all to this talk in our series. We've been blessed with a number of excellent speakers and today we're in that same line with Sidney Callaghan. So we're very grateful that she was able to be with us. It's been over a year since we asked Sidney if she would come and be with us. And I say that because of this situation that happened last Tuesday, because she has a degree in psychology and has written a number of books and so forth, that people would tend to think we got her as a kind of crisis counselor for the situation today. But that's not true, and it would be seriously Well, I don't want to say wrong exactly, but that's the case. Suffering and joy have been with us since the beginning of the human race, certainly since the beginning of human recorded history.

[01:10]

So this is a topic which we hope you carry with you. Sidney is writing a book on this particular topic, and in a sense there's no last word that we can say. But we would ask you to have the mindset of listening to someone who's talking to us about our life, and about our future, not simply about individual crises of suffering and sorrow. So it was a great deal of joy and pleasure that we present Sidney this afternoon. I'm so happy to be with you today.

[02:17]

Thank you for inviting me. Well, the first question which I've been asking myself today is how did I ever get involved in writing this book anyway? It's such an impossible topic. I think I began to get involved in the question of suffering perhaps in the pro-life and youth in Asia movements in which I gave many speeches and I realized that I was unable to get across any idea that some suffering might be morally necessary. And so I began to write papers in a more public vein in that way. However, it also turns out that I could not get across in my own family and even I realized to myself that I did not truly understand this and I wanted to start thinking about it again. The family crisis came up in the sense that my son's wife was having a baby and we were all very delighted and the baby was born and then 30 hours later her mother died.

[03:29]

And this was a sudden horrible shock and we went to California and brought this little baby home. And my son and all of his friends were devastated. We were all devastated. And I realized I hardly had anything that I was able to say to them. How could I talk to them about this? And then I began to worry and how will I be able to talk to my granddaughter about this? She's now five and time is getting closer and closer for discussions of this sort. If I don't understand it myself, Now, I might just reside in the way out of saying, well, this is a mystery, and we'll just leave it like that. But my definition of mystery, which I got once and have never been able to forget, is that mystery is infinite intelligibility. And since we know that reason and faith must be one, we have a call to penetrate and to proceed as far as we can to understand.

[04:38]

And particularly those of us who are in the intellectual life and have been called to that particular vocation. I also have always been impressed by Nicholas Lash's writing and one of the things he talks about where he talks about the endlessness of making sense of the Gospels that we have to constantly reinterpret and try to think it through and be able to give a reason for the faith that is in us. So in the sense of trying to think this through again, of course, I had to think about what suffering is, different kinds of suffering, very complicated question right there, then to consider new theological understandings about God and whether God can suffer, and then this leads to, of course, Christ and Christ's suffering. And only then did I think that I could really begin to talk about my own feel, more or less, personal transformation, because it seems to me what we think we're supposed to do and how we're supposed to change is very much dependent on what we think these larger realities of our faith are.

[05:52]

So the first chapter was on introduction, then I go on into question of God, but I thought that that being much more abstract, I would talk about looking again at Christ's suffering, since this is more practical or more focused for us. So when I look up at the crucifix above the altar in our parish church, I cannot help but wrestle with these questions. Now how does the suffering of Jesus on the cross relate to human suffering? The body of the cross on the cross in our church is not particularly bloody or contorted like some I've seen, and perhaps it should be more so. The image we have is much too sanitized for what the actual facts of what Roman empires practice of flogging and crucifying its victims was, since we know that death by crucifixion was excruciatingly painful and harrowing because the person gradually suffocates as he can no longer pull his male body upright to breathe.

[06:59]

Yet the physical torture of Jesus's death is not the whole story. Other intense suffering was present and has revoked the question of whether Jesus suffered more than any other individual ever has. Now this comes up because I've heard a lot of older people who have been exhausted from years of chronic pain and illness remark, well, three hours wasn't very long. and that this seems a relatively brief sentence of agony compared to what they have gone through. And we can well imagine that within the hospitals, the battlefields, torture chambers and concentration camps of history other victims have experienced equal amounts of physical pain for longer periods of time. Yet when we've analyzed suffering we see that it consists of much more than physical pain. You can actually have pain without suffering, say, if you're in an athletic event or in a rehabilitation program, and pain is a signal that you're regained the use of a lens, but pain usually is distressing because it threatens us in some way.

[08:14]

And we have seen, I take Eric Cassell as a doctor who wrote on suffering, take his definition to begin with, suffering can be defined as severe distress produced by threats to the integrity of the self and by helplessness to protect either the self or others from harm and meaningless assault. So while Jesus was physically tortured to death, he also endured betrayal, rejection, abandonment, mockery, and the public humiliation of a criminal's death. Jesus, as a sinless human being who had done nothing but good, was innocent and cruelly executed in an absolute act of injustice. And since suffering is partly a contrast experience, this is an insight from a theologian, Skeelobix, says we expect good and goodness and happiness and the contrast produces of what we see produces suffering. And since suffering is partly a contrast experience, the contrast of the cross with Jesus' uniquely joyful intimacy and union with his father would be far greater than any other human being ever knew.

