Today is Ash Wednesday, the first day of forty days before Easter during which the church celebrates the wilderness, the suffering of Jesus. We come together, usually meditate on Psalm Fifty-one, think on suffering, and then choose something to fast from for the next forty days until Easter.
I knew this girl in our youth group who every year fasted from candy and chocolate. We all knew; she complained about it often. But I didn't come up with very good ideas either. I felt on-the-spot pressure to act more spiritual than I felt. The best idea I had was one year when I chose to drive no faster than the speed limit. For forty days I learned patience and to submit my actions to a higher law. I think those are good things. The funny thing is, the speed limit is always posted. I didn't add some new rule to my life to
engage in suffering, I simply chose to finally follow the one that I had been breaking so long.
I was supposed to be suffering with Jesus, but Jesus' suffering seems so beyond me. How could I ever begin to identify with the one who "was despised and rejected by men - a man of sorrows, acquainted with deepest grief"? Betrayal, disappointment, all those lashes, a crown of thorns, beatings, and then crucifixion!
Everyone had that childhood friend who, when you got a skid knee, told you, "That's nothing, I had one twice as big." Then my tears would really start to flow. I ran into my house, sat on the bath tub and my mom would come in and listen to the story. Ah, to be heard and loved in my pain. "Yeah, Brendan, that hurts huh?"
The universal relativity of human pain is part of the beauty of a mother's comfort. When a father in England cries over a divorce as hard as a mother in India cries over the death of her child, which is stronger pain? Both, I guess. It really depends on how much that person is willing to enter into the pain. I've never lost a child or had a divorce, but I've cried deeply too. I can understand the broken heart of the father, mother and Jesus to the extent that I have acknowledged my own brokenness.
My life has plenty of suffering, and mostly I spend my time avoiding it. How spiritually superior I would feel if I successfully endured a self-prescribed chocolateless month while I ignored the broken relationships around me festering in agony.
During lent, I am tempted to add new, manageable suffering to my life as if my God-given suffering is not real, as if Jesus is telling me how he had it much worse. But Jesus is more like my mother than that neighborhood kid. He understands my deep pain. For the next forty days, I'll be practicing sitting on the bathtub and rolling up my jeans as Jesus acknowledges my wounds and begins to tend to them.
"I am tempted to add new, manageable suffering to my life as if my God-given suffering is not real" - This makes so much sense to me. I've never thought about how Lent can be a time where we give ourselves "manageable", controlled sufferings, while we ignore the unmanageable sufferings we experience daily. Hopefully choosing to engage in some suffering helps us to engage in the suffering we and others did not choose. Hopefully we are able to become familiar with suffering.
ReplyDelete