A God who hurts
Garvey, John
OF SEVERAL MINDS JOHN GARVEY A GOD WHO HURTS Still a mystery T here is a little boy in my parish, about two years old, who has just had a bone marrow transplant which, we hope, will cure a...
...This is what compassion involves...
...I remember looking at her through two panes of glass and knowing that I would die to keep her alive...
...Pascal is more biblical when he says that Christ suffers until the end of time...
...There is little here that is abstract...
...Orthodoxy teaches that God does not will human suffering...
...One man had a particularly hard time accepting the idea that we must forgive our enemies...
...His parents and grandparents take shifts...
...And that agreement calls us to a willingness even to die, to live like people who have died and have nothing to fear from death...
...Even if we believe that at the end the suffering will be over, that resurrection and glory are the true end of the tale, we take little comfort from this as we look into the face of a suffering child, or see someone fading into Alzheimer's disease...
...I try to see him and his family about once a week, and have to scrub up and put on a sterile gown and gloves to enter the hospital unit he is staying in...
...it is the result of sin...
...This can hardly be demonstrated in any philosophically satisfying way...
...If Christ is the one through whom we are forgiven and reconciled, if we are baptized into his death and the hope of resurrection, we can learn what this means only by entering into a life which risks being wounded...
...When I visit him I play with him for a few minutes, then anoint him, and he cries because he knows this is somehow an official action: Just as doctors and nurses advance with needles and stethoscopes, priests advance with oil...
...God's unknowable self has been revealed in flesh and blood and bone...
...But this is not biblical so much as it is a development of Greek philosophy...
...but we have joined his life with ours, which means we agree to live as he did...
...An Albanian monk once spoke to some of our parishioners, immigrants from Albania, where the persecution of their relatives under the repressive Communist regime made many of them bitter...
...It is important to emphasize the ferocity, because centuries of philosophy and theology have accustomed us to thinking of God as the prime mover, an impassive source of being, one who is beyond suffering...
...It is a painful knowledge...
...It is all about relationships between persons...
...Father Joan (now Metropolitan Joan of Korce) told him that you cannot reason your way to this...
...We are baptized into Christ's death and the hope of his Resurrection...
...Real forgiveness understands the offender with love and compassion, not excusing the offense, but understanding the pain, the woundedness, from which almost every offense proceeds...
...OF SEVERAL MINDS JOHN GARVEY A GOD WHO HURTS Still a mystery T here is a little boy in my parish, about two years old, who has just had a bone marrow transplant which, we hope, will cure a rare form of childhood leukemia...
...When we refer to God as compassionate we often think of the word as meaning something like "merciful" or "loving," and of course it does mean those things, but the word itself means, at root, "suffering with...
...To forgive without compassion is not really forgiveness, just as a truce is not really peace...
...He's at the age when children point at anything, for reasons that are sometimes baffling to adults...
...In fact, seeking comfort seems almost indecent in these contexts...
...Love is not serious without compassion...
...That experience helped me realize what it means when we call God "father": The love shown in Christ, who referred to God as "father" constantly, is a much more powerful example of that same fierce love...
...This is heartbreaking, but at the same time there is something beautiful about it: His family is so loving and attentive, the medical staff so compassionate, that you know something holy is happening here, as well as something deeply sad...
...And this is said by one who is about to die for us...
...someone is with him constantly...
...Most of us are very far from this...
...But we can see that compassion and suffering are connected, and so are compassion and forgiveness...
...No self, not even God's self, exists in isolation...
...At moments when we are forced into suffering with another, as the sick child's parents and grandparents are, we begin to know something more about God's love for us...
...He has joined our lives with his...
...You are only one with another person when you are capable of suffering with her, when your life has become that close...
...At times like this I am reminded of my first visceral experience of fatherhood...
...We become capable of truly being forgiven only when we are truly capable of forgiving...
...If there ever was anything to the idea that God is beyond suffering, it may be because God lives where it has all been accomplished, and knows how the story ends...
...it has been commanded, by someone who forgives us—but can forgive us only if we forgive others...
...This is what makes baptism scary...
...At the moment his prognosis is uncertain, though the doctor is guardedly optimistic...
...And unsatisfying as this may be—it doesn't, after all, fix every situation, and the people toward whom we are compassionate will die, and some of them Commonweal 7 October 8,1999 will continue to hate us—it is the only way in which we can begin to approach the mystery of Christ's life among us and in us...
...My daughter was born prematurely and almost died...
...it is as if we are evading the horror of suffering, the full tragedy...
...Jesus tells Philip, "He who sees me has seen the Father...
...He always seems relieved that it doesn't hurt, and is playing again within minutes...
...During my seminary years, one of my best teachers tried to cut through the ways in which seminarians and other Christians tend to theologize: "You strike me," he said, "and I refuse to strike you back, and this is how we discuss the Trinity...
...It leads some people to question God's goodness: We would rather have a God who fixes things than one who simply suffers with us...
...this is what the doctrine of the Trinity means, among other things...
...Christianity is not, finally, a philosophy...
Vol. 126 • October 1999 • No. 17