[09:26]

He knew himself as the son of God and was enduring a horrible, shameful death. And in addition to this, we have to take into account the fact that human beings, through empathy, that's feeling as others feel. We need to think about that much more. We can suffer with others. We suffer for others and with others. The travail of those we love produces vicarious sorrow. So Jesus, who loved his own and his neighbor more selflessly than anyone else, could empathize and suffer with the pain of others. He would intensely feel the sorrow of his mother, his disciples, and all of his brothers, sisters, friends, and fellow human beings. He could neither protect nor heal them while hanging upon the cross. And during his ministry we've seen him lamenting his inability to gather his chicks under his wings like a mother hen. So he feels deep pity for the confused people milling about like sheep without a shepherd.

[10:29]

He has compassion on all the sick and sinful of the world. And as an inspired prophet, he can also foresee how much more the future world is going to suffer as a consequence of rejecting God. How much woe will befall human beings from the sins, the family sorrows, the betrayals, the persecutions, the natural disasters, wars, and unjust cruelties that will come. I doubt that Jesus could have foreseen terrorist attacks, but we see the another horrible suffering that has come to the world. So Christ's empathy and love can identify with all human suffering and experience the sorrows of humankind. Clearly this is one sense in which Jesus can truly be said to be sin and to bear our sins in his body upon the cross. Disappointed sorrow from the rejection of his ministry would add to Jesus' distress. But can we say that Jesus was disappointed?

[11:31]

Wasn't he omniscient and informed of his destiny from the beginning? Such a claim appears to reject the affirmation that Jesus Christ was truly human as well as truly God. As an actual embodied human being, he was subject to the limitations that his, that ills in flesh are heir to, including death, and he also lived in historical time and place with these particular ideas. He grew and changed from his youth, increasing in grace and truth. Through prayer and experiences of the Spirit, he developed an increasing understanding of his vocation. I think this is very encouraging for us. He may not have known from the first how his ministry would turn out. Well, long before the Second Vatican Council, there was life in the Catholic Church. Before the Second Vatican Council, we used to read Romano Gardini's book, wonderful book, called The Lord. And in that book I remember being shocked when he said that Jesus' message could have been accepted by his people.

[12:40]

If all who heard Jesus had repented, acclaimed Jesus as God's word, then God's kingdom could have been ushered in on earth and salvation would have come. So Guardini's ability to suppose an alternative outcome to the gospel story shows that he had an understanding of God's gift of openness and freedom to creation, a very modern theological idea. I remember when I first read this I was too puzzled to really grasp it because I was still in the thraw to a belief in a predestined, detailed, defined plan that was unfolding and scientifically a fully determined, closed universe. The universe is a big machine going along. But now we can know that God is constantly creating the new with an evolving creation which God's purposes can be creatively filled. and a plenitude of ways. There may be many plans for each of us, potentially.

[13:43]

The real freedom given to creatures in creation means that historical scenarios could have and can have other outcomes and Jesus may have hoped that it would be so. He knew that he had responded to God's call with full freedom and trust and understood that with God nothing is impossible. In Robert Carus's fine book on prayer, he notes that Jesus prayed constantly to discern and follow God's will, culminating at the last in the great prayer, if it be possible, let this come pass from me. Jesus as a human being was free to seek, discern, respond to what God asked of him. He was not simply following a detailed blueprint. At every juncture of the great drama, he could have acted otherwise. He could have fled from persecution and avoided going up to Jerusalem. Earlier, he had had no difficulty facing down a lynch mob in his native Nazareth, and he was able to elude the enemies, his temple authorities, by fleeing to the countryside.

[14:46]

When he wished, he could easily hide and escape, but he prays to be fully open to God's love despite the danger, and he says yes to his call. In the same way, Catholic devotion to Mary is founded on the understanding that at the Annunciation, Mary could have said no, but instead answers, be it done unto me according to thy word. Views which imply that Jesus was completely omniscient and always knew exactly how everything would turn out do not accept the full humanity of Jesus, nor give him enough glory for his courage and fidelity. Jesus, somebody in memorable words, was not God disguised in the Jesus suit pretending to be one of us, but Jesus was a fully human being. We have to take seriously the affirmation of the hymn in Philippians describing Christ's complete self-giving and self-emptying to our human estate. And so in his humanity, Jesus could suffer pain and sorrow, death, and feel bitter disappointment from his people's rejection.

[15:53]

At the beginning, when the crowds flocked to hear him preach and teach and heal, Jesus may have hopes, had hopes for the acceptance of his ministry, but these hopes were soon dashed. Very early popular acclaim begins to fade and opposition mounts. It becomes clear that God's people of Israel along with the rest of humankind are not going to repent and accept Jesus as God's good word. Jesus ever attuned to others, the great realist I think of him, knew what was in everyone, In what Jesus sorrowfully describes as an adulterous and sinful generation, too many people existed who loved darkness rather than light because their deeds were evil. So he can begin and will recall the fate of God's previous messengers. Because of the continuing power of the world's darkness, personified as Satan, the Prince of Darkness, Christ understands that if he remains faithful to his call, sooner or later he will face death and truism like God's prophets before him.

