I am having a really hard time understanding
suffering, especially those who suffer directly from their experience with the church.
Any insights?
Well, first of all, you are not alone. The
purpose and meaning of suffering eludes us all, especially when we are in the
thick of it. The church is unquestionably a fully human institution, and
therefore far from perfect. In fact, as shown in the sexual crisis, we are a
deeply flawed people.
But, we are also saturated with the grace
and mercy of God. If we are able to open ourselves and receive this mercy, then
we are drawn to share it as well. The “church” (aka, the people of God, not
just our church leaders) has come in for the save so many times in my life that
I have a deep loyalty to her. When my Dad was broken to the point of mental
breakdown after his divorce, it was the People of God from the church that
wrapped their arms around him and brought him back to health. When my family
experienced a devastating house fire two days before Christmas when my
daughters were only 8, 5 & 1 year old, the People of God from the church
brought a fully decorated Christmas tree for our sad hotel room and a pile of
gifts “from Santa.” And, of course, the People of God (namely ALL OF YOU)
prayed and supported my family through the dark days of my health crisis back
in 2016. My girls may not know their creed by heart, but they will NEVER forget
these formative experiences of church.
That being said, the People of God are
still human beings, both luminous in beauty and drenched in grace, but also
prone to real failure and fraught with ugliness.
Richard Rohr emails a meditation each day
from the Center for Action and Contemplation. I found the one from 10/23/18 on
the “Traumatization of Spirituality” particularly insightful.
It is based on the work of James Finley,
a clinical psychologist on staff at CAC. He speaks expertly—from a
professional, personal, and mystical perspective—on suffering and healing.
Here Jim explains how Spanish mystic John of the Cross (1542–1591) allowed
trauma to transform him.
John of the Cross was invited by Teresa
of Ávila (1515–1582) to join her in reforming the Carmelite Order by returning
to a renewed fidelity to prayer, simplicity, and poverty. The priests of the
order did not take kindly to the suggestion that they needed reform and
demanded that John stop his involvement. John said that he would not stop
because he discerned in his heart that God was calling him to continue with
this work. The priests responded in a very harsh manner, capturing him and
putting him in a small dark prison cell with little protection from the
elements. John was imprisoned for nine months. During that time, on a number of
occasions, he would be taken out of his cell, stripped to the waist, and
whipped.
John felt lost. It wasn’t just because of
the severity of his imprisonment. This was the Church! The priests who
were mistreating him were people he had emulated. John went through what we
could call the traumatization of spirituality, which can be described as a kind
of dark night of faith in which we lose experiential access to God’s sustaining
presence in the midst of our struggles. [I, Richard, imagine many are going
through a similar experience as we learn about the Catholic Church’s extensive
cover-up of sexual abuse.]
Trauma is the experience of being
powerless to establish a boundary between our self and that which is about to
inflict, or is already inflicting, serious harm or even death. It is one of the
most acute forms of suffering that a human being can know. It is the experience
of imminent annihilation. And so, when your faith in God has been placed in the
people who represent God’s presence in your life and those people betray you, you
can feel that God has betrayed you. And it is in this dark night that we can
learn from God how to find our way to a deeper experience and understanding of
God’s sustaining presence, deeper than institutional structures and authority
figures.
For John of the Cross, his suffering
opened up onto something unexpected. John discovered that although it was
true that he could not find refuge from suffering when he was in his prison
cell, he also discovered that the suffering he had to endure had no refuge from
God’s love that could take the suffering away, but rather permeated the
suffering through and through and through and through and through. Love
protects us from nothing, even as it unexplainably sustains us in all things.
Access to this love is not limited by our finite ideas of what it is or what it
should be. Rather, this love overwhelms our abilities to comprehend it, as it
so unexplainably sustains us and continues to draw us to itself in all that
life might send our way.
This is why John of the Cross encourages
us not to lose heart when we are passing through our own hardships, but rather
to have faith in knowing and trusting that no matter what might be happening
and no matter how painful it might be, God is sustaining us in ways we cannot
and do not need to understand. John encourages us that in learning to be
patiently transformed in this dark night we come to discover within ourselves,
just when everything seems to be lost, that we are being unexplainably
sustained by the presence of God that will never lose us. As this painful yet
transformative process continues to play itself out in our lives, we can and
will discover we are finding our way to the peace of God that surpasses
understanding.
Send your Crazy Catholic Question to Lisa
Brown at dre@ctredeemer.org or read past columns at www.crazycatholicquestions.blogspot.com.
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