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Transforming Our Suffering by Richard Rohr, OFM
All healthy religion shows you what to do with your pain. Great religion shows you what to do with the absurd, the tragic, the nonsensical, the unjust. If only we could see these “wounds” as the way through, as Jesus did, then they would become “sacred wounds” and not something to deny, disguise, or export to others.
If we cannot find a way to make our wounds into sacred wounds, we invariably become negative or bitter. Indeed, there are bitter people everywhere. As they go through life, the hurts, disappointments, betrayals, abandonments, the burden of their own sinfulness and brokenness all pile up, and they do not know where to put it. If we do not transform our pain, we will most assuredly transmit it.
Exporting our unresolved hurt is almost the underlying storyline of human history. Biblical revelation is about transforming history and individuals, so that we don’t just keep handing the pain on to the next generation. Unless we can find a meaning for human suffering, that God is somehow in it, and can even use it for good, humanity is in major trouble.
From Richard Rohr's Daily Meditation, April 6, 2014. Adapted from Things Hidden: Scripture as Spirituality, pp. 25-26 and , pp. 90-91. Subscribe at The Center for Action and Contemplation website.
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... we also rejoice in our sufferings,
because we know that
suffering produces perseverance;
perseverance, character;
and character, hope.
And hope does not disappoint us,
because God has poured out his love
into our hearts
by the Holy Spirit
whom he has given us.-—Romans 5:3-5
"There is one question that emerges over and over again in the spiritual life. What’s holier: to pray or to work, to be involved in the world with all it its pains and troubles or to withdraw from it to meditate on the next one?"-—Joan Chittister, O. S. B.
Sister Joan discusses contemplation and action and a danger of the contemplative life.
Read the transcript.
Sr. Joan Chittister, a Benedictine Sister of Erie, Pennsylvania, is a best-selling author and well-known international lecturer. She’s the co-chair of the Global Peace Initiative of Women, a partner organization of the United Nations, and an active member of the International Peace Council. Sr. Joan is the author of 35 books and writes a weekly web column for the National Catholic Reporter online. [Biographical information is correct as of the broadcast date noted.]Joan Chittister
From Contemplation to Justice
Program 4910
First broadcast December 4, 2005
[Transcribed from tape and edited for clarity.]
There is one question that emerges over and over again in the spiritual life. What’s holier: to pray or to work, to be involved in the world with all it its pains and troubles or to withdraw from it to meditate on the next one? The desert monastics of the second century had a very clear and cogent answer to that question:
Once upon a time, they said, “A disciple went to see Abba Joseph and said to him, ‘Abba Joseph, as far as I am able I say my little office, I keep my little fasts, I pray my little prayers, I live in peace and as far as I can, I purify my thoughts. What else can I do to be holy?’ Then Abba Joseph stood up. He stretched his hands toward heaven. His fingers became like ten torches of flame and he said to him, ‘Why not be turned completely into fire?’ ”
The meaning is clear: The danger in the contemplative life is that it may become only one-half of the spiritual life. The danger is that prayer contemplation, will be used to justify distance from the great questions of life. That contemplation will become an excuse to let the world go to rot.
That is a sad definition of the spiritual life, and, at best, a bogus one.
Contemplation is not for its own sake. To live a contemplative life, to be spiritual, does not mean that we spend life in some kind of sacred spa designed to save us from having to deal with the down and dirty parts of life. The contemplative life is not spiritual escapism. Contemplation is immersion in the God who created the world for all of us.
The mystics of every major religious tradition remind us of that always:
“Within the cave of the heart, God dwells,” Hinduism tells us.
“ Buddha is omnipresent, in all places, in all beings, in all things, in all lands,” the Buddhist master says.
“Where can I go to flee from your presence?” the Jewish psalmist prays.
“Withersoever you turn, there is the Face of God,” Islam teaches.
And Christianity reminds us always, “Ever since the creation of the world, God’s invisible nature has been clearly perceived in the things that have been made.”
But that’s the point: if all things are of God, then all things demand, deserve justice.
Indeed, the teachings are traditional and the teachings are clear: God is not contained in any one people, in any one tradition. And that’s why the contemplative responds to the Divine in everyone.
God wills the care of the poor as well as the reward of the rich. So, therefore, must the true contemplative. God wills the end of oppressors who stand with a heel in the neck of the weak. So does the real contemplative. God wills the liberation of human beings. So will the true contemplative. God desires the dignity and full development of all human beings. Thus God takes the side of the defenseless. Thus must the genuine contemplative. Otherwise, the contemplation is not real, cannot be real, will never be real because to contemplate the God of Justice is to be committed to justice. The true contemplative, the truly spiritual person, then, must do justice, must speak justice, must insist on justice. And they do.
