Читать книгу Finding God in Suffering - Bruce G Epperly - Страница 5

Theology For Those Who Suffer

Mary called me in a state of shock.1 We had been friends since high school, and because she knew I was a pastor, she often confided in me during difficult times. “I don’t know how to say this, and almost can’t get the words out, but I just got the results of the scan. I have incurable cancer and may have less than a year to live. How can this be happening to me? I’m finally happy with my professional life and just got engaged, and my kids still need a mother!” Several months later, I received the news of Mary’s death.

Alex was visibly upset when he came to my study. His world had fallen apart with virtually no warning. In the course of a week, his wife told him that she wanted a divorce and he received word that his position would be eliminated. He shared his disbelief and frustration at this unexpected and undeserved turn of events. “I’ve done everything the way I was taught. I was a faithful husband, good breadwinner, and caring father. I devoted thirty years to the company and only missed two day’s work. I went beyond the call of duty, and now it’s all falling apart. All my life, I’ve been told that if you work hard and support your family, everything will be alright. And, now this! Am I being punished for something I don’t know? What’s God trying to tell me? Did I do something wrong?”

Susan had been a dedicated congregant at a local Pentecostal church. For most of her adult life, she believed that God rewarded the righteous and punished sinners in this lifetime and the next. She took seriously the words of her pastor and the televangelists, whose sermons counseled that if you plant a seed of faith by giving generously to your church and their television ministries, God will bless you with good health, financial prosperity, and a happy home life. But, now, as she surveyed her life, she saw nothing but chaos: financial insecurity and a possible home foreclosure, kids doing drugs, and constant physical pain from arthritis. Her faith was also in chaos. “I did the right things. I followed God’s way and gave to the church above and beyond our financial ability. I trusted that God would bless us. Is God punishing me? Or, is God testing my faith? Is this all just a hoax to fill the collection plates and build a television empire? Right now, I don’t know what to believe. Was I just a sucker, the victim of some kind of spiritual pyramid scheme? Was the promise of prosperity a hoax? I don’t know if I can believe in God anymore!”

As I write these words, people in nearby Boston are remembering last year’s Boston Marathon bombings, a mudslide recently leveled a town in the Pacific Northwest, a truck crossed a divider killing teenagers on a college tour, a plane has been lost at sea, and another school child has been the victim of gun violence. Each of these victims, and their families, began their day thinking they were safe and believing that life would go on without any significant interruptions. Without warning and for no apparent reason, life collapsed for them and their loved ones. The world is a risky place, whether as a result human decision-making, acts of violence and corporate decision-making, mechanical failures, and natural catastrophes, often inaccurately described as “acts of God.” Moreover, sometimes “stuff happens,” and life appears to be random in its bestowal of blessing and misfortune. At such moments, we look for a reason why some die and others flourish; why some rise to the top and others fail; why the tornado struck here and not down the road; or why an innocent child must suffer pain and disability, while another child runs happily home from school.

For many people, even those who would describe themselves as agnostics, the question of God emerges at times of unanticipated and apparently unwarranted encounters with death and destruction. “God, why did you do this to me? What good can come from punishing my child with a devastating illness? Do you care at all about the pain we feel or are we pawns in some sort of cosmic chess game?”

Philosopher Alfred North Whitehead once stated that philosophy could be seen as a series of footnotes to Plato, who raised most of the important philosophical questions in Western thought. The same could be said for Job in terms of the problem of evil, or theodicy, and our responses to the sufferings of ourselves and others. In a manner unexcelled in insight for over twenty five hundred years, the book of Job raises questions about the origin and reality of suffering, starkly and without denial. The author of Job asserts without equivocation that suffering is real and that personal and corporate disaster can strike at any time, without notice, and turn our theological and spiritual worlds upside down. Reading the book of Job is not for the faint-hearted or those who want easy answers to life’s greatest questions.

Readers of Job may discover that there are no clear answers to the origin and reality of suffering. Still, the author of Job invites all of us to live in solidarity with those who suffer. The book of Job reminds us that regardless of our piety, economic, or spiritual achievements, no one is immune from the sufferings of body, mind, and spirit felt by a man named Job.

