addresses the invisibility of objects that are commonly too familiar, too available, too immanent to be seen. To this end, it intentionally cultivates nearsightedness. Religion practices myopia in order to bring both work and suffering into focus as grace. Redemption turns on this revelation.
...
Double-bound, grace has two faces. On the one hand, grace presents as the ceaseless work required by the multitude's resistance. On the other hand, grace presents as the unavoidable suffering imposed by our passibility. Work is grace seen from the perspective of resistance. Suffering is grace seen from the perspective of availability. Hell is when the grace of either slips from view. Work and suffering are the two faces of Grace.
...
The business of religion is "to disappoint, first, to disappoint" (TF 32). Religion aims to intentionally, relentlessly, and systematically disappoint this desire to go away by bringing our attention back to the most obvious features of the most ordinary objects. Its work is to bring us up short by revealing our desire to be done with the double-bind of grace. To disappoint this drive, "to divert it, break it, subvert it, to render it impossible, is just what religious talk is after (TF 32). Habitually, we smooth over the rough edges, downplay the invompatible lines, and fantasize that the relative availability of a black box depends on something other than the unruly mobs packed-away inside. Sin is the dream of an empty black box, of a black box that is absolute rather than relative, permanent rather than provisional. Sin repurposes the obscurity imposed by ta black box for the sake of obscuring grace. In this way, sin is as natural as the habits upon which substances rely. But in religious practices, "incredible pain has been taken to break the habitual gaze of the viewer" (TF 39). Great effor is expended to show work and suffering as something other than regrettable. "Religion, in this tradition, does everything to constantly redirect attention by systematically breaking the will to go away, to ignore, to be indifferent, blasé, bored" (TF 36).
Mark this definition: religion is what breaks our will to go away.
...
...This revelation of the ordinary as a grace already given, as a life already being lived, is nothing exceptional, but it is something that must be enacted. It is a revelationt aht must be practiced. Attention is difficult to exercise, it resists focus and is available for distraction. It is a little bit subtle and requires great care. Religion, rather than fleeing, practices attending. It bends the flight of our attention back toward the ground that's already bracing us.
Adam S. Miller, Speculative Grace, pgs. 143-145
...
Double-bound, grace has two faces. On the one hand, grace presents as the ceaseless work required by the multitude's resistance. On the other hand, grace presents as the unavoidable suffering imposed by our passibility. Work is grace seen from the perspective of resistance. Suffering is grace seen from the perspective of availability. Hell is when the grace of either slips from view. Work and suffering are the two faces of Grace.
...
The business of religion is "to disappoint, first, to disappoint" (TF 32). Religion aims to intentionally, relentlessly, and systematically disappoint this desire to go away by bringing our attention back to the most obvious features of the most ordinary objects. Its work is to bring us up short by revealing our desire to be done with the double-bind of grace. To disappoint this drive, "to divert it, break it, subvert it, to render it impossible, is just what religious talk is after (TF 32). Habitually, we smooth over the rough edges, downplay the invompatible lines, and fantasize that the relative availability of a black box depends on something other than the unruly mobs packed-away inside. Sin is the dream of an empty black box, of a black box that is absolute rather than relative, permanent rather than provisional. Sin repurposes the obscurity imposed by ta black box for the sake of obscuring grace. In this way, sin is as natural as the habits upon which substances rely. But in religious practices, "incredible pain has been taken to break the habitual gaze of the viewer" (TF 39). Great effor is expended to show work and suffering as something other than regrettable. "Religion, in this tradition, does everything to constantly redirect attention by systematically breaking the will to go away, to ignore, to be indifferent, blasé, bored" (TF 36).
Mark this definition: religion is what breaks our will to go away.
...
...This revelation of the ordinary as a grace already given, as a life already being lived, is nothing exceptional, but it is something that must be enacted. It is a revelationt aht must be practiced. Attention is difficult to exercise, it resists focus and is available for distraction. It is a little bit subtle and requires great care. Religion, rather than fleeing, practices attending. It bends the flight of our attention back toward the ground that's already bracing us.
Adam S. Miller, Speculative Grace, pgs. 143-145
Monday, June 24, 2013
...to be is to be passible. God is no exception to this rule. God, should such an object exist, would be one being, one particularly complex multiple, that composes, is composed of, and is in interdependent relation with many other objects. Like every other object, God would be available, passible, resistant, and graced by the unavoidability of hard work.