Thomas Merton spoke out against the Vietnam war. Catherine of Siena walked the streets of the city feeding the poor. Hildegard of Bingen preached the word of justice to emperors and to popes. Charles de Foucauld lived among the poor and accepted the enemy. Benedict of Nursia sheltered strangers and educated peasants. And so must we do whatever justice must be done in our time if we claim to be serious about really sinking into the heart of God. A spiritual path that does not lead to a living commitment to the coming of the will of God everywhere for everyone is no path at all. It is, at best, a pious morass, a dead end on the way to God.
Contemplation is a change in consciousness. It brings us to see beyond boundaries, beyond denominations, beyond doctrines, dogmas and institutional self-interest straight into the face of a mothering God from whom comes all the life that comes.
To claim to be aware of the oneness of life and not to regard all of it as sacred trust is a violation of the very purpose of contemplation, the immersion in the God of life. To talk about the oneness of life and not to know oneness with all of life may be intellectualism but it is not contemplation. Contemplation is not ecstasy unlimited. It is enlightenment unbounded by parochialisms, chauvinisms, classisms and gender.
Transformed from within, the contemplative becomes a new kind of presence in the world, signaling another way of being, seeing with new eyes and speaking with new words the Word of God. The contemplative can never again be a complacent participant in an oppressive system. From contemplation comes not only the consciousness of the universal connectedness of life but the courage to model it, as well.
Those who have no flame in their hearts for justice, no consciousness of responsibility for the reign of God, no raging commitment to human community may indeed be seeking God. But make no mistake, God is still, at best, only an idea to them, not a reality.
Indeed, contemplation is a very dangerous activity. It not only brings us face to face with God. It brings us, as well, face to face with the world, face to face with the self. And then, of course, something must be done. Nothing stays the same once we have found the God within. We become new people and, in the doing, see everything around us newly, too. We become connected to everything, to everyone. We carry the world in our hearts: the oppression of all peoples, the suffering of our friends, the burdens of our enemies, the raping of the Earth, the hunger of the starving, the joy of every laughing child. The zeal for justice consumes us. Then action and prayer are one.
Zeal, defined as “the burning point” in Greek, has to do with caring enough about something to make being born worthwhile. To be contemplative, to be a really spiritual person, we must have Zeal for the God of justice and love. We must be consumed with zeal not only for God but for everything God created. There is no clearer sign of contemplation. And then, and only then, is our own zeal, our desire to do right, to do good, safe to unleash upon the world.
Abba Lot went to see Abba Joseph and said to him, “What else can I do to become holy?” Then Abba Joseph stood up and stretched his hands toward heaven. His fingers became like ten torches of flame and he said to him, ‘Why not be turned completely into fire?’ ”
What is the relationship between contemplation and action? The same as the relationship between flame and the fire. Clearly, it is to be turned completely into fire.
With Us by Deborah Smith Douglas
In unimaginable love, God has taken on our humanity—including all our mortal terror, sorrow, and pain—and invited us, in exchange, to participate in the mystery of eternal life that is God’s own nature. God offers us, in that exchange, a partaking of divinity so deep that it amounts to union, what the Lady Julian called “one-ing” ourselves to God. (1) God in Christ is so profoundly with us that that “with-ness” is who he is: Emmanuel.
[O]ur suffering in this life may be unspeakable; we may feel ourselves to be completely isolated and alone, but in truth God is with us. Not … assuaging or canceling the pain, but inhabiting it—and thereby transforming it.
This “great transforming” of our catastrophes is possible because the Incarnation was for Jesus just such a catastrophic narrowing, just such a claustrophobic enclosure of the vastness of God within a human life. Christ understands our human experience of being “fenced in” not as a function of divine omniscience, nor from some detached observation of our suffering, but from his own human experience.
1 “Prayer oneth the soul to God.” 14th Revelation, 43rd Chapter, XVI Revelations of Divine Love Showed to Mother Juliana of Norwich 1373, preface by George Tyrrell S.J. (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner and Co., 1902) p. 103.
From Weavings: A Journal of the Christian Spiritual Life, Vol. XXVI, No. 1 (Nov/Dec 2010/ Jan 2011), (Nashville, TN: The Upper Room, 2010), 27-33.
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