a lawless blog

"Whoever loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me,
and whoever loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me;
and whoever does not take up his cross
and follow after me is not worthy of me.
Whoever finds his life will lose it,
and whoever loses his life for my sake will find it."

Recently it was asked on the Forum, what is the place of suffering in life? The first thing that comes to mind is that the whole cosmos is a process in which there are mighty forces at play. Evolution from the simple to the complex appears as the product of great violence, though at different scales of magnitude what we might call violence can vary greatly. When I look at a daffodil thrusting gently up through the grass, preparing to welcome the springtime with its golden flower, I scarcely see any violence and yet the energies produced in that small engine of change come by chemical processes like those that form the mighty stars.

Pain is a register of violence. I think it is possibly true that all living things have some awareness and so feel pain. For us the anticipation of pain adds a special dimension of fear, and the terror engendered by the threat can be worse than the blow when it actually comes. Could we say then that the more developed awareness or consciousness is, the more keenly is pain experienced?

Pain has a prominent place in Christian religion since the Saviour accomplished his work in suffering. He freely allowed his arrest knowing it would lead to extreme torture and brutal execution. He was killed as an outlaw, guilty of the greatest crime of blasphemy. From earliest times this has been seen as central to the new deal, the New Covenant that was sealed in his blood. It would be hard to imagine any development of humankind to a new plane of godliness that could be more violent.

After two millennia there is questioning in the air. People are beginning to ask about this violence, whether it is adequately explained as 'the price paid for our redemption'? Is it accurate to say his experience of pain was the act of propitiation that took away the guilt of humankind? In short, we ask today whether pain is really a currency for trading sin for grace?

The injunction in today's gospel, to take up your cross and follow Jesus, has been lived over generations in the form of bearing the sufferings of life as part of this ransom payment. Many even take on painful practices 'to fill out the sufferings of Christ', as Paul suggests.

Cosmic pain

Among humans, suffering can be of two kinds. The first is that which occurs in the nature of things which includes everything from childbirth to ordinary work fatigue, from the pain of illness to the trauma of dying. If we consider this as an integral part of cosmic violence we may see no particular value in it; it is neither good nor bad.

After my heart surgery they had us on a morphine drip and later switched to endone tablets. Morphine gives me hallucinations, and soon enough I made a protest to the doctor. "How much pain have you got?" she asked. "We don't want you to have pain. Pain is not good for you." I've thought a lot about that since, wondering does that school of thought see acute post-operative pain as a cause of stress that stops the body healing. Will a pain-free body function better and heal more quickly? Generally the health sector seems to favour minimising pain, even to the extent that some of us worry today that we are personally weaker for being unaccustomed to pains that a few generations back were common and unavoidable.

Animals avoid pain. A dog will yelp and run and not come back till it's reassured there will be no more pain. People use pain for "character building", perhaps in every civilisation. Warriors and athletes exercise themselves in tolerating the pain of activities that build up physique and skill.

The Stoics of ancient Greece developed a tactic to ensure you can always maintain self-control, namely, by deliberately placing yourself in an uncomfortable situation where the supports you depend on are absent. You accustom yourself to being without support to harden yourself against fear. As a current writer puts it: "Comfort is the worst kind of slavery because you’re always afraid that something or someone will take it away." In early Christian times Stoicism was much in vogue. It became the lens through which the gospel way was understood.

Much of the ascetical practice of the christian communities remains essentially stoic. This is not a bad thing, but the attempt to christianise it can be fraught with complexity. The gospel record shows that Jesus practised fasting. He also questioned the Pharisee's attitude to fasting for the sake of keeping rules. I assume he went into the wilderness for forty days without food to test himself through a period of total detachment from normal supports and comforts. One feels one's fragility, which as the Stoics taught, is strengthening to the character. You are also likely to see things more clearly once you are outside the daily routine of work and leisure time. Early christian monks committed themselves to lives of permanent isolation and deprivation.

Building on the theory that the pain Jesus suffered paid the price of sin, it seemed to them reasonable to see the pains of their asceticism as extending the Saviour's redemptive work. But if we say that, by living the human life as he did, the Anointed One "sanctified" our pains and labours, we also have to say he sanctified our joy and celebrations by the same token. This is no reason to take on more such pain, nor does it mean his pains were more redemptive than his rejoicing - and he did plenty of that in various celebrations and banquets. Pain has no value in itself.

There is no intrinsic value in cosmic suffering and we properly avoid it as far as possible. What we cannot avoid we can learn to bear with dignity, and this may contribute to our personal growth.

Evil pain

The other category of suffering is that which we inflict on one another deliberately, for whatever reason. This pain is not part of the cosmic fabric. It is not inevitable. It is an aberration, and yet it is most common and most disastrous. It is wrong, always and everywhere. It is sin. It is denial of what we are.

This pain of human causation is the pain that Jesus embraced when he had the option to escape it. He waited three hours in the garden, looking in horror into that dark abyss, and when the soldiers arrived he was drawn into it, to be degraded by other humans, to be contaminated by human evil. Paul says he became sin, for us. He was stripped of every last shred of human dignity and killed as a criminal. And then he was raised to life by the power of God to show that sin - this devastating perversity which sees us inflicting pain and shame and death on one another, will not win.

What now does it mean to "take up your cross"? First, we can try, as Jesus did, to absorb that evil pain into ourselves so it will be neutralised. By not retaliating we avoid spreading it. We will counter the fear of being killed by it with a growing trust in God who showed, in raising Jesus from the dead, that evil will not win.

Our cross is also to bear our share of guilt. We too, every last one of us, are implicated in the evil of hurting others. We don't really know why, but washing our hands of it doesn't work. Saying: I have no part in the death of this just man - whoever this just man may be in any particular case - doesn't work. So we must consider the evil pain we cause another for whatever reason. Look at yourself. Identify the ways you put yourself above another, using them, enslaving them, accusing them, punishing them. See the way you lie to yourself to justify all these. Take your place as Jesus did among the condemned ones. Put away excuses. Strip away the coverings that dress our inhumanity in robes of human propriety. Think of yourself as among the worst, and let that false self esteem and self love, that false 'ego', die.

Then you will know the love the Father has for each of us, and for you with all the rest. You will know what is the love of the Anointed One which reveals the Father's love. This strange perversity that would destroy us is being overcome. But it happens one person at a time, as each one comes to realise what love is, and catches fire from another. This is God's work. This is God's gift.