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Responses (sorted by date)
clrclady: Right on!!! (3/17/08)
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You can also find this at my blog site.
 I'm rereading Henri Nouwen's book Compassion. He looks at the root of the word and translates it "to suffer with," which is one of the things that was transformational for me back 20 or so years ago when I first read this book. I was in college and found that as I opened the reality of my own suffering and wrestled with others in theirs, God's answer was not to remove our suffering but to suffer with us. I come back to this often as I work with suffering people and return to the WHY of it all. Whenever I rage against God because I don't know why a god of love would allow such suffering, he always brings me back to Psalm 22 which is a psalm about David's suffering and a prophesy of the suffering of Christ. So often I want a God of vengeance, forgetting that I would be destroyed under such a god. Instead, he shows himself as God who suffers with us. Now, I have to say, sometimes this is meaningful and sometimes I still pound on God's chest about it, but this is actually a bit of a side note of what Nouwen got me thinking about.
He was talking about how our society emphasizes personal freedom at the expense of compassion and leaves compassion as a side note to mitigate the harsher elements of competition. At first I was wondering about my own tendency to talk about freedom as being something God invites us into. Does this run contrary to compassion? Then I realized that what I think is important on the path of healing and receiving the gospel is something different than personal freedom, but might sometimes get confused with it—especially with us coming from such cultural indoctrination as we come by in the USA. I think the thing that God wants to invite us into in Christ is the experience of communal freedom. It's not about ME being free, but about US finding freedom to live a life of love and compassion. I think this will include an experience of life that is substantial and meaningful for me, but if that becomes the point then I've lost something. My relationships become something where I am looking for you to do something or be something to me to make my life better or easier or less painful or less lonely and in the end you will disappoint me and I will get angry and lash out at or withdraw from you. The path I think we are offered in Jesus is one where God meets me in the midst of my loneliness and suffering and pain in his compassion and then he invites me to bring that to others even while I am still suffering. Without Jesus this seems kind of impossible, with him seems pretty hard. My natural bent is to twist things in order to get something for myself, even if it's a good feeling that I've helped someone and made a difference. I might use that to ease my own suffering by focusing on yours and fall back into relationships where I'm trying to get you to somehow make me feel better. I'll grant there's a catch-22 in there. I mean, even if it's Jesus working through me for his good purposes, I might still get that good feeling. so how am I supposed to know if I'm trying to make my own world work or if I'm involving myself in some path of communal freedom? I don't know, I get caught in this all the time. I keep coming back to the idea that this is a messy path and we won't get it right. I will say that as I do this in the context of a loving, compassionate community of believers, I am lifted out of my sin and selfishness a lot sooner than when I was more going it alone. I think one of the toughest elements in this for me is letting myself actually feel my own suffering and pain, because I have a host of options for shutting that out or numbing myself to the pain. When I get like that, I feel myself more distant from the comfort and compassion that Christ wants to offer me—either mystically or in a physical way through another person—and I in turn have less to offer my companions on this journey.I guess when I am struggling in a relationship, I should stop and consider what it would be for me to let go of what I want from my friend and look for how I might suffer alongside that person.
ps - I also think rejoicing together is a part of communal freedom, but that will have to wait for another day... |
