Lent and the Practice of Suffering

Lent, always, is a practice in suffering.

Minor suffering, anyway.  Most of what we give up for Lent constitutes little more than an inconvenience and can hardly compare with what the tragedies and difficulties of life can demand others endure.

But it’s an effort: a fast that takes away from us in order to teach, a fast that reminds us the taking-away can teach.  And this is one of the reasons I love Lent, because it is so radically counter-cultural. 

I live in a secular world that tells me my own gratification should be the priority at all costs.  That if any relationship, practice, or experience does not serve my “truest self” I ought to immediately change it until it does, or jettison it, or destroy it.   That tells me it is my right to feel fulfilled and comfortable at all times.  That presents discomfort and struggle not as something to be endured but something to be escaped.

I understand the appeal, of course.

In the church, I think we can mix up our messages around suffering. Or we at least communicate them badly.  Sometimes, in our attempt to express what the unique experience of enduring suffering can produce and transform in a child of God, we become reductive and blurt out something like: Yes, you’re suffering terribly, but that’s a good thing!  Really!  I mean, God will use it for good.  So…what a blessing. Why are you crying?

Any discussion of suffering by people of faith has to acknowledge the sheer miserable awfulness of it.  The wrongness of it.   There are many kinds of suffering I don’t understand, that are unconscionable.  That I have to live in a world where children and animals have to suffer horribly makes me ill.  Watching my mother suffer in the final stages of her cancer is a memory I still can’t fully revisit.  I want all of us to suffer less.  I want us to suffer not at all.

But what Christianity offers, and what Lent reminds me of, is the transformative act of God’s grace in suffering.  The mystery of His presence there. None of us want to hurt, and I certainly don’t, but if we must experience it—and we must, for God did not even permit Himself an exemption—we can know that at least something redemptive will come of it, something of great value.

I have lived through, prior to this year, two absolutely miserable years that qualify, at least for now, as the worst years of my life.  Job-esque, even, in the way that tragedy seemed to pile up on tragedy with no sign of stopping.   I did not want to live those years.  I would not want to re-live them.  I pray by the grace of God I’m not asked to experience anything like them again.

But God has transformed me over those years.

Some of the transformation I can see, or at least others have told me it is evident.  I’m drawn more to those who are hurting or suffering.  My own hurts have made me more compassionate to others.  I’m stronger, more resilient.  In some ways, recognizing how short and unpredictable life is, I’m more free: to laugh, to cry, to risk what I otherwise might not dare.

But the deeper transformation, I suspect, is the more valuable, and the hardest to represent in words.

Scripture tells us of a woman who touched Jesus’ robe in order to be healed.  She did not want a conversation, a debate, a question: she gambled that the simple act of encountering God, catching hold of Him, would be enough. 

Job cried out to God for answers; God showed up, and His presence was the answer.  Job’s response in chapter 42 is still something I hold close to my heart: “My ears had heard of you, but now my eyes have seen you.  Therefore I despise myself and repent in dust and ashes.” 

The Presence is enough.

This is how suffering works as well, I think.  God is present to His suffering children in a way that is difficult to articulate.  I don’t really understand.  All I can say is that He was present to me in my suffering—both in ways that I understood clearly at the time and now that I can see only more clearly in retrospect.

Christ is The Suffering God.  Little wonder that in our own suffering, we meet Him perhaps in ways we might not otherwise.  And I suspect that during these times, we draw closer to understanding God’s heart in ways that no amount of reading or listen or thinking can teach. We have an encounter; we meet God there. The mere encountering alters us to our bones.

I’d still undo the past two years if I could, because I’m human and impatient.  I can’t yet say that I am grateful for them.  That’s probably too mature by half for the child that I am.   But I would not undo, now, the person I have become from those two years.  Nor would I take back the opportunity, in that suffering, to meet and find God as I have.  Suffering extracts a toll; God redeems it into something that we can look at, astonished, and call beautiful.

So, Lent. 

I give up what I choose to give up.  I reflect.  I pray.  And I realize, this year more than ever, that the giving-up is an acknowledgement of what is inevitable:

Suffering will come.

But God will be present, there.

And to those who endure, much will be granted.

So let us practice enduring.