Creation Both Good and Wounded

“This makes a kind of sense until I look at a child, at all that is wonderful in the world, and then see that creation is both profoundly good and wounded beyond our understanding.  The fact that it takes the incarnation, the crucifixion, and the resurrection to cut into the ice around our hearts shows the depths of the catastrophe.

And the fact that the catastrophe is often more apparent to us than the goodness of creation is not the way God wanted things to be.”  (John Garvey, DEATH AND THE REST OR OUR LIFE, pp 42-43)

Looking Death in the Face, Seeing Christ

Now it happened, the day after, that He went into a city called Nain; and many of His disciples went with Him, and a large crowd. And when He came near the gate of the city, behold, a dead man was being carried out, the only son of his mother; and she was a widow. And a large crowd from the city was with her. When the Lord saw her, He had compassion on her and said to her, “Do not weep.”

Then He came and touched the open coffin, and those who carried him stood still. And He said, “Young man, I say to you, arise.” So he who was dead sat up and began to speak. And He presented him to his mother. Then fear came upon all, and they glorified God, saying, “A great prophet has risen up among us”; and, “God has visited His people.”    (Luke 7:11-16)

In any given week any of us might hear about a tragedy which has struck someone we know.  Someone is diagnosed with cancer, a young couple suffers a miscarriage, mental illness interrupts a family’s plans, a father loses his job, a wife is told her husband plans to divorce her.  A death occurs and we must attend a funeral.

Many of us have experienced such news, and perhaps we felt totally sick deep inside because of what was going on.

In today’s Gospel, we see our Lord Jesus moved to compassion for a woman when he learns that she is already a widow and now her only son has died.  Jesus was deeply moved by the grief he observed in others.  Thirteen times in the New Testament we read about Jesus being moved to compassion when he encounters the suffering of others.  And we might note the word compassion is used in the New Testament only of Jesus.  No one else in the New Testament is said to be compassionate except Jesus.

When Jesus encountered this widow, the text of the Gospel says Jesus felt the loss in a gut wrenching way.  His stomach tightened.  His throat constricted and he swallowed hard.  His body was moved by the pain he saw in another.

And yet, he was not defeated by death, as Isaiah the Prophet had said of God:

He will swallow up death for ever, and the Lord GOD will wipe away tears from all faces, and the reproach of his people he will take away from all the earth; for the LORD has spoken.   (Isaiah 25:8)

And we who are united to Christ are to bring the compassion of the Savior to all of those who weep and grieve, to all of those who cause us to be moved to compassion. We can pray:

O Lord, be merciful to each person who is suffering pain or loss.  Bless those who mourn.  Comfort those who grieve.  Give us the gift of compassion so that we too might care for those who are sick or grieving or suffering.  Give us courage not to look away from them or their need, but to approach them and offer them our hand in fellowship, to help us care for them with co-suffering love, so they may know that they are not alone in their sorrow.  Grant us to be your servants, caring for your people.

Jesus  who wept at the tomb of His friend Lazarus, tells this sorrowful widow not to weep.  He knows the pain of loss and separation.  He is not telling her it is wrong to weep for He Himself wept.  He comes to take on Himself our pains and sorrows and to heal our broken hearts.  He wants her to hear His words of hope.  As Jesus proclaimed:

Truly, truly, I say to you, you will weep and lament, but the world will rejoice; you will be sorrowful, but your sorrow will turn into joy.  . . .   So you have sorrow now, but I will see you again and your hearts will rejoice, and no one will take your joy from you.  (John 16:20, 22)

Jesus says to all His disciples including us that we will weep and lament  in life.  He says we will experience sorrow – He does not promise constant prosperity.  He does not promise that we will be spared the  trials of life or the sorrows of this world.  However, He says He has overcome the world, and Christ promises that we will have a joy which will not be taken away from us.  His promise is echoed in the words of St. John:

and I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, “Behold, the dwelling of God is with men. He will dwell with them, and they shall be his people, and God himself will be with them; he will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning nor crying nor pain any more, for the former things have passed away.”  (Revelation 21:3-4)

Every year at Pascha we go with the Myrrhbearing women to the tomb of Christ.  And we hear the same words that Mary Magdalene was told by Jesus:  Go tell my brothers what you’ve seen and heard.  That is our task.  To look into the face of death and see the Risen Christ, and then to find the way to share that  vision with friend and neighbor, family or enemy so that they in turn might believe that Jesus is Lord.

