Had friends over for a dinner last night. A welcome return to this form of hospitality we have missed during the pandemic.
It was a challenging night. Both are suffering. One with memory loss. The other with chronic pain. Not how they envisioned life for themselves. The dinner conversation had much to do with suffering and our experience (or not) of God in our pain. More so, it was an acknowledgement that our faith has not grown easier as we age as much as it has become more mysterious and yet, strangely real.
Suffering deeply challenges and changes our comfortable and packaged concepts of the Divine. In suffering we do not experience a God who acts according to our expectations, hopes, or calculations. God is frustratingly close and far, intimate and distant, comforting and seemingly callous, with us and against us. Some eventually abandon God. Yet some grow deeper. Why deeper in the face of such struggle to understand? I believe it is because the faith we have, if we have it, is a gift. God draws us.
Even in the dark there is a pull toward the
light. Even during God’s silence, as I cry
out in pain and frustration, is that not the evidence of a gift in action? Why
would I otherwise choose to lash out to the God I feel has abandoned me? To leave God, to fully abandon any conversation or argument, is to be truly alone in this universe. That is the most frightening suffering of all.