[16:58]

So he begins to try to prepare his disciples. But Jesus, despite going and going through suffering, betrayal, arrest, torture, and the suffering of the cross, trusts in God's love and promises. And as the whole world attests, after this routine execution of one more troublemaker, in an impartial backwater, an unexpected drama takes place. So the demoralized disciples experience Christ's resurrection from the dead, the first Easter arrives, the Spirit comes, and with the birth of the Church, history changes forever. The victory of Easter is far more important than Good Friday for Christians, for without the experience of resurrection and triumph over death, the frightened disciples would have scattered and hardly be heard from again. The miracle of the risen Lord leads some contemporary Christians to argue that the display of the crucifix is a distortion of the Christian message. Victory in the joyful news of Christ alive and present to us now should be the focus of Christian imagery.

[18:05]

Faith and love displayed in the life of Jesus is more important than his death. First Christians did not use icons at the crucifixion, so why should we? Don't we risk glorifying and exaggerating the role of suffering and dying in the Christian story? Well, this whole book is, I'm writing to deplore in some ways any glorification of suffering or over exaggeration of suffering. And I vigorously deny and argue that God ever sends pain and suffering as part of a predestined plan for humankind. I think it's wrong to assert that suffering is intrinsically good for us or a blessing in disguise. Rather, suffering should be seen as horrible or meaningless in itself. Pain, disease, and death front God's desire for life and human happiness. If this is so, what should we make of the part suffering place in the life and death of Jesus? Is this a particularly unique kind of suffering with some deeper meaning and purpose for our salvation?

[19:10]

Today we've also come to the theological understanding that God can grieve for us in empathy. The old idea that God was unmoved and had no emotions and could not suffer empathy. Maybe God doesn't suffer loss and distress and anxiety and things that come from sin, but the idea of God suffering for us in empathy is very important. So if God can be affected by us and Jesus suffers with us and for us, how should this affect us and our attitudes towards suffering? So untangling these different threads of meaning is a challenge. We have to begin by remembering that different kinds of suffering exist. Complications also arise from an understanding in the complex dipolar nature of God. This is something David Tracy talks about. God's suffering may coexist with God's joy. And that's a very important point that I want to bring out in the book. In God, joy and suffering can coexist. In Christ, it seems that joy and suffering can coexist.

[20:14]

And what we know from human psychology, it also seems that suffering and joy can coexist in us. There are different circuits in the brain for positive emotions and negative emotions. And I think we all might have experiences in which, even now, even in the midst of this horrible thing, there are moments of joy as well as suffering. As we shall see, Jesus is a man of joy. And that's also, we need to think about that more. And this joy coexists with sorrow. Christ in the Gospel promises disciples joy as well as suffering and Jesus' followers will receive a joy that cannot be taken from them. That's the great promise in this life as well. Not only joy in the future but joy in this life. Although they must take up their cross and endure persecution, it's now clear that suffering and joy relate to each other in the life of a disciple. and trying to figure this out is extremely important.

[21:17]

It's an old question with a new component of thinking about joy. Okay, the meaning of Jesus' suffering and death, but how does the suffering and death of Jesus save us? Why does Christ come? And so this whole question, what is the meaning of what he does? Certainly, Jesus' steadfast courage in his fidelity to God, no matter what costs, provides a shining example and a model for humans to follow. We are to look at his life and go and do likewise. But any prophet or exceptionally good person gives us a good example and witnesses to moral courage. Many prisoners and good people that we and martyrs we have known do that. I could admire Socrates' exemplary loyalty to his principles and admire his wisdom, but it doesn't help me all that much since I can recognize that I'm in no way morally or intellectually equal to Socrates. Throughout the Church's life, Christians have confessed that the life, suffering, and death of Christ upon the cross saves all of humanity from death.

[22:24]

Every time we say the Nacian Creed, we proclaim, for our sake, he was crucified in Pontius Pilate, he suffered, died, and was buried. On the third day, he rose again in fulfillment of the scriptures. So this is the core of the gospel message, the essence of the good news. lies in the fact that in, through, and by Jesus, fully human and fully God, humankind has been saved and will rise to new life in God's love. And we read in the Gospels, God so loved the world he gave his only son so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life. Yet even in the midst of our gratitude and wonder, Christians have struggled to fully comprehend this saving event. Through the centuries, many different theological explanations, theories of the atonement, of why and how Christ saves us has been offered. And naturally, those interpretations are going to have a great deal to do with a believer's vision of the nature of God, the state of the creation, and the moral condition of humanity, how wounded and sinful

[23:30]

is human nature and how did it become so. Natural disorders and disasters in the universe have to be taken into account too if there is to be a cosmic salvation. The story of the Sin Rebellion of Adam and Eve affirmed that the whole world's fall could be blamed on human disobedience. Christ coming to suffer and die has been thought to be necessary to undo the original flaw and its sinful consequences through a sacrificial payment of reparations. The payment and the flaw are so often been linked. Now those Christians like myself who deny that a loving God sends suffering to us in a purposeful predestined plan to afflict his creatures for their own good will also challenge the view that a wrathful God needs his son to be deliberately tortured and killed in order to expiate the sins of a rebellious humanity. Can a god of love and mercy be so offended by the sins of humanity that his wrath would demand that the debt incurred by sin be paid by his son's bloody sacrifice and death?

