That I May Know the Weight of Your Hand

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

My eldest daughter once asked me why God placed her in these days rather than placing her in a more magical historical age like the medieval age of chivalry or the age of elves. I understand her love for enchantment and her longing for change. Like me, she feels so very regular and her pain seems so normal, so inconsequential, but she has forgotten that every great legend starts with a quite regular kid…or hobbit. She might be a ring-bearer. On the other hand, she might live her life in relative obscurity but give birth to the ring-bearer. What she has not realized or has failed to see is that God has placed her smack in the middle of a legend and even if her life amounts to nothing earth-shattering, her routine faithfulness is changing the world. That perspective changes the kind of mental calculations we perform, especially where suffering is involved.

Where pure reason or emotion cannot make the mental calculations, the imagination helps us enter the suffering. It helps us sit down in the pain within our soul and to listen to God. It helps us to participate in and enter—insofar as we are able—the mystery of God. Profound stories, strong songs, vivid pictures, thoughtful poems, and purposeful lives are conduits for the imagination to travel along as it moves toward God. The journey is long and the road wanders, but the soul’s pilgrimage back to God must pass through suffering and eventually death itself. The imagination is a shepherd’s staff that guides us through the valley of vision because “though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me” (Psalm 23).

 

A healthy imagination gives us the opportunity to see our suffering as God sees it: not as amusement, nor as an empty vessel that we fill with meaning. Our suffering is already filled with meaning and we need a strong imagination to see it rightly. It is one thing to know how God sees, it is another thing entirely to see along the same line of sight. Since God first imagined us and all of the events in detail that make up our days and lives, our suffering has been transformed. Our suffering is hallowed, sanctified, transfigured. This sanctification of suffering was so with Abraham when he was about to sacrifice his only son, and it is so for us.

God is the telos of this story. Every event and every character in the story is driving toward a resolution in God. Perhaps pain is not only the megaphone of God, but the means by which, through which, he draws us to himself. It is a door, like delight, like bread and wine, through which we might travel toward God—a God who did not stay in his holy heavens but became one of us and suffered our pain with us and for us. He entered his own story—the Storyteller became a character. Christ’s agony has made suffering not only a badge of honor for his followers, but it has also given greater meaning to our suffering. By suffering we enter into Christ’s and, thereby, know our Savior more intimately. Such knowledge does not remove the bewilderment, nor does it banish the darkness, but it trains the imagination to see with God’s eyes. Suffering does not save, but it is a sign of our identity in Christ. It is a seal of ownership upon our lives. It signifies “God: made this day by my hand.”

I sometimes tell my students, “Be careful what you tell people when you call them to Christ. Be sure they know what is in store for them. Martyrdom takes many forms, and Christianity is a cross-centered religion for a reason.”

Suffering takes many forms. Grief is non-linear. Pain is hard to measure. The process from pain to resolution is messy. God did not give us suffering so that we might only look beyond it to some happy vale of future delight. He gave us suffering as a gift, just as he has given us happiness as a gift. Pain is a megaphone. Pain is a gift, “for God made my heart weak, and the Almighty terrifies me; because I was not cut off from the presence of darkness, and he did not hide deep darkness from my face” (Job 23:16-17). That is why Augustine wrote such a passionate description of how suffering caused imaginative healing at the compassionate hand of The Great Physician: “…for you have compassion on our dust and ashes. It was pleasing in your sight to reform my deformity, and by inward stings you disturbed me so that I was impatient until you were made clear to my inward sight. By the secret hand of your healing my swelling was lessened, the disordered and darkened eyesight of my mind was from day to day made whole by the stinging salve of wholesome grief” (Augustine).

Make yourself clear to my inward sight, O God.

Consume my imagination in the fire, the glory, of your face.

A friend of mine was, by all American standards, successful. He was a rich and important businessman. Then he crashed a snow mobile with his son. His son has suffered, but the father could not walk nor could he talk for a very long time. He can talk now, with a significant slur in his words, and he can walk, but slowly. We spoke the other day—slowly, but together.

“I miss those days of convalescence,” he said. “I don’t miss the suffering, but I miss the very real sense of God’s presence in my life. I try to hold on to that memory. I try to remember what it was like, but it is hard now that I have my life back.” His tongue forms the words with difficulty.

“I think I understand,” I say to him. “I wish I could give that presence as a gift to my children and to those around me, but I’m afraid I can’t. They must pass through pain.”

He pauses. “Yes. You don’t wish the circumstances upon them, but you wish they could taste the presence of God that wonderfully.”

Suffering is a gift. Suffering is a thrust, a nudge, away from my swollen self-intoxication, and it sends me stumbling into the presence of God where Joy is found: the vibrant life is found only in the lap of God because only there do we realize “that joy is the sweetness of contact with the love of God, that affliction is the wound of this same contact when it is painful, and that only the contact matters, not the manner of it” (Simone Weil).

 

“If you wish me to be in darkness, I shall bless you. And if you wish me to be in light, again I shall bless you. If you stoop down to comfort me, I shall bless you, and if you wish me to be afflicted, I shall bless you forever” (Thomas A Kempis).

 

“No one is ever holy without suffering” (Evelyn Waugh).

 

My daughter cannot sleep. Her stomach is cramping. It has been doing this for a few months. She is the same one who, at the age of three, could not breathe, so we took her to the hospital, the same one who kept accidentally falling out of her dinner seat as a kid and we laughed because she did it every day.

She can breathe tonight, but still…

Perhaps I shall tell her about barking dogs at night. I shall tell her about hawks at dusk. She laughs louder, more readily, than the rest. And then I shall tell her about wings, warm and strong.

Sit in the suffering, my skittish dove.

Attend to the voice of God.

He is not silent.

Better yet, he is painting you—these are the dark paint strokes of a masterpiece.

 

“Beneath the shadow of Your wings I sing my joy and praise. Your right hand is my strong support through troubled nights and days” (Psalm 63, Psalter Hymnal).

 

We are bewildered pilgrims who carry the accumulated pain of life upon our backs. Some of us stoop lower than others. Sink the tap root into the soft loam of suffering and find God. He is life for the soul, strength for this pilgrim way.

 

“Since I still don’t know enough about pain,

this terrible darkness makes me small.

If it’s you, though–

press down hard on me, break in

that I may know the weight of your hand,

and you, the fullness of my cry.”

–Rainer Maria Rilke