Catholic
Spirituality
Uniting with the suffering Jesus our best hope
Guest Columnist
Joan Forde
Yes, we know that all creation groans and is in agony even until now. Not only that, but we ourselves, although we have the Spirit as first fruits, groan inwardly while we await the redemption of our bodies. In hope we were saved. But hope is not hope if its object is seen; how is it possible for one to hope for what he sees? And hoping for what we cannot see means awaiting it with patient endurance.
— Romans 8:22-25
The news is never without a surfeit of misery over which to pray. But the recent earthquakes in the Sichuan province of southwest China and the cyclones in Myanmar highlight the human face of tragedy with particular intensity.
I can still hear my mother’s voice dolefully intoning the words, “mourning and weeping in this valley of tears” as she said the rosary. At the time, I was convinced that — along with all the other flaws a teenage girl perceives in her mother — she was just being lugubrious and overly pessimistic. I simply had not lived long enough.
It is easy to feel a sense of recognition reading St. Paul’s account of all creation groaning in agony. And as the years fly by, the deterioration of our own fragile, not-yet-redeemed bodies becomes all too graphic. The uncomfortable truth is that we, and the physical world we inhabit, live suspended between life and death.
Theologians refer to catastrophic natural disasters as “natural evil.” Insurers call them “acts of God.” I can easily get caught up in asking, “Why, why?” as I wonder how this world of earthquakes, tsunamis and plagues can be the creation of a benevolent God. This is not a case of war, or massacres, or opportunistic farm policies where the human stain is clearly to blame. This is random. We wince at the scenes of implacable natural forces catching a bunch of innocent people — often, it seems, the poorest ones, in an inescapable trap.
I like to think that God, who has said that He desires our friendship, welcomes our honesty, even our baffled anger, in asking those questions. Friends open their hearts to each other in good times and bad.
After the recent earthquake in China, charts of the earth’s tectonic plates, like a giant jigsaw puzzle in constant motion, flooded the Internet. Sometimes the plates collide and fracture, causing fierce seismic activity and, indirectly, human anguish. In the longest possible view, Dr. John Polkinghorne, British physicist and theologian, points out the paradox that those moving plates and their fractures are signs that the earth, unique in our solar system, is a living planet, and so habitable and hospitable to human life. Order and chaos, life and death, and here we are in the middle.
It is all too easy to wax philosophical and academic about someone else’s loss and devastation on the other side of the globe. But who of us would care about tectonic plate theory if our own child lay buried under a mound of rubble? Then it would seem time to wail and curse the God who presumably allowed this outrage.
Fortunately, the Biblical Job laid the groundwork for bitter complaints to God when things go very wrong. But as God told him, creation is much larger than his human experience of it. Job is only a creature cheekily calling his Creator to task.
But there is something unique about Job’s protests, something that seems to rivet God’s attention. Unlike his friends, who only talk about God and his motives, Job turns and talks to God, questioning him honestly and directly. In doing so, he is comforted, embraced and eventually restored, though his questions remain. So do mine.
My heart aches for those who have never known Jesus, who cannot consciously unite their agonies to His in their hour of need.
In his recent encyclical, Spe Salvi, which takes its name from a line in St. Paul’s Epistle to the Romans above, Pope Benedict says, “Life is not a simple product of laws and the randomness of matter, but within everything and above everything, there is a personal will, there is a Spirit who in Jesus has revealed Himself as Love.”
Choosing union with the sufferings of Christ, who took on our wretched vulnerabilities, is our best hope in a capricious universe.
Joan Forde is a writer and member of Our Mother of Consolation Parish.
Almighty God,
Give us such a vision of your purpose
And such an assurance of your love and power, That we may ever hold fast the hope
Which is in Jesus Christ our Lord, Who is alive with you and the Holy Spirit,
One God now and forever.
Amen.