Thursday, November 10, 2011

More on suffering!

I came across two variants of the 'does God suffer' question in the same day, one from a womanist perspective that wants to take seriously the real suffering of slaves and blacks in the US and show us what we can learn from such strong witnesses, and one from a Christian-exploring-Buddhist perspective raising questions about creation ex nihilo.  I find it interesting that those strands of thoughts could coalesce into (what I have learned) can be called open theism.  "Could", I say.  There's some flexibility in the final reading of those two sources, I think.

So much of this seems motivated by a particular understanding of love that sounds like this: Love must entail suffering.  To love something is to become so intimately involved in it such that the danger and risk of the beloved becomes the worry and danger of the loved.  Love means mess.  Love means involvement.  And if God is love, we need to take this seriously and give up certain older stands of theology that insist on God's transcendence at the expense of God's connection to reality.

There's something to this 'love critique,' especially in the way we conceptualize "perfection."  The ancient Greeks thought of perfection as unity, stillness, and constancy.  Maybe what is really up for grabs is our notion of perfection--Greek white men imagined that perfection looked infinite, simple, unified, power, and that does indeed sound like a conditioned notion of perfection.  Really, it sounds like a dictatorship.  Where is perfect relationship?  Where is perfect love?  So from that perspective, I can get right on board.

Where I find myself pausing is when the next step is made into the suggestion that God really isn't different from creation.  If God loves us, that love means God is involved with us, suffers with us, is down in this mess with us together.  Hm.  Does love mean dying in a ditch next to the one we love?

Maybe it's my experience with ACoA and Al-Anon, but I wonder about any description of God that makes God sound co-dependent (which, for those Buddhism-watchers out there, is amusingly quite different from dependent co-arising).  We could boil down the lesson from those groups in this way: a person can learn to be okay whether or not an addicted person is still using.  That's what healthy, connected relationship looks like.  Connected, but 'okay' in themselves whether or not  someone they love has become enthralled to something dangerous.  Connected, and yet separate.  Loving, and sometimes sad, but also okay.  That is a far different vision of love--it mingles individuality and relationship.

Love might entail suffering, but perfect love might entail both suffering and okay-ness.  I think that's fundamentally what I find so dissatisfying about questions about God's suffering, or knee-jerk reactions against those questions.  Both of them seem to me to have missed something mysterious about relationship, where neither the relationship nor the individual has the final word

Wednesday, November 2, 2011

Pain and Suffering

Probably one of the funny things about pain--which, let's be honest, there just aren't that many funny things about pain, and this might not exactly qualify as humorous--is that even studying risks invoking it.  It reminds me of that old medieval sense that invoking a name might summon something terrible, as if talking about pain might somehow summon it.

My sister and I were speaking of accustoming our hands to pain for the sake of cooking and making candy--for her, that's a far more immediate and economic concern, but we were speaking about how we have to undo years of training to learn to cook.  "It's hot--don't touch!" has to give way to hot but able to be handled.  Pain has to faced, prepared for, in the course of being able to something well.

One of the most helpful things I have ever learned is that pain and suffering are different.  Pain is immediate--it can be psychological or physical or perhaps even spiritual, but it hurts.  It's the sensation of something wrong.  Which is why pain can be so frustrating--like phantom pain, that pain that people who have lost a limb feel from a non-existent body-part.  Pain is supposed to tell us something is wrong, but sometimes we're inclined to say, "Thanks!  I got it!  No need to remind me!"

Suffering, though, is what I want to reflect on for a moment, because I've been wondering about something.  I learned once that "suffering is pain we feel at our own limitation."  That's why, for example, some people suffer much while confined to a hospital bed, and others much less so, because the second group finds different ways to accept the limitation.  Elsewhere, recently, someone suggested to me that "suffering is the pain we feel between what we imagine/want and what is."  It seems to me that those definitions are interestingly different.

It's funny that the pop-conception of legalese is that we can sue someone for "pain and suffering," when, if either of these definitions is correct, pain might be the fault of the perpetrator, but suffering is as much the fault of the one suing.

Clearly, the two definitions are related--but I wonder, which is true?  Is the pain we call suffering because of our limitations, or because of what we imagine?  If the latter is true, the pain we call suffering is eradicable.  If the former, some kind of suffering is inevitable.  It makes me think of Jesus on the cross and the poem in Philippians 2--by choosing to be limited as human is limited, Jesus truly suffered the pain of those limitations.

Can we escape all suffering?  I'm simply not sure.  Certainly how we respond to our limitations affects--or quite possibility effects--our suffering.  But maybe the more important lesson is that, while suffering can be eased and it's not clear to what extent, pain sometimes is simply part of our experience.

Maybe confectionery has more to teach us than simply avoid sweets.