God and human suffering

GOD AND HUMAN SUFFERING
Sister Patricia Martinez ICM

Two Stories of Pain and Suffering

Fely’s baby dies at 4 months old, her first born. She is inconsolable and keeps asking, “Why did my baby die? What have I done?” The parish priest comes to the wake and consoles her with these words: “You should not be sad. You now have an angel in heaven. God has taken your baby to be with him. He has his reasons for doing so.” Fely is filled with disgust at what the priest says she asks him to leave saying, “I do not need a baby in heaven. I need my baby here, in my arms.” A wife’s story. A beautiful, wonderful, generous lady faces a broken marriage which ends in divorce. She confides to her niece, “I think God is punishing me. I entertained the idea of becoming a sister but I did not answer his call. That is why my marriage does not work.”

What is common to these two stories? When suffering or tragedy strikes, people ask, “Why?” There is a search for an explanation to be able to understand the suffering. The explanation given is: God is the cause. Usually, these explanations are meant to defend God; to show that he has good reasons in causing the suffering or allowing it to happen. Suffering is also sent by God to test our faith. In fact suffering brings us closer to God, teaches us a lesson, and makes us realize how much we need him, etc. In Fely’s case, He allows Fely’s baby to die. We do not understand it now but everything that happens has a purpose: to fit God’s plan. In the second story, the suffering is a punishment for sins we have committed.

Often, the explanations given have negative effects on the victim. In the first story, the effect is anger, disgust. In the second, the effect is guilt. Instead of helping, they cause more suffering on the part of the victim. Such explanations can even lead to a loss of faith because they are so angry with God. These explanations pose problems in our present day world because to say that God sends/causes/allows suffering to test people, to teach them a lesson, or to punish them is to make God a monster. Why do people impute it to God?

Our Image of God

The way a person see God affects how they interpret life and, necessarily, how one view suffering and cope with it. From what image of God the above view example on suffering? This image sees God as a supreme, omnipotent Being who created the world with its own laws. This world is separate and distinct from God. God is up there in the heavens. He intervenes occasionally in the world and human affairs, especially in answer to prayer, right worship and correct behavior. He has a divine plan and everything has to happen according to that plan. Since he is powerful and omnipresent, he is also in control. And his justice demands that he rewards the good and punishes the evil. Since God is perfect, he is unchanging, unmoved, and unaffected. Is God then a capricious being with whom we can only relate as victims, or as servants who must please him, or placate him all the time to gain his favor and avert his wrath . Why does he intervene sometimes, and sometimes does not? Why does he not avert suffering disaster and accidents all the time? “Is God really like that? Does he really cause or allow all these suffering and misery and stand aloof, unaffected and unmoved? Why is there suffering? Is it possible that God does not want us to suffer? Is it possible that there are no reasons that suffering simply happens?”

Present day search for ways of speaking of God

Confronted with radical suffering, especially the suffering of the innocent, there is need to find new ways of speaking of God that are relevant and meaningful. These people who want to be faithful to their faith traditions yet attentive to contemporary experiences of suffering look at the above image of God and ask, “Is there something missing/not taken into account in this image of God? Are there other elements in our faith tradition and in scriptures that were not paid attention to or played down?

One such person is Harold Kushner, a Jewish rabbi. His son, Aaron was diagnosed with progeria, a disease that causes fast aging. This experience of intense suffering and pain led him to ask questions about the image he has of God.

Kushner started to process this question first by owning his experience of suffering. His son Aaron has progeria. He is going to die. He looks different from all the other children of his age. People stare at him, speak in whispers, etc. Aaron is an intelligent boy and he knows, he feels, he suffers. Kushner shares Aaron’s suffering. Like every other victim of tragedy and pain he also asks that poignant question? “Why, God, why Aaron?”

