Tuesday, March 23, 2010

On Suffering, Part 3: From Thomas Merton

2 Corinthians 4:8-11
We are afflicted in every way, but not crushed; perplexed, but not driven to despair; persecuted, but not forsaken; struck down, but not destroyed; always carrying in the body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be manifested in our bodies. For we who live are always being given over to death for Jesus' sake, so that the life of Jesus also may be manifested in our mortal flesh.

Each Tuesday, our Wesley UMC staff engages in time of spiritual formation. We have been journeying through Thomas Merton's, No Man is an Island. I'm posting the excerpts from Merton as we discuss suffering, which has always been difficult for me to process and understand. Maybe, as Merton points out, I'm too selfish.

Excerpts from Thomas Merton’s No Man is an Island, Chapter 5: The Word of the Cross: On Suffering (Part 3)
• Heroism alone in the face of suffering is useless, unless it is born of God. Divine strength is not usually given us until we are fully aware of our own weakness and know that the strength we receive is indeed received: and that is a gift. The fortitude that comes is from God. It is God’s strength, which is beyond comparison and not complicated by pride.
• To know the Cross is to know that we are saved by the sufferings of Christ; to know the love of Christ who underwent suffering and death in order to save us. To know God’s love is not merely to know the story of His love, but to experience in our spirit that we are loved by Him, and that in His love the Father manifests His own love for us, through the Holy Spirit.
• The effect of suffering upon us depends on what we love. If we love ourselves selfishly, suffering is merely hateful. It must be avoided at all costs. It brings out the evil that is in us. The person who loves only themselves will commit any sin and inflict any evil on others merely in order to avoid suffering himself/herself. Worse, if one cannot avoid suffering, they may even take perverse pleasure in suffering itself – showing that they love and hate themselves all at the same time. If we love ourselves selfishly, suffering brings out selfishness. Then after making known what we are, suffering drives us to make ourselves worse than we are.
• If we love others and suffer for them without the love of God, we may gain a certain nobility and goodness. It may bring out something fine in us and even give glory to God, but in the end a natural unselfishness cannot prevent suffering from destroying us along with all we love.
• But, if we love God and love others in Him, we will be glad to let suffering destroy anything in us that God is pleased to let it destroy, because we know that all it destroys is unimportant. If we love God, suffering does not matter. Christ in us, His love, His Passion in us: that is what we care about. Pain does not cease to be pain, but we can be glad of it because it enables Christ to suffer in us and give glory to His Father by being greater, in our hearts, than suffering would ever be.

Tuesday, March 16, 2010

On Suffering, Part 2: From Thomas Merton

I Corinthians 15:51-58
51Listen, I will tell you a mystery! We will not all die, but we will all be changed, 52in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound, and the dead will be raised imperishable, and we will be changed. 53For this perishable body must put on imperishability and this mortal body must put on immortality. 54When this perishable body puts on imperishability, and this mortal body puts on immortality, then the saying that is written will be fulfilled:
‘Death has been swallowed up in victory.’
55‘Where, O death, is your victory?
Where, O death, is your sting?’
56The sting of death is sin, and the power of sin is the law. 57But thanks be to God, who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ. 58 Therefore, my beloved, be steadfast, immovable, always excelling in the work of the Lord, because you know that in the Lord your labor is not in vain.


