Suffering

"Freedom to Feel
Suffering is the necessary feeling of evil. If we don’t feel evil we stand antiseptically apart from it, numb. We can’t understand evil by thinking about it. The sin of much of our world is that we stand apart from pain; we buy our way out of the pain of being human. Jesus did not numb himself or withhold from pain. Suffering is the necessary pain so that we know evil, so that we can name evil and confront it. Otherwise we somehow dance through this world and never really feel what is happening. Brothers and sisters, the irony is not that God should feel so fiercely; it’s that his creatures feel so feebly. If there is nothing in your life to cry about, if there is nothing in your life to complain about, if there is nothing in your life to yell about, you must be out of touch. We must all feel and know the pain of humanity. The free space that God leads us into is to feel the full spectrum, from great exaltation and joy, to the pain of mourning and dying and suffering. It’s called the Paschal Mystery. The totally free person is one who can feel all of it and not be afraid of any of it."
- Richard Rohr - from Days of Renewal

I was really struck by one thing in this message - that suffering is necessary so that we can know evil and confront it. It leads me to think that unless we suffer in some way, we will not really be aware of suffering in the world and will not feel passionately about justice or bringing about justice. It is very true that we people feel feebly in comparison to God's great fierce feeling and passion. Maybe that is why we continue to idly stand by while we are continually faced with injustice - we have lost our capacity to feel it. However, we cannot stop there - we need to feel not only pain and suffering and injustice, but we must also open ourselves up to fully embrace joy and peace and love and allow it to overflow to those around us. The challenge is to feel and hold both in tension, losing sight of neither and yet obsessing about neither. This is my prayer.

Side note: I don't have regular access to the internet this summer, so blogging might be sadly intermittent.