Sometimes pain passes quickly and small losses are easily absorbed. But when suffering goes on and on, for people of faith, the resulting crisis can be deeper and more destructive than the loss itself. We look for ways to comfort those who are hurting. But sometimes, in spite of our good intentions, the cliches and simplistic theology we offer only add to the pain and misery. In When Suffering Persists, Frederick W. Schmidt presents a pastoral exploration of ways to understand suffering theologically, offering an approach that ministers to both mind and spirit. He questions the value of our usual comforting words and examines the pat explanations we give one another. He provides instead a theology that takes seriously the devastating character of suffering, allowing for real help to those who continue in pain.
Sometimes pain passes quickly and small losses are easily absorbed. But when suffering goes on and on, for people of faith, the resulting crisis can be deeper and more destructive than the loss itself. We look for ways to comfort those who are hurting. But sometimes, in spite of our good intentions, the cliches and simplistic theology we offer only add to the pain and misery. In When Suffering Persists, Frederick W. Schmidt presents a pastoral exploration of ways to understand suffering theologically, offering an approach that ministers to both mind and spirit. He questions the value of our usual comforting words and examines the pat explanations we give one another. He provides instead a theology that takes seriously the devastating character of suffering, allowing for real help to those who continue in pain.
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Overview
Sometimes pain passes quickly and small losses are easily absorbed. But when suffering goes on and on, for people of faith, the resulting crisis can be deeper and more destructive than the loss itself. We look for ways to comfort those who are hurting. But sometimes, in spite of our good intentions, the cliches and simplistic theology we offer only add to the pain and misery. In When Suffering Persists, Frederick W. Schmidt presents a pastoral exploration of ways to understand suffering theologically, offering an approach that ministers to both mind and spirit. He questions the value of our usual comforting words and examines the pat explanations we give one another. He provides instead a theology that takes seriously the devastating character of suffering, allowing for real help to those who continue in pain.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780819225238 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Morehouse Publishing |
| Publication date: | 11/01/2001 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 144 |
| File size: | 364 KB |
About the Author
Frederick W. Schmidt is an Episcopal priest and the Rueben P. Job Chair in Spiritual Formation at Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary in Evanston, Illinois. He is the author of several books, including The Dave Test: A Raw Look at Real Faith in Hard Times. He lives in Arrington, Tennessee.
Read an Excerpt
When Suffering Persists
By Frederick W. Schmidt
Church Publishing Incorporated
Copyright © 2001 Frederick W. SchmidtAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8192-2523-8
CHAPTER 1
Having Suffered
My Stories, Yours, and Ours
Suffering passes. Having suffered never passes. —Charles Péguy
I experienced a number of childhood surgeries, bumps, and bruises, but my first conscious encounter with suffering took place in late adolescence. I had spent four years on our debate team. During most of that time we had just enough money to compete in a county-wide forensics league that included high schools from my hometown of Louisville, Kentucky. Late in my senior year, however, we were finally able to convince our school's principal to give us enough money to enter an invitational tournament being held in nearby Bardstown.
On the morning of the tournament four of us set out on snow-covered roads in a car driven by our coach and teacher, Sara Edison. Kentucky roads are hazardous in the snow, in large part because we have one and only one solution for them—spring. The going was slow. We slipped gently into a ditch early in the drive out of town and then, much more tentatively, we continued our progress south.
I have retrograde amnesia, but according to witnesses, with half of the trip behind us, Sara lost control of the car and we fishtailed into a head-on collision with a two-and-a-half-ton truck. The results were devastating. The much larger truck ripped into the front of the car, carrying glass and metal ahead of it. Injured in a way that no one could effectively help her, our young teacher and friend died en route to the small hospital in Bardstown. The rest of us were examined and then transported back to a hospital in Louisville.
Carried along by adrenaline and shielded from the realities by shock, I continued to function as if nothing had happened. As a result, I insisted on riding in the passenger seat of the ambulance in order to make room in the back for my friends. It was only after we arrived back in Louisville that the physicians discovered the full extent of my injuries.
