Yesterday we went met with the nice folks of the Department of Immigration & Homeland Security to finalize all of my son’s paperwork to be a US Citizen. While there was a measure of suffering involved with this process, it is not what has disturbed me to write this post.
For lunch we went to Moe’s Southwest Grill in Dilworth. It was a just lunch while we waited for some paperwork to be finalized. The guy at the cash register was a very friendly guy who noticed Noah’s energy and made a comment. We talked for a couple of minutes. He was just a cheerful, engaging guy from Buffalo, NY who had been to some places we’ve been. Good guy. Nice chat. His name was Jeffrey Phillip Maher. I say ‘was’ because of this! About an hour after we left, the guy was dead. Murdered in cold blood by a former employee.
The first thoughts that came to my mind when I read about this were, “No! This can’t be! There’s no way! It was just an average quiet day in Dilworth!”
It is so shocking that 1) life is so fragile and 2) that in light of this fragility, we walk around acting as if we’re unbreakable – as if in a dream.
We were there at Moe’s having a great time, meeting and talking to people, never thinking that in a matter of moments everything would change – as if in a dream.
I live as if there is a permanence to life and this world even though I know there isn’t. Am I delusional? Or just forgetful? I get lost in the details and bored by the beauty of the ordinary. I emphasize the peripherals not the substance. I nurture the temporal rather than seeking after the eternal. Days like to today mash my face into the truth – into the really real.
It’s funny, many people would pull the Theodicy card – “God if you are good and all powerful why don’t you stop such evil acts before they happen.” But if we’re going to talk about the really realness of things, all we can say is that evil IS but God still IS too. There’s a paradox, certainly. But this God isn’t the cush God of consumer delights and satisfactions guaranteed. This is the God with us, who was crucified for us, who has risen to triumph over all that may come against us. No violence committed against us takes away from God or diminishes his glory. Violence only illustrates just how badly we need him and the shalom that he brings.
“It is because suffering, in one form or another, is a common human experience that religions give to suffering a place of central importance or consideration. There are few better ways of coming to understand the religions of the world than by studying what response they make to the common experience of suffering” (John Bowker, Problems of Suffering in World Religion). Dorothee Soelle correctly notes Christianity’s relationship to suffering is “not merely as remover or consoler. It offers no supernatural remedy for suffering but strives for a supernatural use for it. A person’s wounds are not taken from him. Even the risen Christ still had his scars.”
St. Paul in 2 Corinthians 4: 16-17 elaborates on why the scars are important, even necessary:
“Though outwardly we are wasting away, yet inwardly we are being renewed day by day. For our light and momentary troubles are achieving for us an eternal glory that far outweighs them all.”
Therefore the implications for suffering from a Christian point of view are ultimately teleological. The design has purpose. In view of Christian faith, there is no such thing as meaningless suffering.
And yet our religion, in and of itself, does not provide solace. Christian comforters do best to sit and move in silence trusting that their presence articulates, nay incarnates, truths that cannot be formed with words.
As C.S. Lewis says in response to his would-be comforters:
Talk to me about the truth of religion and I’ll listen gladly. Talk to me about the duty of religion and I’ll listen submissively. But don’t come talking to me about the consolations of religion or I shall suspect that you don’t understand.
The Lord be with you.
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