Thought for the week - 23 June 2008

A Gift of Love...reflections on the mystery of human suffering

Just a week ago a very good friend of mine died aged just 45 years of age after a long struggle over some years against cancer. I had prayed for her throughout that time, sometimes rejoicing with her and her husband when there seemed to be some sign of hope, often crying out to God when things took a turn for the worse. And at the end when she died leaving her husband and two young children I was no nearer any understanding of the meaning of her suffering and death than I was when she first told me that she had cancer all those years ago.

I have heard many so called explanations for human suffering over the years but somehow they all seem to leave me either with a picture of God as terrifyingly strong and apparently uncaring or alternatively as deeply caring but pathetically weak. I know that there are more subtle ways of describing these positions than I have outlined here but they do not seem to go beyond these two understandings. None of them seem to do justice to those who have suffered. They do not honour the memory of my friend.

Actually I have given up trying to explain the ways of God, not as an act of despair but as one of faith and hope.  I have been greatly helped here by the mystics and especially by an anonymous 14th century work entitled, The Cloud of Unknowing. In this the writer makes this statement, “It is impossible to grasp and hold onto God by our understanding. We can only do so by way of love.” You might want to replace the word, God with something like, the mystery of life, or as Thomas Aquinas, the greatest of medieval theologians did, with the word, Being. But however you wish to describe the deepest mystery at the heart of all things the same truth holds. It is by love, and most especially by the offering of our lives as a gift of love to the world in which we live that all its sorrow and joy, its brokenness and delight begin to make some kind of sense. Not the kind of sense that is able to understand a technical manual, as if we could somehow reduce the mystery of human life to that level, but a sense of the heart that gives meaning and hope to all we do. My friend’s suffering and death calls me once again to seek to offer my life as a gift of love. That is enough for me.

Revd Stephen Winter,

Assistant Director of Development (Discipleship)