Human Suffering & God

RELIGION often puts the cart before the horse, GRACE puts the horse back in front. – Richard Rohr, on Radical Grace     

It was unfortunate that Origen was declared anathema in 553 CE since it was he who was among the first to recognize our Divine Indwelling when he said “Who among those who have read the Gospels does not know that Christ makes human suffering his own?” Had Origen’s understanding of God’s divine indwelling been accepted from the beginning others might have viewed this world in a completely different context or light. No doubt this would have allowed all of us, to quote Richard Rohr, “to connect the dots better when considering human suffering.”

    

God’s Divine Indwelling clearly implies that “this life is not about us but about God experiencing Himself or Herself through all of us individually and indeed within and throughout all of Creation”.  That profoundly illustrates that any pain, suffering, or joy we experience – God also experiences that with us.  The knowledge that God is within the soul of each human being should provide us with the comfort of knowing that we are not alone; and journeys with us every part of the way from the Alpha to the Omega.  Accepting that God is present within and throughout all of Creation may be the first step necessary for understanding the significance of our True and False (ego) self.  Only God’s unconditional love incorporates and accepts both positive and negative aspects of our human nature.  To try and understand this radical definition of God’s unconditional love is almost maddening.  But Julian of Norwich expressed this best as follows: 

  

“Humans see some deeds as good and others as evil, but our Lord doesn’t see things like this; for everything is given its nature by God and so all that is done is done by God.  It is easy to understand that the best of deeds is well done, but the least of deeds is as well done as the best, for all things happen in the way and order that our Lord has ordained for them from beginningless time; for there is no doer but Him.”

This same radical understanding of God’s unconditional Love was recently wonderfully expressed by Mirabai Starr[1] in these words:

 “When we make mistakes and create suffering, we humble ourselves and God loves us all the more.  For those of us non-Christian and post-modern types, try substituting the word sin for shame, or blame, or even karma.  In other words, we screw up, but that only opens the tender heart of the cosmos where we can find refuge and come back into wholeness.”    

Now our suffering, such as from addictions, can be approached in terms of God’s desire to bring us to wholeness through his healing love.  This unconditional love not only brings us forgiveness and the awareness of the ability to forgive, but also allows us to transform the addiction into a blessing to freely love God, others and myself.  Rohr reminds me such a transformation can only be truly achieved by turning verbal orthodoxy into orthopraxy.

It has taken me at least ten years or more to understand the full significance behind the True Self/False Self as it was first explained by Fr. Rohr at a two day conference in Cleveland, OH. sometime around 2004?  What a blessing his insights that help us Breathe Under Water- Spirituality and the Twelve Steps (2011) have proven to be for all those burdened with addictions and other trials. 

In the face of so much continuing pain and suffering in the world and because we still ask “why does God not do something about it?”  We only need to accept that God does do something about it every day – he created you and me.  We only need to activate the God within -  the True self, or higher self if you prefer.  Teresa of Avila (1515-1582) understood this perfectly well; almost 500 years ago when she said:      

Christ has no body but yours,

No hands, no feet on earth but yours,
Yours are the eyes with which he looks
Compassion on this world,
Yours are the feet with which he walks to do good,
Yours are the hands, with which he blesses all the world.
Yours are the hands, yours are the feet,
Yours are the eyes, you are his body.
Christ has no body now but yours,
No hands, no feet on earth but yours,
Yours are the eyes with which he looks
compassion on this world.
Christ has no body now on earth but yours. 

Finally below you will find Richard Rohr’s Daily Meditation, coincidentally for today, which may help to explain why the False self with a dualistic mind is unable to process such things as human suffering, etc.,  

Dualistic Thinking – The Egoic Operating System

Dualistic thinking, or the egoic operating system, as Cynthia Bourgeault calls it, is our way of reading reality from the position of my private ego. “What’s in it for me?” “How will I look if I do this?” This is our preferred way of seeing reality. It has become the “hardware” of almost all Western people, even those who think of themselves as Christians, because the language of institutional religion is largely dualistic itself. It is a way of teaching that has totally taken over in the last five hundred years. It has confused information with enlightenment, mind with soul, and thinking with experiencing. But they are two very different paths.

The dualistic mind is essentially binary. It is either/or thinking. It knows by comparison, by opposition, by differentiation. It uses descriptive words like good/evil, pretty/ugly, intelligent/stupid, not realizing there may be 55 or 155 degrees between the two ends of each spectrum. It works well for the sake of simplification and conversation, but not for the sake of truth or even honest experience.

Actually, you need your dualistic mind to function in everyday life: to do your job as a teacher, a doctor, or an engineer. It is great stuff as far as it goes, but it doesn’t go far enough. The dualistic mind cannot process things like infinity, mystery, God, grace, suffering, death, or love. When it comes to unconditional love, the dualistic mind can’t even begin to understand it. It pulls everything down into some kind of tit-for-tat system of worthiness and achievement, which is largely what “fast food religion” teaches, usually without even knowing it.