This last point about the link between grace and passibility is crucial to the experiment I've undertaken because it fundamentally reframes the problem of suffering. To say that grace unfolds as the exceptionless universality of passibility is to say that grace guarantees the universality of suffering. Moreover, it is to say that the imposition of suffering (classically understood as the problem) and the reception of grace (classically understood as the answer to this problem) are equivocal....both sin and salvation turn on this equivocity.
However, whatever the nature of salvation, suffering, because it names the double-bind of resistant availability constitutive of every object, cannot be expunged. To be is to suffer and, outside of classical theism, suffering must characterize both activity and passibility. Available for relation, every object passively suffers its passibility to being enlisted, entrained, repurposed, or redistributed by other objects. Moreover, even in actively influencing other multiples, each object will suffer the only partially reducible resistance of those objects it means to influence. And it is important to note that, because every object (God included) must also suffer itself.
This universality, though, is not simply bad news because suffering is the universal mark of grace. Without exception, grace comes. Suffering it to be so, grace is what enables us to act, think, feel, love, an be.
Adam S. Miller, Speculative Grace, pg. 80-81
This last point about the link between grace and passibility is crucial to the experiment I've undertaken because it fundamentally reframes the problem of suffering. To say that grace unfolds as the exceptionless universality of passibility is to say that grace guarantees the universality of suffering. Moreover, it is to say that the imposition of suffering (classically understood as the problem) and the reception of grace (classically understood as the answer to this problem) are equivocal....both sin and salvation turn on this equivocity.
However, whatever the nature of salvation, suffering, because it names the double-bind of resistant availability constitutive of every object, cannot be expunged. To be is to suffer and, outside of classical theism, suffering must characterize both activity and passibility. Available for relation, every object passively suffers its passibility to being enlisted, entrained, repurposed, or redistributed by other objects. Moreover, even in actively influencing other multiples, each object will suffer the only partially reducible resistance of those objects it means to influence. And it is important to note that, because every object (God included) must also suffer itself.
This universality, though, is not simply bad news because suffering is the universal mark of grace. Without exception, grace comes. Suffering it to be so, grace is what enables us to act, think, feel, love, an be.
Adam S. Miller, Speculative Grace, pg. 80-81
Grace is suffered in that it is passively received rather than actively controlled...There are no exceptions to the rule of availability, interdependence, co-composition, passibility, and passivity. This means in turn, that there are no exceptions to the rule of grace. Every object is shaped by forces and relations that exceed its knowledge and control. Every object suffers the conditioning and enabling gifts of the other objects that compose, sustain, and cannibalize it.
Adam S. Miller, Speculative Grace, pg. 79
Adam S. Miller, Speculative Grace, pg. 79
Monday, May 6, 2013
Happiness emerges from being fully sentient and fully alive, which only means that it comes with being a sufferer. Which raises the question: Is it a weakness to want happiness? In some categorical sense, the answer is obviously no. But it is if we want it like a drug, if we feel anger or betrayal when it slips from our hands, if we feel that it is something we can control or demand.
George Handley, "Patience in Suffering"
George Handley, "Patience in Suffering"
Tuesday, March 26, 2013
Monday, March 11, 2013
While suffering may indeed be a soul-making process (some psychological research indicates this to be true), it is not inflicted for this “greater good.” Perhaps it is not that God allows our hearts to broken, but, in many cases, He simply cannot prevent it. But because of the love He has and the at-one-ment He seeks with us, His own heart is broken and yearns to heal both ours and His. Atonement is about unity, unity is about love, and love is about vulnerability.
Walker Wright, Mourn With Those Who Mourn: The Weeping God and Me
Walker Wright, Mourn With Those Who Mourn: The Weeping God and Me
Saturday, February 2, 2013
What can it mean, that Christ's blood was spilt for our sins, that "by his bruises we are healed"? Perhaps His perfect love means His identification with human suffering is so complete, that in one fell vision He comprehended the depth and range and terror of all our individual pain. Perhaps it is the almost irresistible power of His superabundant love manifest in His choice to suffer what He suffered, that transforms the sinner's heart.
