Every day I am ready to be murdered, betrayed, enslaved — whatever may come my way.
-St. Patrick
I wonder about our willingness to endure “whatever may come our way” for the sake of something greater than ourselves. I wonder about how we in the “West” handle suffering and pain and what we do with it. (I speak of “West” here not as a geographical description but as an ideological designation.) The church in the West has adapted itself to the overriding culture of the day, one that pours every ounce of energy into avoiding pain — through diversion, entertainment, shallow relationships, easy investments, psychobabble, and the religion of popular talk show hosts.
Suffering is the pain caused by the division between desire and satisfaction, and we try our best to bring satisfaction up to the level of our desires.
It never works, or not permanently at least. At some point it fails. Always. Every time. What we do with that failure marks our movement toward either an authentic growth in godliness and transformation or a slinking away from it, a creeping toward (as the only alternative) death.
The Buddhists are familiar with the issue of suffering. The entire religion is built, in fact, upon the evasion of suffering through the eightfold path. The ultimate goal of Nirvana is really a state of complete detachment and desirelessness. It is the absolute absolution of desire. They try to bring desire down to the level of their satisfaction. This also does not work. Desire cannot be completely killed, nor can it be permanently locked away.
What Christ has done is to bridge the gap between our desire and satisfaction. He transforms even our understanding of suffering — remember, this comes from the gap between desire and satisfaction — by daring us not to desire less, but to desire more. And then he dares us to believe that we can actually have what we really want (that is faith). Of course, our desire has to be increased dramatically, maybe infinitely, and He usually does not give us satisfaction of our small desires. We are made for more than those. New cars, fancy clothes, even our version of peace and prosperity — these things would trick us into thinking they are what we are really after. No, He takes us into deeper places of hope, requiring greater levels of faith.
All of this I say this today because I have recently experienced a very personal and painful betrayal, one that has brought me poignantly face-to-face with suffering, and I wonder again its purpose. What is God up to in it? Why does He choose to use it more, sometimes, than any other thing, to bring His redemption and restoration? “To reconcile both of them [Jews and Gentiles] to God through the cross,” as Paul put it in Ephesians 2:16, the cross being the breaking and shattering point of all human suffering, the singularity at which the distance between desire and satisfaction was at the greatest and was born under by one man, Jesus. Whatever else is said of the suffering our Lover-God experienced there, surely by way of it he “put to death” hostility among men and between men and God. This is peace, and this is what we are to desire. Since Christ is the only fulfillment of that desire, we cannot allow it to be filled by any lesser thing if we want it to draw us to the Lord. As Kenneth Boa said, “We must grow in the realization that no earth-bound felicity can fully satisfy the deepest God-given longings of our hearts.”
At the point in Patrick’s life when he uttered these words quoted above, he had long been used to the pains and pangs of human life. He had been naked and hungry as a young man kidnapped by Irish and forced into slavery. He had known what it was to be alone and frightened, broken of body and of heart. But in the midst of those looming shadows, he encountered something greater than his own pain, a secret he held to and sought after, a secret that sustained him throughout his ordeal then and his calling when he later returned to Ireland as a bishop, a secret that kept the fire in his belly burning when all others were snuffed out on the damp and windy hills of that pagan isle. It was a secret that allowed him to embrace suffering, not as an end in itself as a Stoic would, but as a means to something else.
His teacher Paul knew the same secret. Listen in closely to what he says in Philippians 3: “I want to know Christ and the fellowship of sharing in his sufferings…” Good Lord. Really? Does he not know what it was that Christ suffered at that still point on the cross, the dividing historical event between the old and the new, between death and life? Why would he want to suffer with Christ? Because through it, he could “attain to the resurrection from the dead.” Because life was in the balance. And because of Christ, in the suffering there is life, because there is fellowship with Life Himself.
What hangs in the balance with the betrayal I am faced with is everything. What I do with it will determine whether or not my own desire — and possibly the desire of those who betrayed me and my friends — will deepen, and so approach more fully Christ’s own desire, or whether or not I will try to starve it. The first means that I will suffer, deeply, but it also means I will know Christ all the more. The latter is the easier, broader way, the more common route and the one that I could only enter into through some sort of denial or numbing. It is the way of death.
As the greatest contemporary theologian (in my opinion) Rich Mullins once said, “So go out and live real good and I promise you’ll get beat up real bad. But, in a little while after you’re dead, you’ll be rotted away anyway. It’s not gonna matter if you have a few scars. It will matter if you didn’t live. And when you wash up on that other shore, even though you’ve been disfigured beyond and recognition, the angels are gonna see you there and they’ll go, ‘What is *that*? We’re not even sure if it’s human.’ But Jesus will say, ‘No, that’s human. I know that one.’”
Jesus will touch me or speak my name and I will rise. He will look me in the face and ask if in these moments — when all around is at a breathless standstill awaiting my response, while in the midst of the bitter pain of betrayal not unlike in kind but less in degree to that of Jesus — whether or not we knew each other. Because today is the day of salvation. It is here, in the dirt and grime of suffering, that we can experience the staggeringly intimate love of our God. In the words of George Herbert, “Here, in the dust and dirt, O here the lilies of His love appear.”
