Something the past year of knockout punch after knockout punch of grief has opened my eyes to is the absolute main character energy of suffering.
I’m 41 years old now, and in the midst of year two of the most grueling calendar expanses of life so far, and what I’m recognizing as I come up for little gulps of air and little lulls of “normalcy” is that the “life is good, vibes are high” mentality I’d accidentally internalized from the ambient culture is not only a philosophical fallacy, but it’s toxic to the Christian soul.
The unwritten expectation is just a 21st century adaption of the heresy of health and wealth: Live a good life, be a good human, take care of your body, and your life’s path will unroll before you like a glorious, karma-studded red carpet on an upward trajectory to success. Until, you know, the luck runs out.
And whether one has been coasting along on humanitarian good vibes or attempting to hustle to earn one’s way into God’s good graces, our posture towards Him, meanwhile, has warped into this disfigured, servile, performative self-reliance that crumbles in the face of real pain.
And, thusly positioned, in sorrow and bewilderment, one might feel quite justified in turning an imploring gaze toward heaven to ask the question, “how could this have happened?”
Expecting a life of ‘atta girls and just a general sense of everything “working for the good for those who love him,” a Christian soul imbued with a worldly perspective on suffering recoils in mortal terror from the specter of the Cross.
Oh, it’s fine for Him, He’s God after all. I want to kiss His bloodied feet and sit in awestruck contemplation of His excruciating self offering.
I adore the cross as the source of my salvation. But I recoil from the cross as the means of my perfection.
I do not want to suffer. And therefore, I creep timidly along the path of Christian living, making all kinds of agreements (with whom?) and unconsciously taking all sorts of inner vows in order to bargain my way to a life of comfort and joy and, hopefully, escape His notice and therefore His wrath.
Instead of submitting eagerly to the ministrations of the Divine Physician who wields the scalpel of suffering to heal my disfigured soul, I slouch in fear of a vengeful principal, hoping my grades and good behavior earn me a spot on the honor roll. And then when the list is posted and my name isn’t there? Oh, the anger. The righteous indignation. The sense of betrayal.
Needless to say, my personal theology has had to undergo a bit of a structural overhaul in the face of so much pain. Because at a certain point, even if you’re currently lying face down in the mud of grief, you have to decide whether or not you’re going to submit to the reality of suffering being a feature, not a bug.
The programming my brain had been running did not ultimately serve me well when the going got tough. And, as I’ve permitted Him to update my operating system (but why the IT analogies? I don’t know! Sleep deprivation, perhaps) I’ve become less surprised by suffering. Horrified and unwilling? Yes, almost always. But surprised? Not anymore.
I’ve started to see a rhythm to it, in my own life and also in everyone else’s. None of us escapes the cross. But we get to choose whether to climb up onto it to rest against His broken heart, or to attempt to go it alone, and be crushed into hopelessness under the weight of it. Sometimes that choice is made in a heroic instant after a lifetime of saying to God “yes, of course”, but I think more commonly it’s an agonizing, drawn out process of bargaining and disbelief and, eventually, please God, acceptance.
And while our sufferings might be uniquely personal and, at times, especially lonely, especially when dismissed or misunderstood or unseen by the outside observer, there is this sense of deeper awareness that I guess you might call the corollary of “this too shall pass,” and it’s this: “they too will hurt.”
If grief has brought any good into my life – and I do believe it has done so, in spades – one of the greatest goods has been an expanded capacity for compassion, both for myself and for others. Compassion literally translates as “to suffer with”, and my prayer in better moments has been “make me better, not bitter” which is a quote lifted from a beautiful short film by Chris Stefanick on John Paul II. I know I am a wretched work in progress in this regard, as evidenced by my behavior in boilerplate situations like heavy highway traffic and the after school meltdown hour. But I have hope that in the midst of my largely unwilling, unimpressive and almost imperceptible progress along the path of purification, all this hurt ain’t for nothing. And, in fact, if I squint and look very closely at each new tear splattered page, I can also see the love notes He has scratched in the margins, a cruciform Valentine penned just for me.
Because eventually, the cross comes for all of us, and no human being will be left unsought by the Divine Healer.