[24:44]

In this interpretation of the redemption, the crucifixion is a human sacrifice exacted in order to atone for or to satisfy the offense given to divine justice by the sins of disobedient creatures. This seems to be in continuity with ancient Israel's practices of offering animals holocausts and even human sacrifices like Japheth's daughter to Yahweh. And the story of Abraham and Isaac is invoked to support the view that God the Father demands the sacrificial death of his son. So this version of theology encourages enemies of the Church, and some Christians, to mistakenly see Christianity as worshipping an abusing God who practices fully aside. I think my resistance to such a view came to a head several years ago during a brief social encounter. I was at a guest at a sophisticated dinner party in New York City on the Upper West Side, of course, when another guest began to confidently proclaim to the room that the Christian doctrine of a God who sacrifices his own son was a deplorable regression to ancient pagan practices of child immolation and infanticide.

[25:57]

In a superior religion such as Judaism, the guest continued, you would never find such a primitive doctrine. Since the time of Abraham and Isaac, the Jews had rejected pagan practices of child sacrifice, still so unfortunately enshrined in Christian belief. Well thought I at least, the report of ancient pagan practices of human sacrifice is correct because I knew about all those little bodies in the funerary jars at ancient shrines and we know about the high places, the Indian and Aztec sacrificial remains and how they turn up, human sacrifices turn up all over, even Agamemnon's daughter of course. But not in Christianity, so rising to the defense of the faith, I had to protest politely. Our fellow guests garbled reading of Christ's atonement as filicide. Wait a minute, I said, your view of God as an abusing parent, killing his son as a sacrifice gets the Christian story wrong.

[26:59]

First of all, for Christians, Jesus Christ is God the Son, fully God and fully human, who freely gives himself up for the salvation of his people. And out of love, Jesus voluntarily accepts suffering and lays down his life. Secondly, the suffering and horrible death that Jesus undergoes was imposed upon him by men, serving the Roman oppressors, not by God. Humans are free to reject God's goodness and regularly do so, choosing to torture and kill innocent victims. Finally, you should also know that there are different theological interpretations of the crucifixion atonement other than the one you have misunderstood. Here I was on really shaky ground, since I didn't know all these other versions at that time myself. But I knew there were other versions. At this point, our hostess began to look faintly distressed. So everyone changed the subject and began to criticize the latest play on Broadway. A good thing, too, since at the time I was more certain of what I did not believe to be true than what I did.

[28:03]

I knew enough theology to know that there existed different explanations of the Atonement and Christ's redemptive act, and that the felicide version of God as child abuser was a distortion. But I also knew that feminist religious thinkers had criticized the traditional view as sadomasochistic and necrophiliac. Indeed, going further down this wrong road, one could make the accusation that God acts like those disturbed parents who, in a particular horrible syndrome, secretly half-suffocate their children in order then to save them by heroic resuscitation. And admittedly, some versions of God in his offended wrath laying on more torture upon Jesus so he could pay the whole human debt are pretty grisly. And popular piety can go this far as well. Who can forget Robert Duvall's great movie, The Apostle, and fiery last sermon of this, he's playing a charismatic southern preacher. And that climactic end of his career before being hauled off to jail for manslaughter, the preacher goes into the aisle and holds up a toddler's hand, takes the toddler in his hand,

[29:12]

while shouting to the swaying congregation, could you as a daddy nail your own baby son's hand to the cross? Well, God could and he did in order to save you and me from our sins. So come, come to Jesus. Well, coming to Jesus requires trying to think this through And to me, a depiction of God like Abraham sacrificing this human son simply cannot be compatible with a God of absolute compassion and mercy who suffers with us. So too, the doctrine of God as Trinity makes the death of the son, who is also God, more complex than ever. And modern theology has been characterized by a new reclamation of the Trinity. All atonement theories that emphasize God's wrath over man's sin and the necessary expiation and satisfaction of God's justice do not resonate with an understanding of God's loving mercy.

[30:14]

Also, many of these views depend on a very literal interpretation of the Genesis story, which we have to think through again and particularly in the light of evolutionary science and evolution. and the original rebellion of human beings. I have a section on that. As I shall see, the evolutionary approach to human weakness can make sense and explain why humankind has the evolved freedom to sin and the predisposition to do so. I think the conclusions of the story are perhaps correct. We have a predisposition to sin and we do so, we're free to do so. But human sin is repellent enough without being exaggerated and made the cause of all the chaos of the universe. With new theological understandings of a unfinished evolving creation and groaning toward God's future we also look at Christ's suffering and salvation in new ways and I think that's a key image and metaphor and thought that the creation is unfinished it is groaning toward the future and travail

[31:25]

and childbirth, and I think these are the images that make sense, at least for me. So as I've tried to comprehend the cross more fully, I've become persuaded that the most adequate interpretation of the life and death of Jesus Christ, the suffering, is to see him accomplishing the great creative work of giving birth to the new creation. A saving birth of the new is oriented to the future of humankind, not toward expiation of past offenses. I am convinced by those contemporary feminist theologians, such as Mary Gray, who see the passion in the cross as God and Jesus laboring to bring forth the new creation. God in Christ loves and gives completely, even unto death, in order to bring into being a transformed earth and a transformed humanity. So this approach to Christ's redemption and atonement sees our salvation as a supreme act of God's maternal powers of creativity. God in Christ acts with enabling nurturing power, not coercive dominating power.

