‘“Abba, Father,” he said, “everything is possible for you. Take this cup for me. Yet not what I will, but what you will.”’ (Mark chapter 14, verse 35)
Take this cup
I’m a late bloomer. My friends were getting part time jobs by the time I woke up to our taboo on suffering. Up till then, you could ask how I was doing and if I was doing really bad, I’d just say I was doing really bad. I was pretty honest about my struggles, because they had always been part of my life, so I never questioned them.
When I realised that wasn’t normal, I was confused and kind of angry.
I saw people with pain like mine, trying to find excuses for God. Finding their hope in the idea that their healing is just around the corner – a few more prayers away. Or people putting a big Jesus-partition between them (hurting) before and them (happy) now – “But then I met God! And since then it’s been good!”
Because happy is right, right? Happy is all God wants for us. Fear and doubt and confusion is wrong. Anger and hurt is wrong. Or not wrong, but for special occasions. Or for people with doctor’s notes.
I didn’t have my doctor’s note yet, which sucked a lot, and I was starting to want one. I had become ashamed of my wounds.
“...we have forgotten that no God can save us except a suffering God, and that no man can lead his people except the man who is crushed by its sins.”
(Henri Nouwen, ‘The Wounded Healer’)
Yet not what I will
I started to list off every reason I could think of, because I thought if I could explain it wasn’t my fault enough times, someone would come take it off. That’s how people prayed for me sometimes, and it stuck.
God, make her better (normal). Make her whole (like us). She deserves so much more than this (some don’t).
I’d come back and say I felt way better that week, because that felt like what was meant to happen. What we didn’t realise was I didn’t need impersonal memory verses or well-wishes. I didn’t need people shouting encouragement from a safe distance.
When we lean back on these well-meant Christian-isms, we’re selling the lie that pain is unusual just because we don’t understand it. One of the worst things you can do to someone who is suffering is tell them it will get better (before they die).
Firstly, it might not. Secondly, even if it does, it isn’t better right now. They’re in right-now, and escaping the right-now isn’t super healthy. They’re probably already trying to escape as it is. That’s bad. Don’t help them.
I’m not saying you tell them this. That would be kind of insensitive. I’m saying being present, which is the thing we’re collectively the worst at, helps more than anything else ever could.
Grief and all its relatives are a lot more tolerable when befriended. They’re just there to remind us we’re meant for something truer than this. So when pain takes over, it needs to be soothed. People need to know it will be heard, not censored, and that they will be loved even if it never stops.
They need to know they aren’t alone in their longing for more.
“Community arises where the sharing of pain takes place, not as a stifling form of self-complaint, but as a recognition of God’s saving promises.” (Henri Nouwen, ‘The Wounded Healer’)
But what you will
If I could gather up all my younger selves, I’d tell them it’s okay and normal to have this heaviness. I’d tell them to take it for a walk, maybe buy it some fruit. It still hangs around, but that isn’t the end of the world. Life can and does go on.
Our cultural delusions don’t permit us to talk about pain like this. I think if Jesus showed up and started telling people their suffering was an inescapable part of their mortality, and that they’d just have to learn to live with it till they die, he’d probably get cancelled. That’s because it sounds like saying “give up”. It isn’t.
We are planted in a suffering, vulnerable, victorious God. The paradox of our faith is that we believe the victory is still to come at the same time as we believe it is already here. This is why we can look the distress of the world in the eye as it continues to weigh down, seemingly endless, and know it isn’t the end.
Rather than delirious positivity or fear, we have been invited into an uncomfortable clarity. In practical terms, it’s why we can be totally present and totally honest. It’s why we can hold space for the blood-sweat-tears-vomit-bad we feel sometimes without giving it power. It’s like wading through mud. Everyone has to do it in some way.
There’s a lot of bad, but it isn’t our job to make sense of it. We don’t know if it has any sense at all.
But it’s like a wound. Wounds need to be tended.
‘“Now my soul is troubled, and what shall I say? ‘Father, save me from this hour’? No, it was for this very reason I came to this hour. Father, glorify your name!”
Then a voice came from heaven, “I have glorified it, and will glorify it again.”’ (John chapter 12, verses 27-28)