We cannot lock ourselves up in the safety of our private worlds.  We cannot protect our faith by running away from life’s trials and tribulations.  For if we know Christ, we know that suffering and the trials of life are part of His existence.  We are able to stand with all those who suffer in the world if we are in Christ.  We can offer the hope of Christ to all those who suffer.  We have been with Mary at Christ’s tomb, and realize that tomb is empty because Christ is risen.  The grave is not the end of life.

A Thorn in the Flesh

The God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who is blessed forever, knows that I am not lying. In Damascus the governor, under Aretas the king, was guarding the city of the Damascenes with a garrison, desiring to arrest me; but I was let down in a basket through a window in the wall, and escaped from his hands.

It is doubtless not profitable for me to boast. I will come to visions and revelations of the Lord: I know a man in Christ who fourteen years ago – whether in the body I do not know, or whether out of the body I do not know, God knows – such a one was caught up to the third heaven. And I know such a man – whether in the body or out of the body I do not know, God knows – how he was caught up into Paradise and heard inexpressible words, which it is not lawful for a man to utter. Of such a one I will boast; yet of myself I will not boast, except in my infirmities. For though I might desire to boast, I will not be a fool; for I will speak the truth. But I refrain, lest anyone should think of me above what he sees me to be or hears from me. And lest I should be exalted above measure by the abundance of the revelations, a thorn in the flesh was given to me, a messenger of Satan to buffet me, lest I be exalted above measure.  

Concerning this thing I pleaded with the Lord three times that it might depart from me. And He said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you, for My strength is made perfect in weakness.” Therefore most gladly I will rather boast in my infirmities, that the power of Christ may rest upon me.  (2 Corinthians 11:31-12:9)

St. Silouan writes:

The love of God gives strength to continue in prayer the whole night through, but pain in my head wears me out and I am obliged to give up and rest. These headaches have been given me because I insisted on having my own way, and left my task as steward to go into the ‘desert’ to have great freedom for prayer; but the Lord wanted me to spend my life in the Monastery as steward. Twice they would have made me prior, and once senior steward, but each time I refused, and for that God punished me. It was only later that I understood that everyone is needed in the place where he is, and we may all be saved whatever our office. (St. Silouan the Athonite, pgs. 465-466)

Thinking about Suffering

August 29 is the date one which we Orthodox commemorate the Beheading of St. John the Forerunner.   [A trivia note: It also is the date of King Herod’s birthday, but in any case the day is stained by by the King’s notorious decision to murder the Forerunner of the Lord as part of the king’s own birthday celebration.]  St. John is granted eternal memory in the Scriptures and festal Tradition of the Church while Herod is remembered only for murdering a great man.  One sign of the significance of St. John the Baptist in the early church is that he is mentioned in all four gospels.

The hymn for this feast notes that St. John joyously suffered for the truth:

The memory of the righteous is celebrated with hymns of praise, but the Lord’s testimony is sufficient for you, O Forerunner. You were shown in truth to be the most honorable of the prophets, for you were deemed worthy to baptize in the streams of the Jordan Him whom they foretold.  Therefore, having suffered for the truth with joy, you proclaimed to those in hell God who appeared in the flesh, who takes away the sin of the world, and grants us great mercy.

In honor of the St. John, as we commemorate his death, here is a poem from Scott Cairns.

Come, together we will press

to enter the camel’s eye

that narrowest of gates.

Observe the trees. Just as they

must endure the winter’s storms

before they can bear fruit, so it is

with us. This troubled age is our own

destructive storm. Enduring

its trials and temptations, we obtain

our inheritance, our flowering, this new

fruitfulness, and also enter heaven’s kingdom.

(Love’s Immensity, p. 42-43)

Why Do We Suffer In God’s World?

Who will separate us from the love of Christ? Will hardship, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword?  As it is written,
“For your sake we are being killed all day long;
we are accounted as sheep to be slaughtered.”
No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.  (Romans 8:34-39)

The time between Christ’s Ascension into heaven and His second coming to earth is the time of the Church.  The Church really is that interstice between the two comings of Christ – participating in both this world and that world which is to come.  So while Christians are called to rejoice always and to give thanks in all circumstances (1 Thessalonians 5:16-18), we find ourselves in a world in which there still is great sorrow and suffering and we still must wait for that world in which sickness, sorrow and suffering have passed away (Revelation 21:4).  Biblical scholar Richard B. Hays comments on how St. Paul deals with the current age, the time of the Church awaiting Christ’s return:

“Paul reads the Psalm [44] as a prophetic prefiguration of the experience of the Christian church, so that the text finds its true primary meaning in Paul’s own present time. The point is not that ‘righteous people have always suffered like this’ rather, Paul’s point in Rom. 8:35-36 is that Scripture prophesies suffering as the lot of those (i.e., himself and his readers) who live in the eschatological interval between Christ’s resurrection and the ultimate redemption of the world. Thus, in this instance . . . Paul discerns in Scripture a foreshadowing of the church.