Admitted to the same hospital where I had worked as a volunteer, I spent twenty-eight days under close medical care and scrutiny. Then I returned home to a succession of hospital beds, wheelchairs, casts, crutches, and back and leg braces. Winter gave way to spring and my senior year in high school gave way to my freshman year of college before I left most of the visible evidence of the accident behind me.
The Autobiographical Nature of Suffering
Just exactly what I make of this experience and experiences like them is something that I hope to explore with you. In part, I mention a story of my own in order to underline the fact that the conversation we are embarking on cannot be and should not be objectified. Suffering is ultimately neither academic nor abstract for you, or for me. It is inevitably a part of everyone's emotional, spiritual, and intellectual pilgrimage; and the conversation we will have between the covers of this book is not a conversation at the end of that pilgrimage, but somewhere en route.
I've also begun with one of my own experiences, as you should with yours, because suffering has an irreducibly autobiographical character that cannot be neglected. What we suffer and the way in which we experience it is like a kaleidoscope that consists of a hundred and one pieces of colored glass that refract the light in differing ways as we turn the lens. The character of our pain or loss, the shapes of our personalities, and the textures of our lives at any one point along the way will give a subtle but significant shading to even common experiences. A small child who is told there are people in other parts of the world who would like her spinach finds small comfort in that appeal to the greater suffering of others. Like her, we want to know if we can box up the experience and send it on its way—FedEx or UPS?
Accommodating the Experience of Others
On another level, however, in the course of our conversation we will find that the experience of others is of enormous relevance. The pain and loss experienced by others reminds us that whatever we may offer by way of explanation for the problem of suffering, we will need to do more than accommodate our own experience, or a single moment in that experience.
Over and over again I am struck by the ease with which we generalize from the events in our own lives. Those who experience infertility may interpret their experience as divine prompting to adopt an orphan. Those who experience infertility as utter and complete loss may feel very differently. Those who quickly find new employment in the wake of a layoff may see their good fortune as an answer to prayer. Those who slip into long-term unemployment may define God's care in very different terms, focusing instead on the insights they gain into themselves, their sense of self-worth, and the values that shape their lives. Whatever the experience, these and other elements of our lives are often woven into the fabric of a life narrative that acquires nuance and focus with telling and retelling the story. They can also determine the way in which we understand the experiences of others who encounter the same kind of loss.
This kind of generalization is a natural and necessary part of making sense out of life. Arguably the best kind of therapy is, in fact, just that—the task of telling our story, of putting the pieces into a larger narrative. We do it instinctively and with good reason. The ability to explore and articulate the meaning of our lives distinguishes us from other parts of creation.
But the generalizations we make based on those life stories do not necessarily take the needs of others into account; and when the generalizations harden into propositions, the danger of failing to allow for the complexity of human experience grows exponentially. We cite the close calls and perceived deliverances that we experience as testimony to God's goodness and as answers to our prayers without ever taking into account the implications those assertions may have for those who are not delivered, or who continue to suffer. When we do fail to take the complexity of human experience into account, it is left up to those who continue to suffer to make sense of the disparity between their experience and ours.
Again, an example from my own life will help to illustrate what I mean. My wife Elaine and I were married shortly after we graduated from college in 1975. We planned to have children, but like many young married couples paying school bills, we felt it was unwise to start a family immediately. Apart from the question of finances, we had a number of friends with children who were seminary-bound. We could see how difficult it is to maintain the quality of family life that we felt was important for a child while juggling the financial and academic demands of a seminary education. In addition, Elaine hoped to work on her master's degree and this seemed as good a time as any to pursue those avenues of training and service. So, we postponed starting our family, never dreaming what little bearing those decisions had on the future.
Graduate work proved to be every bit as demanding as we expected and seminary gave way to two years of teaching Greek and plans for my part to do doctoral work, and so—with good reason—we waited for a total of five years before we were ready to have a child. Then, in 1980 we moved to Great Britain. We decided that although doctoral work was not likely to be less demanding than seminary, it was time to consider having a child.