[32:31]

It's a key insight of both feminism, I think, and Christianity. To mend all divisions, heal all wounds, and unite God with the world in an irreversible bond of kinship. unity, family. Jesus Christ becomes our peace. He unites God and humankind. He is the gate and firstborn who proceeds others through death into the new life. So the images of liberating, fulfilling, the incomplete, creating, nurturing, these are the way I think we should look at the Atonement. Christ unites God and humankind. He is the gate and the firstborn, as I've said. So this vision, Jesus' saving act, is very much in accord with scripture and traditional Christian spirituality. Jesus speaks of his disciples' suffering as like that of a childbirth, which will be followed by joy in the new life. He refers to the coming catastrophes before the end of time as birth pangs.

[33:32]

Paul uses the metaphor of childbirth to refer to the whole creation groaning in travail while awaiting the redemption of human beings. So visions of Christ as our mother laboring to bring forth our new life are found in many mystics, both male and female, and I think that what the mystics do in one generation Sometimes 100 years later the theologians articulate and incorporate in their theological view. Jesus is God made visible and reveals to us that the enabling power of God takes the initiative to give birth to and fulfill the creation. that God who is divine lover and tender mother first creates us in love and then with great empathy and as a human being in full human suffering brings us fully into God's family life. So all of these new insights into God's love and the Holy Trinity as a dynamic mutual relationship leads to the affirmation that God as God would always desire to unite God's self with human creatures.

[34:40]

You don't need to have the the excuse of the fall of humankind to have God initiate redemption. The incarnation would take place as an outpouring of the creative divine liveliness. I love this image of von Balthasar of God as a fountain of divine liveliness ever creating anew. And that seems to me an image also which is oriented toward the future and oriented toward novelty and creation. I think many of these insights do come from feminism but also from many reclaiming many ancient ideas that we have had about God. So the suffering is the price in a sense Suffering is the groaning, the childbirth, the struggle for birth, for freedom. And it's necessary because of God's gift of freedom to the world, to the whole creation.

[35:44]

Because this would be necessary to have a free human ascent to God's love. And I think I understand this more since I have had children, particularly grown children. Who would want a Pinocchio or a robot for a child? There has to be that freedom and that freedom will be misused and there will be misuse of that and there will be suffering but the sense of wanting the other to grow and to be a co-creator even of themselves is very important. So there is a dark and tragic element in the human story and the crucifixion, but the resurrection points to the possibilities of a new creation, a new order, and a new light that can overcome the darkness. Now I have so much other things to say but we can't say them all here today because I do believe in real reality of sin and do believe in the reality of evil.

[36:45]

Now whether there are really evil spirits and demons and Satan, chew over that all the time. I think that is probably a personification of the evils, but C.S. Lewis always warned against that the devil's greatest weapon was making people laugh at him and not believe in the devil, so I feel a little worried about that sometimes, but I think it's probably a personification which points to a complete reality. However, if we're in the not yet, victory has been won but we're in the not yet in which we're transforming ourselves and transforming the world we can know that looking at creation so far that it can be a very long, long time that there be billions of years to get here and there may be a long, long, long time for us to struggle and to work and to, in a sense, see all these different kinds of suffering

[37:47]

Now let me just talk about the different kinds of suffering I think there are, just to make that clear. I think there is suffering that comes from natural disasters, earthquakes, people say, oh no, that isn't suffering, but it is. There is suffering that comes from evil that we do, we choose to do, sin, that's certainly one of the signs, one of the, and so in the sense, if Jesus takes away sin, he takes away huge, huge part of suffering. There is suffering that comes from vicarious suffering of love for others, from the contra—also the contrast experience, and then there are horrible interactions of suffering that come from a little bit of wrongdoing that then interact with chance and those seem to me the most devastating to deal with because the sense that there is chance is very freeing to me. People are always saying in meetings where I am, oh there are no coincidences, God's planned, God sent me this disease, God made this happen to me so I would learn this or that.

[38:55]

And I think that is an inadequate way to think about it. Now the last thing I'd like to do is to try to reclaim one traditional idea, which I think has sometimes been thrown out, which I think needs to be reclaimed. And that is the idea of vicarious suffering or suffering together with us all being able to suffer when everything else, we know that the main message is alleviate suffering, act to get rid of suffering, that's the whole, and we see Christ's a whole ministry of everything he did, even the miracles are to alleviate suffering. And this is our Christian goal to the seven works of mercy, all of these things, fourteen works of mercy, all of these things are alleviating suffering, psychological and physical suffering.