This psalm raises plaintively the issue that we have already seen to be the central theological problem of Romans: the question of God’s integrity in upholding his promises to Israel. Paul is struggling to vindicate God from the suspicion of capriciousness in choosing to ‘justify’ Gentiles who do not observe the Torah. Is God a fickle god who has cast off Israel (cf. Rom 3:1-8, 3:21-26, 3:31, 9:14, and all of chapters 9-11)?

The psalmist raises a question precisely analogous to the one that Paul is seeking to answer: does the community’s experience of suffering indicated that God has abandoned them?

But there is still one more significant overtone to be heard in Paul’s quotation of Psalm 44. The psalmist’s main point in verses 17-22 is that the suffering of Israel cannot be construed as a punishment for unfaithfulness or idolatry; on the contrary, God’s people suffer precisely because of their faithfulness to him.”  (Echoes of Scripture in the Letters of Paul, 58-60)

Afflictions

“The ancient fathers counsel the faithful to view life’s reversals and afflictions as a whetstone to sharpen their minds, thereby keeping them active and making them wise. Saint John Chrysostom is even of the opinion that the presence of adversities has blessed humanity with the development of the arts. Full of realistic optimism based on observed experience, patristic tradition regards problems as opportunities that can make people resourceful and even strong.” (Father Alexis Trader, Ancient Christian Wisdom and Aaron Beck’s Cognitive Therapy, p 171)

Bearing Patiently the Unsought Affliction

“Unless we bear with patience the afflictions that come to us unsought, God will not bless those that we embrace deliberately. For our love for God is demonstrated above all by the way we endure trials and temptations.

Martyrdom of St. Stephen

First the soul has to surmount afflictions embraced willingly, thereby learning to spurn sensual pleasure and self-glory; and this in its turn will permit us readily to bear the afflictions that come unsought. If for the sake of poverty of spirit you spurn such pleasure and self-glory, and also regard yourself as deserving the more drastic remedy of repentance, you will be ready to bear any affliction and will accept any temptation as your due, and you will rejoice when it comes, for you will see it as a cleansing-agent for your soul.

Hieromartyr Gorazd of Prague (1944)

In addition, it will spur you to ardent and most efficacious prayer to God, and you will regard it as the source and protector of the soul’s health. Not only will you forgive those who afflict you, but you will be grateful to them and will pray for them as for your benefactors. Thus you will not only receive forgiveness for your sins, as the Lord has promised (cf. Matt. 6:14), but you will also attain the kingdom of heaven and God’s benediction, for you will be blessed by the Lord for enduring with patience and a spirit of humility till the end.”

(St Gregory Palamas, THE PHILOKALIA, Kindle Location 45965-45975)

40 Martyrs of Sebaste

Poor in Spirit: Patient Endurance

St Gregory Palamas (d. 1439) reminds us that sometimes experiences we do not like are in fact both necessary and helpful for our spiritual growth.   We don’t want to suffer, and yet we can benefit from suffering.  Forget suffering –  let’s be honest, most of us hate inconvenience.  We become enraged and wrathful when we experience the slightest inconvenience even when any real suffering is almost non-existent.  The tiniest wrinkle in our planned experience of the universe causes us to fly into a rage.   Palamas reminds us that many fruit bearing plants will not give us any fruit if there is no cold winter and hibernation.  The dead of winter is necessary for the abundance of the fruits of the earth.  We, however,  completely ignore the benefits to the planet and to all living things of winter cold as soon as the temperature drops to any temperature we hate.

Palamas writes:

“Then in truth you will be poor in spirit and will gain dominion over the passions and clearly be called blessed by Him who said, ‘Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.’

How, indeed, can those not be called blessed who have absolutely no truck with material wealth and place all their trust in Him? Who wish to please only Him? Who with humility and the other virtues live in His presence? Let us, then, also become poor in spirit by being humble, by submitting our unregenerate self to hardship and by shedding all possessions, so that the kingdom of God may be ours, and we may fulfill our blessed aspirations by inheriting the kingdom of heaven. The Lord has left us certain synoptic statements that express in a succinct manner the Gospel of our salvation, and one of these statements is the beatitude of which we have been speaking. By including so many virtues in that single phrase and excluding so many vices, the Lord has conferred His blessing on all those who through these virtues and through repentance prune the aspect of their souls that is vulnerable to passion.

