Occasionally, I hear words from well-intended Christian’s that make me wince. They say things like ‘God does not give people more than they can handle,’ or ‘This must be all a part of God’s plan.’ I am not a Christian who believes everything in this world happens for a reason. I’ve just seen too much suffering that goes against the God of love and peace to believe that. I was in 7th grade in December of 2012 when I found myself in lockdown, a town away from the Sandy Hook shooting. I have seen lives upended by illness and violence. I have watched the news as war and famine destroy lives.
I think the way we respond to injustice and pain is a crucial part of our spiritual journey. The ability to sit in, acknowledge, and lament is a practice that people of faith have always known is a part of our spiritual life. I believe our obsession with quickly moving on, looking at the bright side, and ‘just trusting God’, is spiritually damaging.
I write this not because I have this approach perfected, but because I know how hard the practice of true lament actually is. My nature is towards positivity. I try to see the best in all situations and people. I try not to complain. It’s a trait I like about myself, yet I experienced this winter how unquestioned positivity can get in the way of our relationship with the divine. This past winter was a painful one. I experienced the end of a meaningful romantic relationship. Heartbroken and living alone, I found that music, the force that had brought me so much peace since I was a child, had stopped being of comfort. It felt as if music itself was slowly turning against me as I used it to make a living. Beyond my immediate personal life, I watched the news as our President launched a war that killed over 100 school children in Iran on the first day. I tried to calm myself with platitudes and positivity, but it left me feeling even further from any relationship with God.
Perhaps no one knew sorrow and injustice like Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Bonhoeffer was a German Lutheran Pastor, theologian, and anti-Nazi dissident who was imprisoned and ultimately executed by the Nazi’s for his resistance to their regime. As his safety was first threatened, he left for the United States to teach at Union Theological Seminary. After being in the U.S for two weeks, he regretted his decision and decided to return to Germany, writing, “I have come to the conclusion that I made a mistake in coming to America this time. I must live through this difficult period in our national history along with the people of Germany. I will have no right to participate in the reconstruction of Christian life in Germany after the war if I do not share the trials of this time with my people.”
Bonhoeffer returned to Germany and was arrested, imprisoned, and finally hanged. Mourning his tragic circumstances and estrangement from his loved ones, he wrote in prison, “There is nothing that can replace the absence of someone dear to us, and one should not even attempt to do so. One must simply hold out and endure it. At first that sounds very hard, but at the same time it is also a great comfort. For to the extent the emptiness truly remains unfilled one remains connected to the other person through it. It is wrong to say that God fills the emptiness. God in no way fills it but much more leaves it precisely unfilled and thus helps us preserve -- even in pain -- the authentic relationship.”
I have been thinking about this quote and Bonhoeffer’s life for months now. His bravery in acknowledging the grief of his life has made me think about the way that I acknowledge the sorrow in my life and the ways that I hear people around me talk about hardship. As I look back on my personal sorrows this winter, I wish I had spent more time in a state of lament. I wish I had sat in my circumstances with nothing to distract me, allowing the spirit of God to sit with and preserve me.
To be in touch with the pain of this world is a necessary practice if we seek to live an honest life. It is something that people of faith have always known. The book of Lamentations in the Hebrew Bible documents the Jewish people’s pain, sorrow, and grief. The author writes, “I remember my affliction and my wandering, the bitterness and the gall. I well remember them, and my soul is downcast within me…Streams of tears flow from my eyes because my people are destroyed. My eyes will flow unceasingly, without relief.” To look at a different tradition, the Buddhist teacher, Pema Chodran, says that the way she relates to fear is to say, “I agree.” Fear, pain, and sorrow are foundational to our story as people trying to live in communion with God and the spirit of love.
I want to be clear that I am not attempting to glorify or romanticize suffering. I do not believe there is virtue in suffering or that God wills human suffering. My point is only that in order to allow God to comfort us in our suffering, we must be able to sit with it ourselves. I agree with Pope Francis, who wrote, “Pain is not a virtue, but the way it is experienced can be virtuous. Our calling is fulfillment and happiness, and pain is a limitation in this quest. For this reason, the sense of personal pain is truly understood through the suffering of God who became man, Christ. Every attempt to relieve pain will achieve only partial results unless it is founded in transcendence."
It seems to me that to be in communion with God, we also must be in communion with truth. Just as the beauty, love, and peace that we can feel are truthful, we also must acknowledge that pain, injustice, and sorrow are truthful. We must not be tempted to avoid it in order to not feel it. We must be brave enough to sit with it - to fully feel it and allow the spirit of truthfulness, love, and patience to embrace us.