[39:59]

And this seems to be our real mandate. If we don't and we say, well, there's just a lot of suffering in the world, I think we can be guilty of what one theologian talked about, the vulgar abuse of the cross. Oh, well, the poor have always been with you, there's always suffering, and so why should we have to do something about it? But it seems to me that sometimes, even though God doesn't send suffering, God is able to do something to help us make the suffering better. This is the sort of creative aspect of God, that God helps us to bring the best out of the worst situation, always nudging us on to see what the next most creative thing we could do to sort of help. And I certainly found that in my own family, my own suffering and how things gradually could heal and I felt that God was leading us to make the best of this, to open ourselves up to make the best of this and to help us to make good come out of even these most horrible

[41:07]

horrible things. Would it have been certainly is never worth it to lose a child or to lose a mother unto these horrible things. It isn't worth it but once it has happened it seems to me that God helps us to come on to some understanding and to sort of help us. But some things there are that we can't do anything about at all. And that is where I think the old idea of offering things up and offering up sufferings. Now people have kind of dismissed this because of the, you know, offering, when you go to the dentist, offer it up for the souls in purgatory, such things. And certainly there have been exaggerations. There's saints who exaggerated wanting to be the knife. I've collected all these, let me be the victim soul, let the knife come. I've collected all of these horrible quotes to put in the book. You know, where people have exaggerated the sense of suffering, seeking suffering and so forth.

[42:10]

But I think there is one last hope for us in situations of total helplessness and in the most dire suffering. If we can retain, it comes from the idea of we have consciousness during some agonizing onslaught, or we can do as Christ did on the cross and offer up the suffering to God for the birth of a new creation. So I think I see us all helping as co-creators in the birth of this new creation that we are. This is all dependent too on understanding how corporately interconnected we are. That seems to be easier to understand now too with evolutionary science and common descent and interaction of all matter. We are corporately one with each other. We are all members. Together what affects one affects all. And Christ has said this constantly that what you do for another you do for him. And we know also, according to certain theologians, that Christ suffers still with his church who suffers and we can suffer with him.

[43:16]

We have to also remember we rejoice with Christ and Christ rejoices with us. But I think this sense that we can help with the creative birth pangs even when we can't do anything. even when we can't act. Once this Presbyterian was interviewing me on television, he said, what's this offering up stuff? He said, I dealt with this woman who had a retarded child and had a terrible life. And she said, well, I'm offering it up. And he said, well, what does that mean? I don't understand that. What does this mean? Well, I think that there is a real meaning to that. And the sense of offering it up means that you have awareness, you have consciousness, you have imagery, you are able to direct your imagery to direct your consciousness, and you can focus your awareness and attention. And we're able to do that on both present and past and future experiences.

[44:17]

Even my field of psychology is beginning to realize we're not rats and we have imagery and free will and can do these things with our consciousness. So while we are awake and mentally unimpaired we are free to direct and focus attention and we can direct the activity of our stream of consciousness. and it can act much more than physical, acting as more than physical and spatial elements. So the conscious act of offering up something to God is a personal act of directed willing or intention that is fused with a positive emotional investment of love of God and neighbor. So in prayer we lift our hearts and minds to God and enact loving feelings and images and thoughts. And I think that this is effective. We are We carry each other. We carry each other. And I think we help each other in this way. And this seems to me one of those comforting things from our tradition is that we must not let lapse.

[45:23]

We have to remember that and to remember that this This is a great, great help to us. I think that even secular people can sometimes understand this. There's a wonderful passage by Natan Sharansky, who was a Jew and a Russian dissident, and he was imprisoned in prison, tormented by the KGB. for fidelity to his moral principles all he had to do was assign something and he could be let out and during his resistance and refusal to betray his faith in other persons he came to have this real sense that there exists an intercommunion of souls beyond time and space and he had this strong and vivid sense that if he were faithful and courageously endured his sufferings he'd benefit many others but if he gave in he would diminish the power of moral goodness active in the world. So he felt that every giving in, he even castigated Galileo for giving in, but that was stretching the point, but every giving in weakened the goodness, moral goodness of the world.

[46:24]

So we have to believe in unseen struggles for us. We have to believe in unseen things which is getting easier all the time too with quantum mechanics and so forth. But these are spiritual things that we have to believe in spiritual force and the energy of love and the energy of the spirit. Even more mysteriously martyrs and others who do suffer in this way, I don't think you can suffer in joy while you are angry or sinful, but who suffer in love, like this, also heroically affirm that living in Christ brings joy in the midst of their suffering. And that too is a sort of revolutionary and important thing for us to remember. But I haven't got any more time to remember it. So thank you very much. I'd like to have questions and see what we have to say. Yes, sir? Well, both terms are wonderful.

[47:32]

Maybe intercommunion of all with all is as good as anything in the sense that what we do affects others. The smallest thing we do may affect others. One of the greatest joys in life is having somebody come up to you and say, oh, you have no idea what you said meant to me, and you don't remember it at all. And you think, oh how wonderful that some little thing I did had an effect. And I don't think we really understand how much we affect each other. And I think that's a part of the gospel message which we in our individualistic little enclosed American sense of materialistic bodies have not quite understood that. Okay. I have a little... epilogue put in.