He then brings this experience of suffering in dialogue with his faith and asks, “What has my faith to say about this?” He grew up with a particular image of a God who is omnipotent, all-wise, all powerful, just (a God who rewards the good and punishes the evil) and good. If God is all good and all powerful and just, why did he allow this sickness to attack Aaron? Then Kushner questioned his image of God. Aided by new insights in biblical studies, he finds there some elements that have not been paid attention to or that have been buried under some presuppositions which are time bound and culture bound. He looks also at other sources; science, philosophy, and contemporary theology.

Physics he realized has come to recognize that there is relativity and randomness in the world even as there is order and pattern. This truth prevents him to insist that there must always be a reason for everything. There are things that simply just happen, part of the randomness in the world. Such as genetic defects can be part of that randomness. And therefore, Kushner made a choice. He chose for what is human and for a God who wills life and not death. “Forced”, he said, “to choose between a God who is powerful yet causes suffering and a God who is good yet powerless to avert suffering”, he chose the latter. Powerlessness is not an antithesis to power, rather an expression of the freedom of God to respect the autonomy of creation, the freedom of people, and to be in solidarity with the suffering.

The question humankind should be asking therefore is, “How do we speak of God in the midst of all these suffering, the degree and cruelty of which, we have never known before? How do we speak of God in the face of the suffering of the cosmos? Some theologians propose that we begin to speak about a Suffering God to a suffering humanity and a suffering cosmos.

The Suffering God

Abraham Heschel, a Jewish Rabbi and theologian, looks deeply into his Jewish tradition, especially the prophetic tradition, and finds that the prophets did not speak about their idea of God. They spoke about the situation of God. They were so in touch with their own situations and experiences and that of the people, especially situations of injustice and oppression, that they intuitively felt certain that they were in the situation of God. Heschel calls this, the Pathos of God. He describes this pathos of God as the way in which God is affected and moved by the events and suffering in history. Because of creation and the covenant (both with humans and creation Gen 9:9-10), God is interested in the world and human beings, to the point of suffering when his creation suffer. God relates and responds to events in history with grief, gladness, anger, compassion.

The Hebrew word for compassion is rachamin coming from the root word racham, meaning womb. (At no other time is a mother so intimately, physically one with her child as when she carries it in her womb. They share the same breath, mother and child are one). The new cosmology images God as fecund, source of life. Creation emerges from the womb of God. That is why God cannot, but be compassionate. Meister Eckhart writes, “Whatever God does, and the first outburst is always compassion.” The new creation story sees this compassion rooted in the fact that human beings and all creation are all of one piece. Compassion involves the realization that the other is in the other person, knowing the need of the other even without him or her expressing it, and doing something about the situation no matter the cost. That is why the compassion of God is almost always expressed as a challenge and call to justice.

Compassion, furthermore, happens not outside the experience, from a position of power and condescension. Rather, as Henri Nouwen writes, compassion asks us “to go where it hurts, to enter into places of pain, to share in the brokenness, fear, confusion and anguish. Compassion challenges us to cry out with those in misery, to mourn with those who are lonely, to weep with those in tears…be weak with the weak, vulnerable with the vulnerable, and powerless with the powerless.”

Theologians see this involvement of a compassionate God expressed in the Incarnation of Jesus (he shared our humanity, all of it), Jurgen Moltmann sees this involvement of a compassionate God manifested on the cross, where suffering and pain have descended to the depths of godforsakenness and death. Into this pit of nothingness, God enters to bring man salvation and new life. This is the same solidarity of God with his suffering people as argued with liberation theologians in Latin America.
Elizabeth Johnson on the other hand looks at the experiences of women and find these experiences helpful to understand a suffering God. Two of these experiences are, experiences of grief, and experiences of degradation

a. Experiences of grief and sorrow:

Isaiah 16:9-11, we read, “Therefore, I weep with the weeping of Jazer for the vines of Sibmah; I drench you with my tears, O Heshbon and Elealeah; for the shout over your fruit harvest and your grain has ceased. Joy and gladness are taken from the fruitful field; and in the vineyards no songs are sung, no shouts are raised; no treader treads out wine in the presses; the vintage-shout is hushed.” The context of this text is the outbreak of war. God grieves and weeps and his grieving and wailing is as deep as the grieving and wailing of the people. He grieves and cries not just for people who are broken and killed, but for the land that is devastated and laid waste. In the book of Jeremiah, God weeps not just for Israel but for the enemy as well. Jeremiah 48:31 says, “Therefore I wail for Moab; I cry out for all Moab; for the people of Kir-heres I mourn.” Ezekiel (Ez 10:18-23) where the glory of God leaves the temple and goes with the people into exile as their companion in disaster and humiliation

A Rabbinic commentator notes that after the Red sea flowed back and killed the Egyptians, the Israelites were rejoicing on the shore. The angels too were rejoicing in heaven and they told God, “Let us have a party!” But God, looking down on the dead bodies of the Egyptians strewn on the shore, wept and said, “No, they are my people too.” God grieves for the destruction of the enemy. That is how wide God’s compassion is.

b. Experiences of degradation

A deeper, more dehumanizing feminine experience which can help mankind understand this image of a suffering God is the experience of degradation of women; a suffering that destroys their human dignity and even life itself. The degree of their degradation invites the compassionate God to enter into their suffering; it points to the depths of compassion and solidarity of the suffering of God because, very often, in these situations, there seems to be no solution, just silence, and as Elizabeth Johnson so poignantly expresses, just “the terrible sense of the mystery of evil and the absence of God which nevertheless may betray divine presence desecrated.”

In a small book entitled, NIGHT, Elie Wiesel, a survivor from Auschwitz, narrates an experience. Three Jews, (two old men and a young man) were being flogged and finally hanged before their eyes. The two old men died immediately. But it took 30 agonizing, cruel minutes before the young man expired. While this was happening, a man behind Elie Wiesel groaned and asked, “God, where are you?” to which query Elie Wiesel heard a voice from within him answer, “He is right there before you, tortured, flogged and hanged”

Brennan Manning, an author, writes about his minister-friend who suffered severe reversals in his life. He resigned from his church, abandoned his family, and fled to a logging camp. One winter afternoon, as he sat shivering in his aluminum trailer, the portable electric heater suddenly conked out. That was the last straw in a string of miseries. Shouting and cursing, “God I hate you” he sank to his knees weeping. There in the darkness of faith, he heard God within him say, “ I know, it is okay.” And God wept with him. The minister stood up, and started home. No amount of explanation, etc. could make this man go home, turn his face against despair, and start life anew. Indeed, only the powerlessness of a compassionate, solidaire and suffering God could.

The Suffering of the Cosmos

Earth is withering, because of the degradation and plunder of the earth caused by human decisions and actions, the whole cosmos is in travail. It is suffering. Yet, this is a suffering which we can avoid, which we can solve by living in a more friendly way towards the universe.

But the suffering of the cosmos is not just inflicted upon it by humans. The new cosmology makes it clear that suffering is also inherent in the cosmos. The universe systematically breaks down some of its achievements in order to arrive at more creativity and more complex forms of life. Usually after these so called cataclysmic events, the diversity and complexity of life in the planet increases. Man’s very own planet earth came about through the explosion of a dying star, the supernova. The mammals saw the day when the dinosaurs were wiped out. The new cosmology says that there have been at least 5 mass extinctions in the history of our planet earth and is now in the middle of the 6th. The question that is being asked now is, “How do we speak of God in view of the suffering inherent and inflicted in the cosmos?” “God suffers in, with, and under the creative processes of the cosmos with its gradual unfolding in time.” (Gloria Schaab, The Creative Suffering of the Triune God).

A Different Image of God

Sensitive to present day human and other than human experiences, and supported by new insights in biblical studies and scientific discoveries, the present day theologians speak of God as a suffering God. This language about God obviously comes from a very different image of God. Instead of an all-powerful, all-wise, omnipresent far away God, these theologians presented the image of God as an encompassing Spirit, “in whom, we live, we move and have our being” as St. Paul puts it in Acts 17: 28. The universe is not separate from God but in God, even as God is not outside creation but within creation enabling it to evolve and to develop to become always more and more. God is not out there, intervening every now and then, but right here, a presence within our everyday life, empowering us to grow and achieve our fullest potentials.