Theology Where the Pain Is

It has been said that theology begins in the experience of suffering and disappointment. If this description of the origins of theology is accurate, then Job is one of the greatest theological texts. The book of Job is not theology written from the armchair and delivered to a self-satisfied and comfortable audience, but theology that emerges from the vantage point of excruciating and undeserved pain. Job is practical and pastoral in nature. It is written at the place where the rubber meets the road; Job makes his complaint from the perspective of an ash heap after having lost everything that characterized his once enviable life - wealth, social position, family, and personal health. Job even has lost his faith in the God of his religious tradition, whom he and his friends believed rewarded the righteous, punished evil doers, and insured an orderly and predictable universe. Job believes in God, but he is now uncertain about God’s nature and attitude toward humankind.

The book of Job is our story. Job’s wisdom enlightens our experiences in the emergency room terrified by chest pains and shortness of breath; in the Alzheimer’s wing grieving when a beloved companion no longer recognizes us and treats another patient as if he or she were their spouse; at our child’s evaluation for autism; and at the bedside and graveside of a parent or companion. Job’s wisdom touches the grief and despair of parents of children who have gone missing or been kidnapped by terrorist groups. Job speaks to those whose lives have been turned upside down by earthquake, hurricane, flood, and cyclone.

The book of Job invites us to claim our identity as theologians. Job shouts out to us, “You are a theologian” because we have experienced the pain of the world and are trying to make sense of it. Job shouts to us: “Don’t let the word ‘theology’ put you off. By whatever word, we strive to make sense of the senseless and meaning of the meaningless.” We become theologians the moment we begin to ask hard questions about life and the One who creates the universe and gives birth to each moment of experience. Theology asks questions of life, death, meaning, human hope, and immortality. It also raises questions about the meaning and purpose of our brief, and often challenging and ambiguous lives. For Job, theology and spirituality are intimately related. As Episcopalian spiritual guide Alan Jones once asserted, spirituality deals with the unfixable aspects of life – or what I would describe as life’s inevitabilities. Sooner or later even the most fortunate of us must make theological and personal sense of what is beyond our control, while taking responsibility for what we can change.

Once upon a time, a seeker from another religion, the Indian Prince Gautama was faced with the problem of evil. He had been sheltered from suffering until young adulthood until, over the course of three days, he observed three realities that had been hidden by the protective walls of his father’s palace: an elderly person, a sick person, and a corpse. He realized that our attitude toward life is the source of suffering, and that only a life committed to spiritual practice can liberate us from the pain and suffering brought on by the interplay of desire, change, and mortality. From his reflections, one of the world’s great wisdom traditions, Buddhism, was born.

Whether we look at the world from the vantage point of Buddha or Job, or from East or West, theological reflection invites us to ask questions about what is most important to us in life and how we can experience joy and equanimity in the midst of what Judith Viorst described as life’s necessary losses. Theological reflection reminds us that what we believe about God and ourselves is important. Our beliefs can cure or kill. They can provide comfort or traumatize. The book of Job also cautions us that theological counsel, especially by ministers and religious leaders, should fall under the guidance of the Hippocratic Oath, “first do no harm.”

Just think of the thoughtless theological speculation publically voiced by popular religious leaders, who have asserted that:

 The terrorist attacks of 9/11 resulted from God’s withdrawing divine protection on the United States as a result of its immorality.

 The devastating impact of Hurricane Katrina on New Orleans was divine punishment for the city’s tolerance of homosexuality.

 The Haiti earthquake was the result of a pact with the devil to gain freedom from European rule in the 19th century.

 AIDS was God’s punishment of the United States for its turning away from traditional Christian values.

While these statements claim to reflect orthodox biblical perspectives, can you imagine how these statements would be heard by the child of one of the victims of 9/11, a family who lost its home and livelihood from Katrina, or the parent of a child, dying of AIDS due to a blood transfusion? If theology begins where the pain is, then we have to ask, “How is our theology experienced by those whose lives have been devastated for no apparent reason and without warning? How would these proclamations respond to the pain of a family whose four year old has been kidnapped or diagnosed with cancer? How would a child receiving chemotherapy understand the God who has supposedly punished him with cancer?” Some people excuse or praise behaviors by God that would lead to incarceration if performed by humans!

A few weeks ago, as I switched from channel to channel looking for a bit of diversion amid the rigors of pastoral ministry during Holy Week, I came upon a proponent of the contemporary prosperity gospel, who challenged his television audience to “just plant a seed of faith and prepare for your great harvest.” Viewers were given the opportunity to plant spiritual seeds with Master Card or Visa! I couldn’t help but pause to reflect on how many seeds wither and how many assurances of prosperity and success fail to come true, despite the televangelist’s promises. In what ways do these promises end up spiritually harming vulnerable and economically insecure people? While I believe that our faith activates and opens us to new possibilities, our faith does not guarantee a particular outcome or happy ending to every story.

