Category: Suffering

Not God Above but Within

4/15/2015

Not God Above but Within

Dear old and new friends,

Recently I came across this quote of an unidentified writer, “God made humans because God loves stories”…and I had to smile as one who also does. When I reflected on my own life, my loving parents as my pre-college religious teachers, the schooling of sharing with brothers and sister and my entire life as a series of adventures, I again smiled at the thought of how God must love my story. Take a few minutes to also reflect on God enjoying your life story with its cast of colorful characters and events.

My smile however turned into a frown when I thought of others who had painful and hard lives. What enjoyment could an all-loving God find in tragic life stories of those who have lost everything when tornadoes or hurricanes wiped away their homes? How could my affectionately caring God find pleasure in the life stories of those who came from dysfunctional, alcoholic families or were victims of sexual or physical abuse as did some men that I met as a prison chaplain?

Christianity’s belief in the Incarnation of Jesus is the story of God assuming not only all the humanness of Jesus, but that of all of us humans. This core faith/belief also implies that God was so in love with humanity as to become a living participant in everyone’s human story! And beyond that to become a living partaker in the Big Story of humanity. Not only in its artistic creations and heroic service to the needy but also the darkness of violence, natural disasters, sexual abuses, war’s atrocities and the plagues of deadly diseases. Those who reject as ridiculous such a victimized God as a theological impossibility do not comprehend the immensity of the bottomless depth of Divine Love and its compelling passion for intimate union with each one of us.

Today as spring’s new life buds forth let your spirituality also experience a new spring growth in the mystique of God, not in heaven but within you! For this new spiritual awareness to grow requires you practice daily an awareness of God’s living, personal presence within you. Practice remembering your God is a daily participant sharing your uniquely human story; tasting the ecstatic delights in your loving as well as suffering your tear-soaked sorrows in life’s conflicts.

Especially be mindful of the Divine Presence within times of crisis which today appears in our religion, politics and international affairs. A crisis can signal two things—a rapidly worsening situation that if not dealt leads to disaster. So if any institution or person is rigidly opposed to change and newness, then usually a crisis logically leads to an ultimate end in death. However, a person who is open, even welcoming of change, will experience the catastrophe as the timely death of the old structure that signals the evolutionary birth of a new one.

Historically we live in an earthquake crisis of deadly implications in our environment, global politics and even our religion. In this epic crisis, be open-minded and maintain an ecological stance of welcoming sweeping change as your “God within” proclaims with eternal enjoyment, “Behold I make all things new!” (Rev.5; 21)

Beware Schadenfreude!

7/23/2014

Beware Schadenfreude!

Dear old and new friends,

     Suffering abounds in each of our lives and throughout the world. While physical and mental afflictions are a part of the human condition, attempts to explain their purpose continues as a blindfolded quest. In previous ages pain and sickness were considered a visitation of the gods or God as a warning or punishment. A stoic theory proposed painful suffering was a teacher; whatever was the lesson became the patient’s responsibility to unravel.

    Today medical drugs that dull or remove pain are easily available. So imagine your physician prescribing you shouldn’t use them to escape your pain, but instead you should enjoy it! Medical madness, except for a condition of those who strangely get pleasure from suffering…of others! No single English word exists for this perverse pleasure, but there is one in German—Schadenfreude!

    In the first century C.E. crowds in Rome of over 50,000 jammed the giant Coliseum for public spectacles. They came to experience Schadenfreude as they watched the bloody slaughter of slaves, gladiators and animals. In just the Coliseum’s inaugural games 9,000 animals were slaughtered to entertain the carnage-hungry crowds. Lest today we protest that we aren’t so barbaric, ponder why gigantic sport stadium crowds cheer the often brutal or crippling collisions of players in football and basketball or the bloody body battering of prize fighting.

    Shouldn’t we find the blood-spattered injuring of others repulsive? Yet, we don’t. An unnamed cousin of Shadenfreude is the fascination for television or newspaper reports of disasters, murder, rape and massacre. News editors know our hunger and so operate on the editorial rule: “If it bleeds, it leads!” In this age of instant 24/7 news a spiritual necessity of an absolute imperative is that we must safeguard our souls and hearts from any delighting or fascination of the suffering of others. Daily vigilance is required to cultivate our compassion by frequent Holy Hurting Communion with any who suffer—spouse, friend, neighbor or the complete stranger.

    We begin to cultivate authentic compassion by rejecting that universal illusion, akin to the earth is flat, that another’s painful suffering is exclusively theirs! As our planet Earth is a sphere and not a flatten disc, so likewise each one of us is united as one with everyone else on this planet. So another’s pains or joys are always yours! While unattainable intellectually, this amalgamated fusion of all life is both a cosmic organic reality and a mystical spiritual one.

