So I've been debating on what to right about my experience in Luweero with the HIV/AIDS orphans and Father Jerry, a Catholic priest working in Luweero (he works with the youth...20,000 in his parish...many of whom are HIV positive). I'm not sure how to communicate the experience in any other way than to put it in the context of my thoughts on suffering soooooo.....
While I have been in Uganda I have been thinking on the issue of suffering…both the suffering I have seen here and the suffering I see in my home country. What am I to say to a child who is HIV positive? Or to my host sister whose continuous illness frequently interferes with her attempt to complete her education? Or to my friend at home whose father has just died? Or to my friends and family members suffering from depression? “I’m praying for you”? How is that of any help? Where exactly is God in the midst of suffering?
In a world full of suffering the ever present question is, “What is God’s response to suffering?” Suffering is part of what defines our lives as members of the human race. It is inescapable, unavoidable and inevitable. It is constantly present, threatening to rob us of comfort and security. In the lives of some it is constantly lurking over their shoulder, rearing its head from time to time; for others it is more fully manifested on a continual basis. As we try to avoid it and see it feeding on those around us we ask, “Why doesn’t God do anything? Why doesn’t He intervene?”
I myself am prompted to ask this question as I have come to realize that God is not regularly in the habit of miraculously alleviating suffering…more often than not He allows it to run its course. Hoe does not eradicate poverty, spare us from death or eliminate our daily struggles however light or heavy they may be. We cry out for relief and He remains silent. Where is God in all of this? Christianity claims a loving God, a benevolent God, a God of abundance, a God who “ha [s] come that [we] may have life and have it abundantly”…certainly it is not His original intention that we suffer. By our innate sense that suffering is indicative of something wrong, something amiss we are keenly aware that suffering must be something other than the intended ideal.
In John V. Taylor’s Primal Vision he includes a quote from Dietrich Bonhoeffer:
What is God? Not in the first instance a general belief in God, in God’s omnipotence etc. This is no genuine experience of God but a bit of extended world. Encounter with Jesus Christ. Experience that here we have a reversal of all human being, in the fact that Jesus exists only for other people! The existence-for-other-people of Jesus is the experience of transcendence! Omnipotence, omniscience, omnipresence, spring from the freedom from oneself, from existence for others unto death…Our relationship to God is not a ‘religious’ one to the highest, most powerful best being conceivable- that is not transcendence but our relationship to God is a new life in ‘existence for others’, in participation in the being of Jesus. (Taylor, 58)
Christ transcended humanness…He was perfectly selfless. This is the character we should imitate. Maybe God’s response to suffering is our transcendence of selfishness through the transformational work of Christ in our lives. For Christ not only lived as a human, submitting Himself fully to a fallen world, but He also died at the hands of a fallen world. He may not alleviate suffering but He cannot be held morally responsible for something He subjected Himself to. He is present in suffering. He submitted himself to suffering but also met the needs of the suffering; we must follow in His footsteps. Our God is the “God who has been eternally committed to, and involved in, the closed circle, even to the limit of self-extinction” (Taylor, 59). Perhaps then, God’s response to suffering is that people would experience His love through the selfless servanthood of His church. As the Body reflects their new life in Christ, Christ in them, through solidarity with the suffering, those in suffering would catch a glimpse of what Christ did for them.
If God’s response to suffering is our transcendence of self as we imitate Christ then it is in such servanthood that we discover God. Not only do we reveal God to the suffering through obedient servanthood, we ourselves discover more of His authentic character in so doing. It may be as Nouwen says, “Becoming a servant is not an exception to Godhood. Self-emptying and humiliation are not a step away from God’s true nature. Becoming as we are and dying on a cross is not a temporary interruption of God’s own divine existence. Rather, in the emptied and humbled Christ we encounter God, we see who God really is. We come to know true divinity” (Nouwen, 25). If He is in His very nature a servant, eternally committed and bound to humanity, then we will catch a glimpse of Him through solidarity with and servanthood to the suffering.
Of course, in the end this is only conjecture; just a theory like every other philosophical, theological explanation of God. It is simply my attempt to rationalize God…to wrap my mind around an incomprehensible being that I cannot fully understand…my attempt to make Him into something that will help me sleep at night.
