What’s So Wrong About Suffering?
A lot of my Lenten thinking has been about suffering. A little of that is because I am looking at my friends, my colleagues, and my congregants who are suffering. It’s never easy. We want to push through it quickly, and get to the other side.
Thomas Merton wrote, in the Seven Storey Mountain:
Indeed, the truth that many people never understand, until it is too late, is that the more you try to avoid suffering, the more you suffer, because smaller and more insignificant things begin to torture you, in proportion to your fear of being hurt.
We try to avoid suffering in so many ways: through pretending, through stuffing, through avoiding, through ducking. Why does it have to be so hard?
Our theology pushes us to think that suffering is unnatural, and unwanted, too. Can a Christian theology accept suffering?
Stay tuned…
Tags: suffering, theology