But this is not all; for in that phrase He also includes many other things, analogous not to pruning but rather to the activity of cold, ice, snow, frost and the violence of the wind – in a word, to the hardship that plants undergo in winter and summer by being exposed to the cold and heat, yet without which nothing upon earth can ever bear fruit.

What are these things? The various trials and temptations that afflict us and that we must gladly endure if we are to yield fruit to the Husbandman of our souls. If we were to feel sorry for earthly plants and build a wall around them and put a roof over them and not allow them to suffer such hardships, then although we may prune and otherwise tend them assiduously, they will bear no fruit. On the contrary, we must let them endure everything, for then, after the winter’s hardship, in springtime they will bud, blossom, adorn themselves with leaves and, covered with this bountiful foliage, they will produce young fruit. This fruit, as the sun’s rays grow stronger, will thrive, mature and become ready for harvesting and eating.

Similarly, if we do not courageously bear the burden of trial and temptation – even though we may practice all the other virtues – we will never yield fruit worthy of the divine wine-press and the eternal granaries. For it is through patient endurance of afflictions deliberately entered into and those that are unsought, whether they come upon us from without or assault us from within, that we become perfect. What happens naturally to plants as a result of the farmer’s care and the changing seasons happens, if we so choose, to us, Christ’s spiritual branches (cf. John 15:5), when as creatures possessing free-will we are obedient to Him, the Husbandman of souls.”     (THE PHILOKALIA, Kindle Location 45781-45888)

Praise the LORD from the earth …

fire and hail, snow and frost,

stormy wind fulfilling his command!

(Psalm 148:7-8)

By Half

Half Dome, Yosemite National Park

I completed this week half of my chemotherapy.  I have completed as many treatments as I have left to do.   Of course being half done with the chemo itself is not the same as being done with half of the side effects from the chemo.   Those side effects linger much longer.   But being half way through the actual drug therapy gave me reason to reflect on the word ‘half.’  We find in the Wisdom of Solomon (18:14-20) a retelling of the Passover story, specifically of the Angel of Death passing through the land of Egypt.

For while gentle silence enveloped all things,
and night in its swift course was now half gone,

I find the course of treatment to be like a continuous night – but now half gone!  I am not the cheery positivist who rallies through the chemo by thinking positive thoughts.  I have cancer and I have chemo.  I don’t like either.  In fact I hate the chemo, even if it is doing some good.  It is a bitter, venomous drug with noxious effects.

your all-powerful word leaped from heaven, from the royal throne,
into the midst of the land that was doomed,
a stern warrior
carrying the sharp sword of your authentic command,
and stood and filled all things with death,
and touched heaven while standing on the earth.
Then at once apparitions in dreadful dreams greatly troubled them,
and unexpected fears assailed them;
and one here and another there, hurled down half dead,
made known why they were dying;
for the dreams that disturbed them forewarned them of this,
so that they might not perish without knowing why they suffered.
The experience of death touched also the righteous,
and a plague came upon the multitude in the desert,
but the wrath did not long continue.

The dreaded Angel of Death, so Wisdom has it, is made better by the people knowing why they had to suffer.  I know I have to suffer the chemo to overcome the cancer, but it is suffering nonetheless.  And I feel half dead as a lingering side effect.  The Angel of Death is portrayed as a warrior leaping from heaven.  The chemo is a warrior as well, hopefully making it possible for God to work in me.  The Angel of Death at least discriminated who would become victim to death.  Chemo, not so much, as it destroys good and evil.  The medical plan is that it will destroy more evil than good, so the good will survive and revive.

Half empty?

“A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho, and he fell among robbers, who stripped him and beat him, and departed, leaving him half dead.  Luke 10:30

There is that half dead again.   Technically it is the cancer which is the robbers, but the chemo leaves me in much the same condition as the robbers left the victim in the Good Samaritan parable.  I need Christ to pick me up.

I find in my sufferings a great concern for all of those people of the Middle East suffering because of war, civil war, terrorism and Islamists.  My trial is half over, but there is no way for any of them to know where they are in their suffering.   I have hope that in the end, some good will result, but so many of them have nothing but uncertainty to face no matter how much they endure now.  It is not at all clear which of the many battling factions would bring good to the region.  May God help them all!  Be merciful, O Lord, to those who are suffering throughout the Middle East.  There are Your people there, Lord and they are suffering horribly.

For the suffering people of the world, as well as for myself I turn to God with the Prayer in Time of Need:

Almighty God, the Father of mercies and God of all comfort, come to my help and deliver me from this difficulty that besets me. I believe, Lord, that all trials of life are under Your care and that all things work for the good of those who love You. Take away from me fear, anxiety and distress. Help me to face and endure my difficulty with faith, courage and wisdom. Grant that this trial may bring me closer to You, for You are my rock and refuge, my comfort and hope, my delight and joy. I trust in Your love and compassion. Blessed is Your name, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, now and ever and to the ages of ages. Amen.