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[1] Mirabai Starr, All Will be Well:  The Radical Optimism of Julian Norwich, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/mirabai-starr/julian-of-norwich_b_4115736.html

FACING OUR GREATEST FEAR

Recently a local member of the clergy announced that Catholics must consider themselves lucky to be able to enjoy the sacrament of reconciliation because they can come directly to a local priest. Protestants, he was quoted as saying, have to deal with their sins directly with Jesus.

Attendants were left somewhat confused behind the implications of this statement. What exactly did this unfortunate priest mean by that? A possible answer eluded me until I shared a few unconnected paragraphs from a book I recently purchased. The book is the classic comic novel 'Clochemerle' by French author Gabriel Chevallier. It was first published in 1936 and describes the efforts of the local mayor to introduce a public urinal, to his lasting memory, in the village from where the book got its title. The author begins with a wonderful introduction to the local characters in the village, sparing little detail about their amorous adventures.

The local curé is innocently drawn into these adventures through his sacred education derived from the amorous but repentant villagers. Unable to resist his aroused feelings he develops a passionate relationship with his housemaid. Filled with remorse and guilt he decides to seek forgiveness by confessing his sin to a neighbouring priest within a bicycle distance from his parish. The tables are quickly turned as his confession leads to the discovery that this priest too is involved in a similar indiscretion. They quickly agree to absolve each other and conduct regular reciprocal visits in the future to justify and carry-on with these amorous but illicit adventures.

This fictitious account probably raised many an eyebrow, among its Catholic readers at the time, when the book was first published in 1936. It may even have been on the list of 'forbidden books' for a time. But can we perhaps draw some parallels from these two separate stories? Is the Sacrament of Reconciliation merely a ritual used to deflect our feelings of guilt and shame? Or is it intended to cause us to wrestle with our false self so that we might grow into our True Self? If so, is the celebrant of Sacrament of Reconciliation experienced enough to challenge us to dig deeper and further? Surely, it must include a means that would encourage us to deal with our failings or shortcomings beyond a simple recitation of a few repetitive Hail Mary's? How willing am I to confront my dark-side? What sins am I not facing that need Christ's healing? How can I expect transformation without first naming my hidden sins? Scripture tells us that there is one sin against the Holy Spirit that cannot be forgiven – and that is the darkness that resides in each one of us that we are afraid to confront!

The priest in the beginning of this story may well have meant that we are probably more comfortable facing a member of the clergy than Jesus. After all, for many of us there still remains a hidden fear of a judgemental God who keeps a record of all our wrongs.

Original Sin or Original Blessing?

click on image to enlarge

Recently  a national Catholic weekly published an article in which several ‘experts’ or academics again tried to explain how ‘Original Sin’ has been responsible for much of the pain and suffering in this world. The article read as follows: 

         

     

Mankind’s natural desires behind our sinfulness

BY EVAN BOUDREAU

The Catholic Register March 24, 2013  p.21

TORONTO

Mankind's capacity to sin comes from an unquenchable thirst to consume rather than a direct desire to act sinfully, according to Kathleen Roberts Skerrett.

The dean of arts at the Uni­versity of Richmond in Virginia was exploring the concept of original sin at a roundtable dis­cussion March 12 at Toronto's University of St. Michael's College. Roberts Skerrett was one of three academics who gave their views during the afternoon discussion The Evolution of Sin: Past, Present and Future.

"Human beings have inde­terminate desires," said Roberts Skerrett. "Our ordinary desires for food, sex and sociality do no have an object that satisfies them. There is always a kind of going beyond the job, not so much insatiability, but more uncertainty of end in human desire."

For Roberts Skerrett, the source of sinfulness is a derivative of our thirst for more rather than a willful desire to sin. In other words, human beings have an innate tendency to sin but do possess the free will to act contrary to these inclinations. Free will means that our sins, although influenced by an innately engrained and often subconscious inclination towards sinfulness, are an expression of freedom.

"There is something that drives us constantly beyond the goals that an animal desire would set for itself," said Roberts Skerrett, author of Original Sin in the 21st Century: The Wanton, the Addict, the Pervert and the Deviant. "We are constantly pressing past or transcending or going beyond the object of an animal or embodied desire."

Roberts Skerrett categorized the tendencies of humanity to push beyond the most basic satis­faction of our desires — the way in which an animal would act — into four characteristics.

The first is the wanton, a tendency towards continual stim­ulation and attention which sac­rifices quality of satisfaction for frequency.

"The wanton wants a little hit of stimulation and attention, a little bit of pleasure on a regular basis. Facebook was made for the wanton," she said.

Second, all human beings suffer from the tendency of the addict who strives for pleasure over pain.

"The addict finds something to fix it for however long," she said. "It keeps going to recalculate the pleasure-pain dynamic in one's soul by hitting that fix over and over again."

This tendency, which can find satisfaction in the practice of devotion through prayer, repre­sents our metabolization of utility — the maximization of pleasure in one's life.

Third, she noted that everyone has a tendency toward perversion, in that humans view all of creation as a means to satisfy our desires.

"There is no sense of these other beings as having a use or value other than the use or value of being bought and sold," she said.

