All Saints’, Dorval
May 23, 2021
Every afternoon at Evening Prayer, before we pray the litany, we go around the Zoom room and share our specific prayer concerns. Many of these have to do with people we know and love, but we also frequently lift up situations in the world that are in need of prayer.
A couple of weeks ago, the prayer concerns were particularly heavy. Not only the suffering of our nearest and dearest, but also a tidal wave of terrible things in the world: the appalling situation in India, not only from coronavirus but from the hideous fungal eye disease afflicting some of those who had been on ventilators; the cluster of mysterious neurological afflictions in New Brunswick; and the heartbreaking violence in the Holy Land, where traumatized people are continuing to take that trauma and turn it outward as violence against others, rather than seeking to heal and make peace.
After all these sad things had been shared, I offered my prayers and tried to sum up and reckon with them. I prayed that those afflicted with these manifold forms of suffering would be comforted, would feel the presence of God with them, would experience the peace that passes all understanding.
As usual, after the evening prayer service wrapped up, we lingered on the Zoom call to chat a bit, and Bill Wilson said, “You know how you talked about God being present and comforting people who are suffering? Sometime, can you talk about … how that works?”
Which is an absolutely legitimate question!
We talk a lot – or at least I do – about how Jesus became human and that means that God knows what it feels like to be human, and so our suffering is not alien to God. But, when you’re the one in pain, what difference does that really make? It still feels awfully like you’ve been abandoned and God is absent.
It feels, in fact, probably a lot like how the apostles felt in the ten days between the Ascension and Pentecost. Jesus’ resurrection was still real, but the tangible, flesh-and-blood proof had been taken away from them. They could no longer embrace their friend and teacher, or hear his voice. He had promised to send them “the Advocate”, but I imagine they had little idea what that meant, and Jesus himself had admitted that “sorrow had filled their hearts” at the prospect of his departure, even as he tried to convince them that it was “to [their] advantage” that he go away.
The disciples started to understand when the Spirit was poured out upon them at Pentecost, manifesting in wind and fire, enabling them to cross barriers of language and culture with the good news of Jesus’ Resurrection. And sometimes we too have these mountaintop experiences, as God is indisputably present and active, revealing new truths to us or breaking down walls that have kept us immobilized. And if we’ve had such moments, the memory of them can keep us going at times when God seems further away, or silent.
But what about those times when that doesn’t work? What does it feel like for God to be present in the midst of suffering? And what different does that presence make, if the suffering continues?
I can’t answer that question for everyone. It is one of the central conundrums of our faith (and of human existence!), and one that I think every congregation should be raising and discussing regularly, as we seek to share our lives and support each other. But I have a few answers derived from my own hard-won experience, which I offer as a way to start the conversation, if nothing else.
One way that we can access God’s presence in our hard times is through God’s word, and this is one of the best reasons to study and learn scripture. I remember when Peter was a couple of months old; I hadn’t slept much since he was born, my body and mind were unsettled as those of someone who has just given birth tend to be, and my life was full of all kinds of stress. I was lying wide awake with insomnia at a time when I desperately needed to be sleeping, and, as tends to be the case at 3 am, all my problems seemed to be uniquely insurmountable.
Desperate to find anything that would quiet the repetitive, anxious thoughts, I started repeating to myself, over and over, the fifth verse of the eighty-fourth Psalm: “Those who go through the desolate valley will find it a place of springs, for the early rains have covered it with pools of water.” Although all I could see around me at the time was desert, the words reminded me that the springs were still there. God was present to me in God’s word.
And of course any form of prayer can serve the same purpose, with or without words – as can the knowledge that others are praying for us. Very frequently, God’s presence is made physically or emotionally real to us through the presence of other people; this is what it means to be the Body of Christ for each other. We can pray for each other, we can offer each other practical help – anything from a ride to the hospital to a donation sent to the other side of the world. In my darkest moments, sometimes it has made all the difference just to have another human being in the same room with me; even if they weren’t saying or doing anything, they were there.
And sometimes, in the midst of pain or anxiety or sorrow, even if your heart is racing and your stomach churning, suddenly, for a few seconds or minutes, out of nowhere, the burdens will fall away and you will feel that everything is all right.
There’s no rhyme or reason to it, just a brief temporary lifting of the cloud of suffering. Perhaps it indicates that someone, right at that moment, is praying for you. Perhaps it’s just that your soul has been able to tune in for a moment to the divine frequency that is usually drowned out by the static of stress and hardship.
It’s this feeling that I’ve always associated with the phrase “the peace of God that passes all understanding.” It doesn’t make sense and it can’t be forced; all we can do is give thanks for the assurance from God that despite everything, we will be all right.
And I think that that’s where the rubber really meets the road, spiritually. “Despite everything, we will be all right.” Do we really believe that? And if so, what does it mean?
Because objectively, if all we look it is our experience in this world, some of us are not all right. Some of us suffer beyond all endurance and die far too soon. The arc of the moral universe may bend toward justice, but in so many of our individual lives, to all appearances, injustice is triumphant.
I’m not a big fan of “pie in the sky when you die”, especially as an excuse to treat others badly while we’re here. But the fact is that our faith makes no sense unless we understand this, our present existence, to be entirely contained within a greater reality that we cannot currently perceive. The whole creation groans in labour pains, and as anyone who has given birth knows, when you are in the throes of it, you can hardly imagine that the pain will ever end, let alone that the end result will be a whole brand new person. But that reality is already there; the child exists, even if all we can feel in the present moment is pain. And God is our midwife or doula, rubbing our shoulders and reassuring us that we can do this, that the pain has a purpose and that it will end.
Our God is a God who not only became human so as to suffer with us, but who rose from the dead so as to defeat death forever. Even if our present reality seems to be a valley full of bones, the Holy Spirit is waiting to pour out upon us and fill us with the breath of life. And by the grace of God, through scripture and prayer, through the presence of others and the peace that passes all understanding, that reality can make its way into even our most helpless and hopeless moments. God is with us, and the Spirit is working. Weeping over the grave, we make our song: alleluia, alleluia, alleluia.
Amen.
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