[48:39]

Of course by the time I finish this book she may be my age, right? However, the endlessness of making sense can be to produce endless projects too because it's been so hard for me. My husband keeps saying, why is it taking so long? I said, it's just the biggest problem in all of Western history and religion, come on. The role of suffering and how to both accept some suffering without glorifying or exaggerating suffering and understanding that you must try to relieve it and alleviate it and it's just so complicated. So I have a little story at the end talking about her little cousins and how we can't keep Patrick from falling down sometimes and we couldn't put him in a... What I'd really like to do with all my children is put them in big cotton battings from age two to forty and let them out.

[49:40]

But of course they'd be a little strange by then, you know, the sense that we can't protect each other because the world is full of chances and coincidences as well as wonderful ways that God works through the world. So also how you say the world isn't determined in a plan, every detailed plan, but yet you still understand that God can work within the world if his creativity can work in a way that doesn't contradict past creativity or the story. It seems to me our story already has death in it. So I wouldn't pray for someone not to die. But there are many other things that may be open for us to pray and to work and to try to affect through prayer and through action. That was a big stumbling point. If you say God can't, doesn't have a predestined plan for every single detail, then how can you say that God really intervenes in the world?

[50:46]

And I thought, you know, that was a hard question. Yes, God can intervene through constant creativity in new ways without having controlled all of our actions every second. And first, I wonder if you would elaborate on the relationship of suffering, separation, separation. You mentioned separation from God, separation from each other, and maybe it's something that has to be separated from, some separation. Yes, isolation. I think isolation, you know, is hell. Fire and ice, ice will suffice. I mean, to be icily alone and unconnected, both with other people, with God, and even within ourselves.

[51:52]

I didn't have time to go into this, but when I think about what Christ did, it was a kind of ability to live totally integrated, as a human being, all of those pieces together, and totally united with God, and that was a new thing, because I think even in evolution we are predisposed to be have many different systems and to be, have them isolated from each other and to have altruistic impulses but also selfish, domineering impulses and all of that is, you know, isolated from each other. And the sicker you get, the more isolated everything gets within your personality. So, I think it's a wonderful point. There's something related to that. I'm not sure if I'm doing it too well. and started talking about crying, how we don't cry, and it helped me weigh on an error that we suppress this, we have to let this go.

[53:00]

We keep trying to push it down the same way we push it up. And then when you cry deeply, it's both frightening and liberating. And maybe that speaks to what was said about the suffering and the, you know, sense of joy that could be almost simultaneous. Yes, I think so. Both of these can be very deeply felt at the same time. Some people don't think that. They think that, some psychologists think that suffering totally totally fuses the whole personality. But I don't think so because I think there's something that can watch myself suffer. There's an I can watch myself cry and suffer. And there's also the kind of suffering that I think goes with joy. I think always of my examples I'm using in the book.

[54:01]

I am a parent giving blood donations to my child. I am, it's very painful, it's very threatening, say it's even worse than blood, it's really something really, really threatening to me. And I can be suffering terribly during that, but I'm also filled with joy that I am I am saving this child's life, my child's life. And so the sense of God feeling joy even at the victory of the crucifixion, you know, that's—one theologian talked about that and I thought, yes, I can see that, that the victory of the totally mourning with this and at the same time totally rejoicing that salvation has come, victory has come. If our brains weren't so complicated we couldn't be able to do it, but it does turn out that fear, anxiety, and the negative emotions are in a different place even than positive emotions.

[55:09]

So that was one of my specialties in psychology. Maybe I should write a book called God's Emotions. When I get really daring, I will do that. And I used to believe that. I mean, they told us that. Well, I read C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain. My whole book is a counter-argument to C.S. Lewis's Problem of Pain, which he uses God, that God uses pain as a megaphone to get our attention. Maybe you saw that in the movie. God uses, even good people need suffering to sort of shape them up and to turn their attention to God. And the worst image of all, God is like

[56:11]

an owner of a dog who has to punish the dog to have the dog rise up into human life. Well, I have to say the animal, right, animal people always love C.S. Lewis because he thought your dog could come with you to heaven, but the thought that all the rest of us are dogs being shaped up by a divine tutorial for a master was, I mean, it couldn't have been a more patriarchal symbol than that. Plus he also felt that God did not suffer. It looks like he might, he said, but he didn't, but he didn't know about this next stage. And he took Adam and Eve's story very literally too. So all of this, that was a long time ago, but What the plan was, God sent it to you, and your one response was to submit, obey. Right, well, I have a wonderful quote in there by David Tracy that God is affected by awe.

[57:31]

He affects all and is affected by all, so that everything that we do affects God, in a sense. Now, the big question is, can God suffer the way we suffer? Well, he can't suffer sin and he can't suffer certain limitations in death and probably anxiety or fear, but God can suffer with us while we're suffering those things and be with us and feel that said that we are suffering in that way and certainly have that experience very clearly in family life. I think the major suffering I've had in my life has been empathetic suffering, suffering with my children and suffering at my inability to help them, protect them or to help them in certain ways and they're going to make mistakes and do bad things I had very bad children. Thank God they all got middle-aged and got better, got better. But it was hard. It was hard. Yes?