Finally, humanity is plagued with deviant tendencies which have manifested a culture of dis­ciplinary institutions: prisons, militaries, even schools. Roberts Skerrett noted that these institu­tions, which range from punish­ment to employment, function as a means of using individuals for a rational purpose with the expecta­tion they will exemplify self-con­trol of their own desires. "The person who is identified as deviant is constantly and systemically extracted from purpose­ful life," she said. "The end of the deviant is to be extracted from all purpose. What the deviant most needs is mission and purpose in order to orient life in order to orient desire."

By casting the concept of original sin in this light, it becomes the theme of our political and ethical discourse in secular society. Doing so, she said, explains why we sin.

Ephraim Radner, a professor of historical theology at the Univer­sity of Toronto's Wycliffe College, said a more traditional Augustine view better explains our sinful actions — at least those of the past century or so.

Global conflicts, genocides and capitalism's quest for greater satis­faction through further industri­alization without regard for harm caused to creation are all signs that humanity is not just inclined to sin, but that sinful acts are in our nature. "We are all brutal people," said Radner, author of Cross-Cultural Encounters in the 17th and 20th Century Compared: The Miti­gation and Return of Original Sin. To ground this argument Radner focused heavily on the suffering of infants, citing their susceptibility to pain, hunger and disease as signs that we are innately damned and need salvation.

"Infants suffer because they are damned and they're damned because all of us and Adam are damned," he said. "There is no other possible reason to explain why children go through this."

Therefore infants are born with a universal damnation due to original sin's inherent condemna­tion which can only be distanced through the sacrament of Baptism, though he noted we are still at risk of sinning, and will, following this ritual.

Fr. Clement Majawa, a theology professor from the Catholic Uni­versity of Eastern Africa, agreed with Radner that sinning is un­avoidable by man because human beings are damned from the moment they are conceived.

"Like a shadow evil, or sin, is an inseparable reality which follows each person throughout life," said Majawa, author of Sin, Reconcilia­tion and Mission in African Chris­tianity and Global Transformation. Similar to Radner, Majawa ref­erenced the suffering of Africans as proof of the universal condem­nation of humanity which can only be momentarily lifted off our shoulders through religious sacra­ments.

How can we as Christians best respond to this intensely negative view which many  still hold?  Others such as Matthew Fox in his book ‘Original Blessing’ (2000) suggest that it will first be necessary to understand the question of Original Sin in its cultural and theological context.  For example Fox states:

1. Original blessing is far more ancient and more biblical a doctrine.
2. The Council of Trent never said what original sin means.
3. Augustine mixed his doctrine of original sin with his peculiar notions about sexuality.
4. Whatever is said of original sin, it is far less hallowed and original than are love and desire.
5. Doctrine is not the basis of faith or its starting point.
6. Since doctrine is for people, not people for doctrine it is important to consider this question:  How much pain and how much sin have come about because of an exaggerated emphasis on the doctrine of original sin?
7. The sooner churches embrace the more primitive doctrine of original blessing, the more compassionate our living will be.

You will have to purchase Matthew Fox’s book for a detailed explanation behind these points, however they should provide and offer the reader more food for thought.

In the meantime is it not time to re-examine our understanding of `Original Sin`?

The negative focus on mankind`s natural desires (see article above) completely contradicts and detracts from the Good News and Jesus` promise ʺI have come in order that you might have life-life in all its fullness``. (John 10:10)  Have we forgotten that we are ALL Holy Creations capable of untold Holy actions as well as unholy reactions? The Good News is that God is more interested in our potential than our sins.  When we miss the mark, meaning "sin" it can become the stepping stone toward God`s free gift of salvation and renew us in a new life in Christ.  For most of us this can take a life time, yet from the very beginning God promised   ″I will lead you and be with you.  ``I will not fail you or abandon you, so do not lose courage or be afraid.`` (Deuteronomy 31:6)   

Until we realize that God’s greatest gift to humankind is our freedom to choose, we will probably never understand what it means to be loved unconditionally. This universal gift, according to Jesus, is bestowed on ALL of humankind when he said ″for he makes his sun to shine on bad and good people alike, and gives rain to those who do good and to those who do evil″ (Matthew 5:45).  Nowhere in scripture does Jesus ever suggest that salvation is dependent on baptism. Rather when we choose to be baptized it means that like Jesus we ʺagree to do all that God requires″.  Furthermore, Jesus taught that children are already in the Kingdom of heaven. (Matthew 18:3). The battle against evil was won a long time ago – it is merely our refusal to accept its victory that prevents us from loving God, our neighbor and ourselves.

 Perhaps now we can begin to better understand and  experience Original Sin as God`s `Original Blessing`!   

 

SIN

One of the disconcerting-and delightful

-teachings of the Master was: ʺGod is

closer to sinners than to saints. ʺ

This is how he explained it: ʺGod heaven

holds each person by a string.  When you sin,

you cut the string.  The God ties is up again,

making a know-and thereby bringing you a

little closer to him.  Again and again your sins

cut the string-and with each further knot

God keeps drawing you closer and closer. ʺ

-  Anthony de Mello, One Minute Wisdom