Lent 5 - Wednesday - Suffering

Text: Mark 10:1-16 (see below)

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As Christians near Holy Week, the subject of suffering comes to the forefront of our daily reflections as we remember our Lord’s ministry of sacrifice, affliction and distress. Richard Rohr, A Franciscan priest, offers some fascinating and insightful reflections on the subject of memory and suffering. My thanks to a dear friend Dale Traven, who suggested Rohr’s daily devotions as a guide for my spiritual life. Here are two reflections that arrived in my email this week. Rohr writes:

“Suffering is the necessary deep feeling of the human situation. If we don’t feel pain, suffering, human failure, and weakness, we stand antiseptically apart from it, and remain numb and small. We can’t understand such things by thinking about them. The superficiality of much of our world is that it tries to buy its way out of the ordinary limits and pain of being human. Carl Jung called it “necessary suffering,” and I think he was right. Jesus did not numb himself or withhold himself from human pain, as we see even in his refusal of the numbing wine on the cross (Matthew 27:34). Some forms of suffering are necessary so that we know the human dilemma, so that we can even name our shadow self and confront it. 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 yell about, you must be out of touch. We must all feel and know the immense pain of this global humanity. Then we are no longer isolated, but a true member of the universal Body of Christ. Then we know God not from the outside but from the inside!” (Adapted from Radical Grace: Daily Meditations, p. 209, day 218)

And:

“Memory is the basis for both pain and rejoicing: We cannot have one without the other, it seems. Do not be too quick to heal all of those bad memories, unless it means also feeling them deeply, which means to learn what they have to teach you. God calls us to suffer (read: “allow”) the whole of reality, to remember the good along with the bad. Perhaps that is the course of the journey toward new sight and new hope. Memory creates a readiness for salvation, an emptiness to receive love and a fullness to enjoy it. Strangely enough, it seems so much easier to remember the hurts, the failures and the rejections. It is much more common to gather our life energy around a hurt than a joy, for some sad reason. Remember the good things even more strongly than the bad, but learn from both. And most of all, as the prophet Baruch said, “Rejoice that you are remembered by God” (5:5), which is the Big Memory that can hold and receive all of the smaller ones.” (Adapted from Radical Grace: Daily Meditations, p. 26, day 25)

I trust these discerning words of Richard Rohr will stimulate your thinking for today and into next week as we once again pause to remember the Passion of our Lord.

Love One Another – Brian

One

H. A. Williams

I cannot see God because God is my eyes. I cannot hear God because God is my ears. I cannot walk to God because God is my feet. And if apparently I am alone and God is not there, that is because God will not separate his presence from my own.

Source: Tensions

Mark 10:1-16

Jesus left the Galilee and went to the region of Judea and beyond the Jordan. And crowds again gathered around him; and, as was his custom, he again taught them. Some Pharisees came, and to test him they asked, ‘Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife?’ He answered them, ‘What did Moses command you?’ They said, ‘Moses allowed a man to write a certificate of dismissal and to divorce her.’ But Jesus said to them, ‘Because of your hardness of heart he wrote this commandment for you. But from the beginning of creation, “God made them male and female.” “For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.” So they are no longer two, but one flesh. Therefore what God has joined together, let no one separate.’ Then in the house the disciples asked him again about this matter. He said to them, ‘Whoever divorces his wife and marries another commits adultery against her; and if she divorces her husband and marries another, she commits adultery.’ People were bringing little children to him in order that he might touch them; and the disciples spoke sternly to them. But when Jesus saw this, he was indignant and said to them, ‘Let the little children come to me; do not stop them; for it is to such as these that the kingdom of God belongs. Truly I tell you, whoever does not receive the kingdom of God as a little child will never enter it.’ And he took them up in his arms, laid his hands on them, and blessed them.