That autumn in Oxford we began to plan for a family and that autumn became, in some ways, the entrance to a long, dark tunnel that stretched out almost six years before us. In late October of 1980, Elaine became pregnant. We were ecstatic. In late November she miscarried and spent the Thanksgiving holiday in bed. A lack of any further success gave way to appointments with doctors: appointments with doctors gave way to clinics; and the clinics concluded that the infertility problems we faced put the odds at something like one in a thousand that we would ever have our own child.
But even doctors will pursue lost causes, and so their conclusions gave way to more appointments that (on a sporadic basis) gave way to an endless, numbing series of still more appointments and enough temperature charts that, if bound together, would have been the thickness of the Encyclopedia Britannica. Those were dark days. Many of them we survived only because the cycle of depression with which we struggled was one in which we were rarely "down" at the same time. I cannot speak for Elaine, but for me anger, bitterness, and bewilderment at the injustice of it all were very much my companions. I became vividly aware of parents who appeared to abuse their children and who appeared to have no real appreciation for what they had. I noticed unwed teenagers with children; I noticed toys and nursery rhymes, other people's daughters and other people's sons.
Then, in 1985, at a time when things were no less depressing and the doctors' predictions were no more encouraging, Elaine conceived and on October 9 of the same year our daughter was born. At the time Lindsay was conceived I was no more hopeful, no less depressed or angry than I had been on the days before she was conceived.
Given the religious climate of our country, I could easily have generalized from our struggle, writing a book that described our experience and the steps that we took to claim a spiritual victory with the birth of our child. There are already a number of similar, very successful books on the market, ones that promise a cookbook remedy to some of life's greater struggles.
But apart from the dishonesty writing such a book would have required, a far larger problem would have been the difficulty of applying that description of our experience to the experience of others. At the time our daughter was born, we knew people of great faith who continued to struggle with identifiable fertility problems, but who were never able to conceive. We knew still other couples who could not conceive, but whose inability to do so did not yield to any easy explanation. There was no clear explanation for our ability, finally, to conceive, and for the inability of others.
Although to generalize from our experience is both natural and, to some extent, necessary, it is also fraught with dangers. Ours is a single lens on life, representative of only a fraction of what might happen to people faced with similar challenges; and that single experience is then refracted by the shape of our own autobiography. Multiply those possibilities by the differences in each of our life circumstances, as well as the differences in each of our life stories, and the number of ways in which our struggles might be different from those of others is almost endless.
Drawing on a single life story and thereby assuming that everyone else sees life in the same way we do, we run the risk of fostering despair and frustration in those we seek to help. Efforts to reassure people of God's care and the comfort to be found in prayer can also lead to discouraging comparisons. The speed with which we recover, and the question of whether we recover at all, can become the engine of still more loss and pain.
Unanswered Questions
Drawing on our own lives alone also raises serious and difficult questions. Are we "blessed" by God when we escape the loss that our neighbor experiences? Are answers to prayer given to one cancer sufferer and not another? Are those who do not recover simply given a different answer to their prayers? Or if others are blessed, does God curse those who do not recover?
What of life's other arenas where persistent suffering takes other forms? Dallas, Texas, is the ninth largest city in the United States. On almost any reading, it is one of our country's economic dynamos. It is also a city of megachurches. The confluence of economic prosperity and religious fervor makes Dallas a place where people tend to attribute their economic fortunes to the hand of God. It is not unusual to hear corporate leaders attribute new clients and larger profit margins to God's hand, or to imply their success is an index of their righteousness. But it is also a city where the average age of those who are homeless is nine. Does God manage the growing success of high-tech industries and neglect children? Do stock options move God in a way that the cries of children do not?
And what about the complexities of suffering in the midst of war? How do we account for the suffering that we escape at the expense of others in times of war and conflict? What does it mean to pray for the defeat or demise of another human being, while raising prayers for our own safety? Do we believe God is clearly the ally of one country and not another? Do we believe there were innocents killed in the London Blitz, but there were no innocent souls in Dresden or Nagasaki?