 

A Man Born Blind, Jonah, Job and A Believer

And his disciples asked Jesus, “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?”  (John 9:2)

The question the disciples ask the Lord Jesus in John 9 has taken on new and personal meaning with me.   When some hear that I have been diagnosed with Stage 3 lung cancer, they often ask two questions:

Were you a smoker?

Is there a history of lung cancer in your family?

The questions are logical – people trying to make sense of the lung cancer diagnosis.  Obviously if you were a smoker (you sinned), the lung cancer is the consequence of your behavior.   Or if your family has a history of lung cancer, then it is your ancestors who passed the gene along to you (parent’s ‘sin’).   What the logic does of course is put the person at ease, for if there is a clear cause and effect of sin to disease, my interlocutor can feel safe that the world is reasonable and logical.  People get lung cancer because they smoked/sinned or the inherited the sin from their parents.

Such logic helps people get through the day and helps them avoid thinking about their own mortality, but we all know the world is a bit more unpredictable than our reason allows.  The Holy Prophet Job  got his story in our Scriptures.  Retributive justice is not always at work, or the only force at work, or may not even remotely be the cause of the effect.

My history is I was not a tobacco smoker, and there is no known history of lung cancer.  There is no doubt some cause for the lung cancer, but as the doctors have told me, we will never know what caused my lung cancer to begin.

Believers in the ancient world did not have an explanatory category of “natural causes.”  For me in the scientific world, I can see there are natural disasters whose causes can be explained by natural forces.  The right collection of natural forces will produce a tornado or an earthquake or an epidemic.  I don’t have to think that every event is caused by an angry God.   The ancients, lacking a “natural disaster” category tended to interpret all things as acts of God.  What was not ever certain was exactly what caused God to act in a particularly destructive way.  Many theories were proposed: sin, icons, lack of icons, unwillingness of people to change, people too willing to change.  The Prophet Jonah, one can recall, was distraught that God didn’t destroy the city of Nineveh.  He proclaimed the city would be destroyed, hoped it would happen, and then was disappointed that God didn’t do it.  Jonah laments what he knows about God: “I knew that you are a gracious God and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love, and ready to relent from punishing.”   (Jonah 4:2)  Sadly many people today share Jonah’s lament and don’t want God to be merciful, abounding in love and ready to relent from punishing.  They prefer the God of retribution not the God who is revealed by Jonah or by Jesus.

I believe in a merciful and loving God.  I’m not blind to the suffering of the world. I’m experiencing it myself.  As a believer, I have to wrestle with the real world, and faith in the God of love.  I accept a modern scientific world that some events can be explained by natural causes.  I don’t always know where God’s hand is in these events.  I know God created this world.  God continues to love His creation, despite the many problems created by natural causes.  God could have created a different world, but He apparently finds this world a good world in which to love us.  Mortality is part of this world, God loves us anyway.  Our Christian faith is that God enters into the human condition and dies in order to save us.  God does not avoid death.  God does not ask us to suffer something He Himself is not willing to suffer.

This week I began my second round of chemotherapy.  Yesterday I received two different chemos aimed at destroying the lung cancer cells.  I’ve experienced many of the serious side effects of the chemo.  I reported that in a previous blog: Walking Through the Valley of the Shadow of Death.  My first week after treatment was a whole lot rougher that what I’m currently experiencing, though I recognize that symptoms come and go throughout the chemo process. And while things are better this week compared to the first round, better is neither good nor normal.   Psalm 107 comes to mind again.

Some were sick through their sinful ways, and because of their iniquities suffered affliction; they loathed any kind of food, and they drew near to the gates of death. Then they cried to the LORD in their trouble, and he delivered them from their distress; he sent forth his word, and healed them, and delivered them from destruction. Let them thank the LORD for his steadfast love, for his wonderful works to the sons of men! And let them offer sacrifices of thanksgiving, and tell of his deeds in songs of joy!  (Psalm 107:17-22)

This week, though I experience that loathing of any food, I am thankful to the Lord for His steadfast love and His wonderful works.  Christ is present even in the suffering of the world.

And to the question the disciples asked at the beginning of John 9 and at the beginning of this blog,

Jesus answered: “It was not that this man sinned, or his parents, but that the works of God might be made manifest in him.”  (John 9:3).

The story of Job is lived many times in the history of the world.