Terryl & Fiona Givens, The God Who Weeps, pg. 90
Terryl & Fiona Givens, The God Who Weeps, pg. 90
Friday, February 1, 2013
Only by choosing the good and experiencing its fruit do we learn to savor and embrace the good. Similarly, only by choosing the evil and living through its consequences do we learn what evil is and why it deserves to be rejected. Or as Julian saw, "So pain endures for a time. Its role is to purge us, make us know ourselves, and it drives us to the Lord." Ther in lies the "needfulness" of sin, the part it has to play.
Terryl & Fiona Givens, The God Who Weeps, pg. 84
Terryl & Fiona Givens, The God Who Weeps, pg. 84
"Call a life worse," [Plato] said, "if it leads a soul to become more unjust,and better if it leads the soul to become more just."
We have no way of knowing, of course, why some are born in health and affluence, while others enter broken bodies or broken homes, or emerge into a realm of war or hunger. So we cannot give definite meaning to our place in the world, or to our neighbor's. But Plato's reflections should give us pause and invite both humility and hope. Humility because if we chose our lot in life there is every reason to suspect merit, and not disfavor, is behind disadvantaged birth. A blighted life may have been the more courageous choice--at least it was for Plato. Though the first act of the play was obscure its hidden details make any judgments in this second act so much foolish speculation. So how can we feel pride in our own blessedness, or condescension at another's misfortune? And Plato's reflections should give us hope, because his myth reminds us that suffering can be sanctifying, that pain is not punishment, and that the path to virtue is fraught with opposition.
Terryl & Fiona Givens, The God Who Weeps, pg. 60-61
We have no way of knowing, of course, why some are born in health and affluence, while others enter broken bodies or broken homes, or emerge into a realm of war or hunger. So we cannot give definite meaning to our place in the world, or to our neighbor's. But Plato's reflections should give us pause and invite both humility and hope. Humility because if we chose our lot in life there is every reason to suspect merit, and not disfavor, is behind disadvantaged birth. A blighted life may have been the more courageous choice--at least it was for Plato. Though the first act of the play was obscure its hidden details make any judgments in this second act so much foolish speculation. So how can we feel pride in our own blessedness, or condescension at another's misfortune? And Plato's reflections should give us hope, because his myth reminds us that suffering can be sanctifying, that pain is not punishment, and that the path to virtue is fraught with opposition.
Terryl & Fiona Givens, The God Who Weeps, pg. 60-61
If God, like us, is susceptible to immense pain, He is, like us, the greater in His capacity for happiness. The presence of such pain serves the larger purposes of God's master plan, which is to maximize the human capacity for joy, or in other words, "to bring to pass the immortality and eternal life of man." He can no more foster those ends in the absence of suffering and evil than one could find the traction to run or the breath to sing in the vacuum of space. God does not instigate pain or suffering, but He can weave it into his purposes.
Terryl & Fiona Givens, The God Who Weeps, pg. 33
Terryl & Fiona Givens, The God Who Weeps, pg. 33
Tuesday, October 23, 2012
But the reconciliation that Jesus offers is not as distant from reconciling ourselves to the mixture of pain and joy in the world as we may at first think. Nailed to a cross, in the midst of his execution, he said "Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do" (Lk. 23:34). He reconciled himself to his executioners though they had not repented of what they had done, though he had received no recompense for his suffering at their hands. He found the joy of reconciliation while yet in pain.
Jesus' reconciliation to his enemies did not require either their repentance or his heavenly reward. It happened in the midst of his suffering. That infinite, divine reconciliation ought to be our model of the reconciliation for which we aim both now and in the future. If we have taken Jesus' name on ourselves, we owe it to him and to our Christian covenant to identify ourselves with him to learn to be reconciled as he was, not after the fact of suffering but in it.
That does not mean allowing criminals to go free, refusing to hold them accountable for their crimes. It means, though, not allowing the need for justice to overcome the demand for reconciliation. Justice is an appropriate part of reconciliation, but we cannot refuse reconciliation because we are not yet satisfied that justice has been done. If vengeance is the Lord's and not ours (Dt. 32:5), then our demand for justice cannot be confused with a demand for vengeance. And when it is not, then it is compatible with reconciliation.
The Christian message is that reconciliation is possible, both now and, ultimately, in the presence of God. Jesus taught us that reconciliation does not mean the end of all pain, but the reconciliation of our pain with our love for others. That is certainly true in this life. Perhaps it is also true in the next. The promise is that families as narrow as a couple or as wide as the human race can be reconciled in their pain.