In the Abrahamic traditions, this image of God was already present side by side with the previous idea of God we spoke about. But the image of the omnipresent, omniscient God got the upper hand because of the worldview at that time. A God in heaven was understood differently then than it is now. For the people in ancient times, heaven was not far away. The universe was thought of as having three layers; heaven which is the dome, earth which is the floor and the underworld which is below the floor. For them, a God in heaven was not necessarily a far away God. Heaven was very close. Today, man experience heaven as so far away, the space around him is simply unlimited. Scientific discoveries tell that the stars and galaxies are constantly moving away and from one another. Humankind now lives in an expanding universe.

Conclusion

I am convinced, that we should allow our image of God to be challenged by our contemporary experiences of suffering and pain. We should dare to expand our horizons and to blaze new trail by allowing our contemporary experiences to put questions to our faith expressions. This is what Kushner did. This is what the author of the Book of Job did. This is what a number of contemporary theologians are doing. For me, this is the only way, if we are to accompany our suffering brothers and sisters, and make our language about God meaningful and relevant.

It will not be easy. We should be able to let go of our previous idea about an outsider God who is powerful, in control and intervening in the affairs of this world; a God to whom we run for solutions. We need to gradually open ourselves to another image of a God who is involved in our history not in a relationship of control but in a relationship of freedom and love; a God who is affected by what happens to us and to his creation. We need to dare to speak of a suffering God who translates his compassion into solidarity with those who suffer; whose words are heard in the eloquence of a silent presence that promises strength, courage, and hope that because he is with us, suffering does not have the last word. The last word, rather, is life.

A youngster came home from school having been taught the biblical story of the
crossing of the Red Sea. His mother asked him what he had learned in class, and
he told her: “The Israelites got out of Egypt, but Pharoah and his army chased
after them. They got to the Red Sea and they couldn’t cross it. The Egyptian
army was getting closer. So Moses got on his walkie-talkie, the Israeli air force
bombed the Egyptians, and the Israeli navy built a pontoon bridge so the people
could cross.” The Mother was shocked. “ Is that the way they taught you the
story?” “Well, no”, the boy admitted, “but if I told it to you the way they told it
to us, you’d never believe it.”

The boy understood the basic story. God is on the side of his people wanting to
be free. The boy understood instinctively that if he has to be faithful to the story, he needed to retell it. The same is asked of us today in speaking of God and human suffering. Like this boy, all what we are given is the basic story about God and his relationship with people and the world. To be understood by men and women of today, to be effective and relevant, we need to retell the story. We have to fill in the details, aided by our present experiences, and the new data afforded to us by biblical studies, science, philosophy, theology; data that were not accessible to our ancestors in the faith. Otherwise, instead of helping others, we increase their suffering. We become a burden, and like Job’s friends, we become “sorry comforters” rejected by God himself.
theodicy
noun pl. the theological discipline that seeks to explain how the existence of evil in the world can be reconciled with the justice and goodness of God
Origin: Fr théodicée: coined by Baron Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz (1710) < Gr theos, god + dikē, justice
Webster's New World College Dictionary Copyright © 2010 by Wiley Publishing, Inc., Cleveland, Ohio.


References:
Borg, Marcus: The Heart of Christianity
Brueggemann, Walter: The Prophetic Imagination
Gutierrez, Gustavo: On Job
Hill, Brennan: Faith, Religion, and Theology
Johnson, Elizabeth : She Who Is
Jurgen Moltmann: The Crucified God
Kushner, Harold : When Bad Things Happen to Good People
Manavath, Xavier: “Journeying Through Contemplation to Compassion,” Religious Life
Asia.
O’Murchu, Diarmuid: Evolutionary Faith
Spong, John Shelby: Jesus for the Non-religious
Spong, John Shelby: Why the Church Must Change or Die
Notes from John Surette’s lectures: Powers of the Universe