From Thomas Merton’s No Man is an Island,
Chapter 5: The Word of the Cross: On Suffering
• Physical evil has no power to penetrate beneath the surface of our being. It can touch flesh, mind, and sensibility, but it cannot harm our spirit without the work of that other evil – sin. Sin strikes deep. It attacks personality, destroys our true character, identity, and happiness – it works to destroy our fundamental orientation toward God.
• Physical evil is only to be regarded as a real evil insofar as it tends to foment sin in our souls. That is why a Christian must seek in every way possible to relieve the sufferings of others, and even take steps to alleviate some sufferings of his/her own: because they are occasions for sin.
o According to Merton’s statement here, he would be an advocate of social justice as an integral part of our faith (unlike some television personalities)
• Compassion for others is good, but it does not become true love and charity unless it sees Christ in the one suffering and has mercy on him/her with the mercy of Christ. Jesus had mercy on the multitudes not only because they were like sheep without a shepherd, but also simply because they had no bread.
• Bodily works of mercy (acts of mercy) look beyond the flesh and into the spirit, and when they are integrally Christian they not only alleviate suffering but they bring grace: that is, they strike at sin.
• Human Sympathy: Alone, it can only offer loneliness in the face of death. Flowers are an indecency in a death without God. The thing that has died has become a thing to be decorated and rejected. May its hopeless loneliness be forgotten and not remind us of our own. How sad a thing is human love that ends with death. This is why many of us fight off suffering and death as long as we can, unless it block our human love forever.
• The Name and the Cross and the Blood of Jesus have changed all this. In His Passion, in the sacraments which bring His Passion into our lives, the helplessness of human love is transformed into divine power which raises us above all evil. It has conquered everything. Such love knows no separation. It fears suffering no more than young crops fear the spring rain.
Why is there peace for the Christian in suffering? Because Christianity is Christ living in us, and Christ has conquered everything. He has united us to one another and to Himself. We all live together in the power of His death which overcame death. We neither suffer alone nor conquer alone nor go off into eternity alone. His love is so much stronger than death that the death of a Christian is a kind of triumph. And while we rightly sorrow at the separation of the one we love, we rejoice in their death because it proves to us the strength of our mutual love. This is our great inheritance – which can only be increased by suffering well taken: We belong to God and no one will snatch us out of God’s hand!

Saturday, March 13, 2010

Thomas Merton on Suffering

I Corinthians 1:18-25
18 For the message about the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God. 19For it is written;
‘I will destroy the wisdom of the wise,
and the discernment of the discerning I will thwart.’
20Where is the one who is wise? Where is the scribe? Where is the debater of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? 21For since, in the wisdom of God, the world did not know God through wisdom, God decided, through the foolishness of our proclamation, to save those who believe. 22For Jews demand signs and Greeks desire wisdom, 23but we proclaim Christ crucified, a stumbling-block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, 24but to those who are the called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. 25For God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom, and God’s weakness is stronger than human strength.


From Thomas Merton's No Man Is An Island, Chapter 5: The Word of the Cross
• The Christian must not only accept suffering: he/she must make it holy. Nothing so easily becomes unholy as suffering. Merely accepted, suffering does nothing for our souls except, perhaps, to harden them. Endurance alone is no consecration. True asceticism is not a mere cult of fortitude. We can deny ourselves rigorously for the wrong reason and end up by pleasing ourselves mightily with our self-denial.
• Suffering is consecrated to God by faith – not by faith in suffering, but by faith in God.
• Suffering has no power and no value of its own. It is only valuable as a test of faith. To believe in suffering is pride; but to suffer, believing in God, is humility.
• Pride tells us we are strong enough to suffer, that suffering is good for us because we are good. Humility tells us that suffering is an evil which we must always expect to find in our lives because of the evil that is inside of us. But faith also knows that the mercy of God is given to those who seek Him in suffering, and that by His grace we can overcome evil with good. Suffering, then, becomes good by accident, by the good that it enables us to receive more abundantly from the mercy of God. It does not make us good by itself, but it enables us to make ourselves better than we are. Thus, what we consecrate to God in suffering is not our suffering, but our selves.
• The Cross of Christ says nothing of the power of suffering or of death. It speaks only of the power of Him Who overcame both suffering and death by rising from the grave.
• What after all is more personal than suffering? The awful futility of our attempts to convey the reality of our sufferings to other people, and the tragic inadequacy of human sympathy, both prove how incommunicable a thing suffering really is. When a man/woman suffers, they are most alone. Therefore, it is in suffering that we are tested. How can we face it? What shall we answer in the pain? Without God, we lose our humanity.
• When suffering asks, “Who are you?” we must be able to answer distinctly, and give our own name. By that, I mean we must express the very depths of what we are, what we have desired to be, and what we have become. All these things are sifted out of us by pain, and they are too often found to be in contradiction with one another. But when we live in Christ, our name and our work and our personality will fit the pattern stamped on our souls by the sacramental character we wear. We get our name in baptism. Our souls are stamped with an eternal identification. Our baptism, which drowns us in the death of Christ, summons upon us all the sufferings of our life.
• Suffering should call out our own name and the name of Christ.