Often the rhetoric and behavior that characterize war help to give the impression that questions of this kind can be answered with deceptive ease. World War II is an excellent example. The allied forces served well as God's army and Adolf Hitler is, in the minds of many, the incarnation of evil. The war itself can be characterized as a just war. The so-called "final solution" that led to the extermination of millions and Hitler's relentless attacks on Germany's neighbors suggest that this war, at least, was a reasonably obvious conflict in which prayers for deliverance and justification could be clearly focused.
But this is hardly the whole picture. The social and political climate in Germany following World War I helped to create a political and economic climate in which Hitler's rise to power became possible. Rendered poor and impotent by the punitive nature of the Treaty of Versailles, Germans of every faith labored under the hardships created by still another war. Nor were all of Hitler's followers equally culpable. Children and teenagers were slowly recruited to assist in the cause with appeals that exploited both their age and their relative innocence. Even some Jewish Germans found it difficult to believe that Hitler would turn on them.
For our own part, American self-interest delayed our involvement in the war. It prompted our own leaders to ignore early evidence of the systematic extermination of Jews and gypsies. Later the same self-interest led us to bomb civilian population centers in Europe and Japan in an attempt to shorten the war on both the western and eastern fronts.
Now, none of this is necessarily grounds for arguing that any other response was possible. That is an entirely different question that cannot be addressed here. Nor would I want to minimize the hideous nature of the Holocaust. But I do want to underline the character of war and the prayers it elicits as part of the complex landscape we call suffering. The tensions, contradictory behavior, lost innocence, and destruction that mark a conflict of this kind make the question of what is and is not God's will a complex matter. For that reason, the perspective that any one nation had was, at best, a window into a much larger experience that can only be described as a tragedy.
Unacknowledged Suffering
Once we realize that our own experience is an inadequate window into the dynamics of suffering, we are then ready to see that there may be suffering that completely escapes our notice and goes unacknowledged. For example, predominantly white American churches confined to the lenses of our own experience have, at times, been slow to respond to the racism that has inflicted suffering on the African American community for over two centuries.
Indeed, our blindness to that suffering has led to incongruity in our behavior that is stunningly immoral and flies in the face of the gospel's injunction to love our neighbors. When, for example, American congregations were first integrated in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, enslaved African Americans were admitted to worship, but only under the strict supervision of their slave masters. Confined to the back of the church, or chained to the floor of a balcony, African Americans were often required to stand through the entire service. They were never allowed to preach, nor were they allowed to receive communion. Any activity that might have placed them at the front of the church was avoided.
Just how little we still understand of the unacknowledged pain that racism inflicts was apparent in the disparate reactions to the trial of O.J. Simpson in 1995. The trial was an unexpected crucible for testing the climate of race relations in the United States; white Americans found it almost impossible to comprehend the reaction of black Americans, when some celebrated the acquittal of a man who many (both white and black) believe is guilty. But what incredulous white Americans overlook is both the history of discrimination and the suffering caused by the continuing "stealth racism" that shapes the African American experience. What appeared to be a question of one man's guilt or innocence was for the African American community a question embedded in much larger patterns of discrimination and injustice. The pain that those patterns had inflicted are still widely unacknowledged, and the surprise expressed by white Americans at the reaction of African Americans is an indication of just how completely that suffering has gone unnoticed.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from When Suffering Persists by Frederick W. Schmidt. Copyright © 2001 Frederick W. Schmidt. Excerpted by permission of Church Publishing Incorporated.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Acknowledgments
CHAPTER ONE Having Suffered
CHAPTER TWO Running the Risk of Conversation
CHAPTER THREE Cold Comfort
CHAPTER FOUR God Is Great, God Is Good
CHAPTER FIVE A Theology of Candor
CHAPTER SIX Embracing the Suffering of Others
Notes