In light of easy and glib responses to the problem of suffering, the book of Job is a type of theological Lysol, eliminating the spiritual sepsis of certain theological explanations and pastoral responses to suffering and pain. Job challenges us, first of all, to be pastoral in responding to the needs of others and, then, to articulate explanations of suffering, worthy of the God we worship. While Job might not fully agree with Albert Einstein’s musings on the reality of chaos and suffering, he would have recognized wisdom in the questions Einstein raises:

 Does God play dice?

 Is the universe friendly?

The Book of Job doesn’t give us a solution to life’s sufferings, but he poses the right questions to guide us in our quest to experience God in the midst of suffering.

Reading Job

Reading Job takes you into the world of Shakespeare’s plays and Plato’s dialogues or a postmodern novel or film. The book of Job presents a variety of voices, raises numerous questions, and provides no clear resolutions to life’s problems. It’s as if they remind us that the problem of suffering can only be solved, and always tentatively, by walking through our own pain and the pain of others with an open mind and a compassionate heart.

The author of Job is a wisdom teacher, who searches for God in the joys and sorrows of daily life. There is no easily understandable divine plan, nor can we fully discern God’s purposes from our finite perspective. Job’s author is unconcerned with God’s deliverance of the Israelites from captivity or God’s continuing activity in Israel’s history. This high mark of wisdom literature is no “purpose driven” spiritual guidebook to solving the problem of evil but an “adventure of ideas,” in which no voices are excluded and no possibilities eliminated. Everything we thought was stable and all the creeds we lived by are on the table, including our beliefs about God. The author of Job recognizes that fidelity to God is not found in the recitation of instant answers but in wrestling with God, like Jacob at the stream of Jabbok in search of a blessing. Chapters three to thirty seven of the book of Job read like a theological tennis match, gaining in intensity with each volley and occasionally collapsing into chaos as if all the contestants are shouting at once.

Reading Job may not give us the “right” answers, but it steers us away from theological and spiritual platitudes that ultimately do more harm than good to those who suffer. Amid the many voices of Job, there is an underlying call to listen to the voices of suffering, our own and others, with our whole hearts. As we will see, when we silence the voices of pain or provide easy explanations, we end up minimizing peoples’ pain and blaming them for their condition. In contrast to theologies than deny or minimize the pain of others, we must, in the spirit of the healer Jesus, respond to peoples’ pain with words and acts of healing regardless of who is at fault.

Talking About God

Old Testament scholar Terence Fretheim once noted that the most important theological question is not “Do you believe in God?” but “What kind of God do you believe in?” The author of Job would concur with Fretheim’s vision. Job is a God-filled book, reflecting the deep piety of its author and his main character. Like the Psalms, Job describes a faith for every season of life and shows that piety can be revealed as much in our questions as in our affirmations.

The author of Job and his protagonist are serious men. Job, the author and character, takes seriously the consequences of sin and the wondrous insecurity of life. There are few “praise the Lords” in Job, but a deep faith tempered by the realities of suffering and silence. Job never gives up on God, despite God’s apparent absence. The intensity of Job’s protest gives witness to the importance of his quest to find a vision of God worth believing. Job’s previous understandings of God have proven inadequate in light of Job’s suffering. Yesterday’s easily-recited orthodoxies no longer fit Job’s lived experience. He needs to discover a vision of God expansive enough to embrace what the philosopher Whitehead describes as the tragic beauty of life.

Over two thousand years later, German-American theologian Paul Tillich spoke of faith as involving our “ultimate concern,” what is most important to us, and asserted that the experience of doubt is essential to deep faith. Tillich believed that we can claim certainty about our experience of the Holy and its impact on our lives, while struggling with doubts about the nature and character of what is most important to us. Job would agree. He believes in God, but is in search of a God whom he can trust when life collapses around him. The orthodox God, who rewards and punishes us according to our behavior, has died. What vision of God will emerge out of the chaos of suffering and abandonment? We can only seek and hope to find!

Job’s struggle to find a God he can believe in is reflected in the dynamic and necessary tension between the apophatic and kataphatic approaches to God. The kataphatic (in Greek, “with images’) approach treasures our experiences of God and the words we use to describe our relationship with the Creator. We sing praises to God, describing God as friend, companion, healer, and rock of ages. We create creeds and holy books to portray God’s nature and relationship with humankind. Worship demands that we articulate words and images for God. Still, we must be careful in our descriptions of the Holy One in order to avoid localizing God’s presence to one place, culture, or religious tradition. One of the problems with Job’s friends’ orthodox theological affirmations is that they claim to know too much about God. Like Aslan, the Christ-lion of C.S. Lewis’ Chronicles of Narnia, God is not “tame,” nor can God’s nature be limited by human language, worship, or doctrine. Believing they have figured God out and banishing mystery from their religion, they have little sympathy with Job’s experience and assume his suffering can easily be explained as punishment for his sins.