James Faulconer, "Reconciliation in Suffering," Patheos Blog
Jesus' reconciliation to his enemies did not require either their repentance or his heavenly reward. It happened in the midst of his suffering. That infinite, divine reconciliation ought to be our model of the reconciliation for which we aim both now and in the future. If we have taken Jesus' name on ourselves, we owe it to him and to our Christian covenant to identify ourselves with him to learn to be reconciled as he was, not after the fact of suffering but in it.
That does not mean allowing criminals to go free, refusing to hold them accountable for their crimes. It means, though, not allowing the need for justice to overcome the demand for reconciliation. Justice is an appropriate part of reconciliation, but we cannot refuse reconciliation because we are not yet satisfied that justice has been done. If vengeance is the Lord's and not ours (Dt. 32:5), then our demand for justice cannot be confused with a demand for vengeance. And when it is not, then it is compatible with reconciliation.
The Christian message is that reconciliation is possible, both now and, ultimately, in the presence of God. Jesus taught us that reconciliation does not mean the end of all pain, but the reconciliation of our pain with our love for others. That is certainly true in this life. Perhaps it is also true in the next. The promise is that families as narrow as a couple or as wide as the human race can be reconciled in their pain.
James Faulconer, "Reconciliation in Suffering," Patheos Blog
Wednesday, September 19, 2012
He poked through the caked mud around the grounds and found almost nothing he could recognize. He scuffed along through the ashes and kicked up one of hte spikes he'd used in building the cabins's walls, but couldn't find any others.
He saw no sign of their Bible, either. If the Lord had failed to protect even the book of his own Word, this proved to Grainier that here had come a fire stronger than God.
Denis Johnson, Train Dreams pg. 45
He saw no sign of their Bible, either. If the Lord had failed to protect even the book of his own Word, this proved to Grainier that here had come a fire stronger than God.
Denis Johnson, Train Dreams pg. 45
Thursday, March 29, 2012
I heard a man say once that Christians worship sorrow. That is by no means true. But we do believe there is a sacred mystery in it, it's fair to say that...I believe there is a dignity in sorrow simply because it is God's good pleasure that there should be. He is forever raising up those who are brought low. This does not meant hat it is ever right to cause suffering or to seek it out when it can be avoided, and serves no good, practicle purpose. To value suffering in itself can be dangerous and strange, so I want to be very clear about this. It means simply that God takes the side of sufferers against thos who afflict them.
-Marilynne Robinson, Gilead (pg. 137)
-Marilynne Robinson, Gilead (pg. 137)
Thursday, March 8, 2012
"'Reuven, do you know what the rabbis tell us God said to Moses when he was about to die?'
I stared at him. 'No,' I heard myself say.
'He said to Moses, "You have toiled and labored, now you are worthy of rest."'"
---
Human beings do not live forever Reuven. We live less than the time it takes to blink an eye, if we measure our lives against eternity. So it may be asked what value there is to a human life. There is so much pain in the world. What does it mean to have to suffer so much if our lives are nothing more than the blink of an eye?...I learned a long time ago, Reuven, that a blink of an eye in itself is nothing. But the eye that blinks, that is something. A span of life is nothing. But the man who lives that span, he is something. He can fill that tiny span with meaning, so it's quality is immeasureable though its quantity may be insignificant. Do you understand what I am saying? A man must fill his life with meaning, meaning is not automatically given to life. It is hard work to fill one's life with meaning. That I do not think you understand yet. A life filled with meaning is worthy of rest."
-Chaim Potok, The Chosen (pg. 216-217)
I stared at him. 'No,' I heard myself say.
'He said to Moses, "You have toiled and labored, now you are worthy of rest."'"
---
Human beings do not live forever Reuven. We live less than the time it takes to blink an eye, if we measure our lives against eternity. So it may be asked what value there is to a human life. There is so much pain in the world. What does it mean to have to suffer so much if our lives are nothing more than the blink of an eye?...I learned a long time ago, Reuven, that a blink of an eye in itself is nothing. But the eye that blinks, that is something. A span of life is nothing. But the man who lives that span, he is something. He can fill that tiny span with meaning, so it's quality is immeasureable though its quantity may be insignificant. Do you understand what I am saying? A man must fill his life with meaning, meaning is not automatically given to life. It is hard work to fill one's life with meaning. That I do not think you understand yet. A life filled with meaning is worthy of rest."
-Chaim Potok, The Chosen (pg. 216-217)
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