    You may find it helpful in deepening your compassion to whisper “Ouch” every time you see another suffering.

Putting Teeth in Your Prayers

1/9/2013

Putting Teeth in Your Prayers

One of our most popular prayers is for justice and peace, yet when Gandhi prayed daily, “I shall not submit to injustice,” his prayer had teeth! If we are to begin to resolve the disease of injustice that like leprosy has eaten away at the flesh of our society, churches and nation, we have to put some muscle in our prayers. Violations of human dignity and failures of fairness are plainly visible in our entire social system: we see, we do nothing, we pray.

Teacher Television has taught us to be couch critics of injustices, sofa silent spectators of unfairness—except in sports! Why is unfairness in the workplace or the worship-place tolerated but not on the basketball court? If we ordinary individuals saw ourselves as the community umpires, referees and whistle blowers would we shrilly whistle at any foul play by an exploiting employer or a church practicing inequality? Our prayers lack clout because of our fear of retribution for speaking out and believing that as only one person we are impotent.

Gandhi’s morning prayer for justice included, “I shall put up with all suffering,” and challenges those praying for righteousness to accept the cost of doing something about it. Gandhi denounced the unjust, exploitative British Colonial Rule of India by denouncing it publicly, leading non-violent demonstrations, enduring prison time for these acts and fasting almost unto death. In doing so he practiced Dharana—“persistence” (in Sanskrit)—like those in India known to sit stubbornly or to fast at the door of one who owes them money until they receive what they have rightfully earned.

In Nigeria in 2002 a large crowd of 600 women composed of grandmothers, mothers and wives challenged the exploitive oil giant U.S. Chevron Texaco for not returning to their impoverished country some of its immense oil profits. Their request carried this threat: if Texaco refused they would take off all their clothing and protest naked! Public displays of nudity in Nigeria by individuals or groups cast shame not upon them, but on those whom their action is directed. Chevron capitulated. They funded the building of schools, electrical and water systems in Nigeria. So consider the possible results if you added actions to your prayers.

Envision the reaction if 600 Catholic women put teeth in their prayers for equality by protesting in Rome’s St. Peter’s Square at the Vatican—naked!

How Are You?

9/12/2012

How Are You?

Usually every conversation today begins with the greeting, “How are you?” Once a doctor’s question, now it’s an invitation from anyone to pour forth your physical pains and sorrows. Only a few who ask are genuinely interested—as long as your recital of sorrows isn’t too long. For the rest, it is only another way of saying, “Hello.”

Sorrow and its comrade death are our twin companions on the journey of life, and they come in sizes ranging from small to xxx-large. Life’s sorrows fill us with sadness and depression while death—be that of your job, a relationship or a life companion—is a burden of sorrow almost too heavy to bear.

When I’m on my deathbed I wonder if I will be asked, “How are you?” If so, I hope to reply, “It is unity that doth enchant me. By her power I am free though in bondage, happy in sorrow, rich in poverty, and quick even in death.” So said the Italian Giordano Bruno before being burned at the stake by the Roman Inquisition in 1600 for his heretical teachings. To be “happy in sorrow” as was Bruno isn’t heretical, rather it’s heroic, holy, and it is a goal to seek in our personal sufferings.

The Russian author Aleksei Peshkov, known as Gorki (“the bitter one”), gives us another radical response to suffering. He wrote of the appalling sufferings of the Russian peasants in the late 1800s prior to the Communist revolution. Gorki reported how from their lives of endless misery and tedious daily grind Russian peasants learned to make of their sorrow “a diversion, an entertainment, playing with it like a child’s toy…a carnival of grief.”

We Americans are spared a lot of life’s sorrows experienced by those in poorer undeveloped countries (as well as having access to painkillers). Is this the reason for when it comes our way we find suffering so difficult to endure—or is it our attitude toward sorrow? Can we adopt the challenge to view our personal sufferings like a Russian peasant or that Italian heretic burned at the stake?

If so, while suffering intensively for whatever reason on the inside, when someone asked how we were we could say, “Great, life for me today is like a carnival!”

They might logically reply, “Well, if it’s a carnival, how do you explain that walker you’re now using?” And we’d respond, “Oh, this thing? It’s my new toy, and I’m having great fun with it!”

Not God Above but Within

Not God Above but Within

Beware Schadenfreude!

Beware Schadenfreude!

Putting Teeth in Your Prayers

Putting Teeth in Your Prayers

How Are You?

How Are You?

Edward Hays

The Haystack

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