The apophatic (in Greek, “without images”) approach serves as a type of “theological Lysol,” eliminating the germs of theological pretense and reminding us of our mortality, error, finitude, and sin. God is more than we can image, the apophatic path asserts. When God speaks out of the whirlwind, God shows Job the wondrous beauty and complexity of the universe. Job is overwhelmed and confesses that his quest to fully define God’s ways is misguided. God is more than we can imagine, whether in Job’s mystic vision or in the descriptions of today’s cosmologists who imagine a 125 billion galaxy, 13.8 billion year old, cosmic adventure, and then remind us that our beautiful earth is just a speck in our home galaxy, the Milky Way.

The book of Job testifies to the importance of faithful agnosticism: if we think we can know God or God’s ways fully, we have created an idol of our own making, subject to our cultural norms and ethics. Still, in a spirit similar to the Greek sage Socrates, Job reminds us that, at the very least, we are obligated to challenge harmful and parochial images of God. The book of Job’s many voices provide us with a deeply faithful agnosticism in which we devote our lives to a Reality that is always more than we can imagine. The adventure of faith is always on the move, always growing by trial and error. It always stays honest and healthy through the humble recognition of our limitations and the impact of our community’s finite and biased perspectives on our understanding of the Holy One. Faithful Job will test his own faith and challenge the God he once believed in, looking for an answer that goes far beyond the certainties of his religious tradition. He risks losing his religion, but in the process he may discover the living God.

Journeying With Job

Each chapter ends with a simple spiritual practice and a few questions for reflection. As I have written elsewhere, I believe that holistic theological reflection involves the interplay of vision and practice. Our personal or community vision is our tentative and humble understanding of the universe and our place in it. Our vision can be described as our theological perspective and involves our images of God, human life, the cosmos, our vocation, the meaning of suffering, and survival after death. Though some persons seek unchanging absolutes, a healthy vision is always on the move, open to growth and new insights, grounded in the recognition that every belief system and faith tradition is finite, time-bound, and reflective of certain perspectives on God and the world. Spiritual practice involves ways that help us experience life in its depths and discover God’s presence in life’s joys and challenges. Practices open our hearts and connect us with the wellsprings of God’s healing energy. Practices are not ways to avoid pain or deny our suffering and the suffering of the world, but pathways to gracefully and courageously face the deepest realities of life, including death, diminishment, grief, loss, and beauty.

In our first spiritual practice, take a few minutes to pause and gently breathe. Imagine that each breath opens you to God’s Spirit moving through your life. After you experience a sense of calm, take a few minutes for a life review, considering the following questions:

1 What is your first recollection of the world as a place of pain as well as joy? What event awakened you to the pain of the world? How did the people around you, especially adults, react to that event?

2 What has been the most devastating experience in your life? What was most difficult about that experience? How did you respond to that experience? What helped you make it through this experience?

3 Where have you experienced God’s presence in moments of suffering?

Conclude this time of reflection with a prayer that your heart might open with compassion toward your suffering and the suffering of the world.

Questions For Reflection

1 Do you think religious faith guarantees well-being and success? How do you respond to the three stories with which the chapter begins? In what ways might faith improve your life? Are there any limits to the impact of our faith on our life situation?

2 How do you explain the evils of the world? What are the sources of the suffering we experience?

3 A prominent religious figure stated the following: “The impact of Hurricane Katrina on New Orleans was divine punishment for the city’s tolerance of homosexuality.” How do you evaluate this statement? Does it reflect your understanding of God?

4 Old Testament scholar Terrence Fretheim once noted that the most important theological question is not “Do you believe in God?” but “What kind of God do you believe in?” What do you think of his assertion? Can our images of God be harmful to ourselves and others?

5 Do you think that faith and doubt can coexist in a person’s experience of God? Is doubt always a bad thing in the life of faith?

6 In what ways is the apophatic, negative, approach to understanding God helpful? Why is it important to recognize that there are limits to what we can know about God?

7 What images of God give you comfort? What images of God are problematic to you?

1 I have chosen pseudonyms to affirm the privacy of persons mentioned in this text.