[58:36]

I think that's a very important theme and I have a wonderful quote, but I probably won't be able to find it, of Robert Canast who said, God has this thrust for beauty, for order, and part of what's happening in the world is this movement toward beauty. So certainly aesthetic Experience is one thing that helps us when we're suffering. You know, as much as anything thinking or emotions also, just that emotion of beauty. And it produces order. And so we feel comforted, I think, by beauty. So you're in the right business. He's in the beauty business. Yes? But Mother, this passage, in the language of Hebrews, which I've never interpreted, is of God's permitting, or causing, maybe even suffering.

[60:04]

And I should paraphrase it, but I pray to God to cleanse His child. That's one of the most troubling things. I'm so glad you brought that up because that was a reading a couple of weeks ago and I said to somebody, boy, I don't know what trouble this passage gives me. Because it is talking about God disciplining like every good father would discipline a child. Well, some of the ways I think about that are this. If the writer of Hebrews felt that all good fathers had to discipline their children, then he would see God doing that as a way of dealing with us. If you had an image that a good father does not flog his child. Remember Augustine believed in flogging even though he hated being flogged.

[61:08]

I mean, if all the world around you thinks that that's your duty is to flog and to discipline and cause pain, then that will be your image of what you think a good person should do. By the way, one important fact I forgot to put in, which is this. It seems to me that because God helps us after bad things happen and is trying to heal us and is moving creatively in there, people read back backwards, and they say, oh, God sent that to me, look at all these good things that happened. So they sort of put the post facto into the previous idea of intention. So because God does help us, then they say, well, God sent me Lou Gehrig's disease because look how wonderful it's been. I mean I actually have a quote of that. Look how wonderful it's been for me to have Lou Gehrig's disease. So the sense that people can, God helps people to resiliently make something creative out of it.

[62:15]

doesn't mean that we should think that God sent it to us for that, for that reason, you know. We lost a child with a sudden infant death and I cannot tell you, this is in the 50s, I cannot tell you some of the weird comforts people offer to us. But it was all a part of this suffering is great for you and this is the plan and so forth and so on. So the sense of thinking that this is part of your plan. Now my feeling is there are many plans and once something happens to you you can creatively make it part of your story if you're open to God. But the thought that this was, this cross came with your name on it, that was the way we used to think. There are a lot of these little crosses coming to you with your name on them and the more holy you were going to be the more crosses you were going to get. So the sense that it was all sort of blueprinted out already. So that was a kind of simple-minded way to think about it.

[63:19]

Yes. Yes. Yes. Right. And I think we Now, yes, I make that point very strongly at the beginning, first chapter, trying to show why we shouldn't exaggerate and see it's a good thing, it's goodness, it's a goodness to disguise. And some wonderful work by Simone Weil, she talks about affliction. where, and also Dorothy Soley, about people become mute, all feeling dies.

[64:24]

And it seems to me that suffering can be so profound and so long that people don't recover. They're just broken forever and people who never had a chance. totally broken forever, so any idea that this is waiting is always going to be made a good and better thing. However, in there I have some hope because it seems to me since we're all bound together as a corporate unity, our effort is to carry those people too because they can't, they are They are traumatized, they are unable to—maybe nothing we can do can help them at this point, but we can sort of think about them and carry them in love and charity. And so I think that that's—there's wonderful quotes along that line. I even found that, you know, after Anne died and I was taking care of Perry, it brought back the sudden infant death and it made me anxious.

[65:26]

I was worried that this baby is going to die too and I wasn't going to be able to do it. I mean it just, it made, it weakened me, it diminished me because that suffering on top of the other earlier suffering and I totally forgot that I'd raised six other children successfully and everything was all been alright. All I could, I could just, I was just kind of broken in this for a long time, in this anxiety that I won't be able to do it. And so I think that suffering does diminish us in all kinds of ways and so that's why it's serious and that's why God hates it. And sent God, really Christ, Jesus is God's answer to suffering and so I think a wonderful, a wonderful thing to think about. I'm still looking for this quote on beauty. I will find it next week. Any other questions or dilemmas or thoughts or things to add? Oh, Robert Knast, pastoral theologian, expresses his truth of the Spirit's movement.

[66:30]

This is about the Spirit working to comfort, inspire, heal, and mend what is broken. This movement and all its manifestations is grounded in God's omnipresent aim at beauty. and intensity of experience. Persons sharing God's own transformation of the world through which the response to suffering becomes a source of new life." They got the beauty in there. Okay, what else can I tell you? Or should I tell you? I think I should say nothing more, just say goodbye. I can tell you goodbye. Thank you. So, Sidney, thank you very much.

[67:33]

And thank all of you for being with us and for your questions. We'd like you just to stand in place and jiggle just a bit because we're going to have vespers immediately and you have to fall asleep. But don't wander around because if people don't come back.

[67:49]

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