Faith the fruit of suffering

Many times we have to suffer very acutely until we finally quit being like a crustacean that sits in its hard shell and is always alone with its own self, caring for nothing going on around it.

Eduard Schweizer in God’s Inescapable Nearness

(from Jason Goroncy's excellent blog

Crazy how this is only true when it has actually happened to you (in this case me).

Yay!!

No easy response to Catastrophe

David Bentley Hart, an eastern orthodox theologian has an article where he talks of the tsunami and its aftermath and suffering.

" The Christian understanding of evil has always been more radical and fantastic than that of any theodicist; for it denies from the outset that suffering, death and evil have any ultimate meaning at all. Perhaps no doctrine is more insufferably fabulous to non-Christians than the claim that we exist in the long melancholy aftermath of a primordial catastrophe, that this is a broken and wounded world, that cosmic time is the shadow of true time, and that the universe languishes in bondage to "powers" and "principalities"--spiritual and terrestrial--alien to God. In the Gospel of John, especially, the incarnate God enters a world at once his own and yet hostile to him--"He was in the world, and the world was made by him, and the world knew him not"--and his appearance within "this cosmos" is both an act of judgment and a rescue of the beauties of creation from the torments of fallen nature."

and

"When confronted by the sheer savage immensity of worldly suffering--when we see the entire littoral rim of the Indian Ocean strewn with tens of thousands of corpses, a third of them children's--no Christian is licensed to utter odious banalities about God's inscrutable counsels or blasphemous suggestions that all this mysteriously serves God's good ends. We are permitted only to hate death and waste and the imbecile forces of chance that shatter living souls, to believe that creation is in agony in its bonds, to see this world as divided between two kingdoms--knowing all the while that it is only charity that can sustain us against 'fate,' and that must do so until the end of days."

Suffering?

A few days ago, a friend of mine from school told me of his loss of faith because of what he had seen in the world. I did not have any kind of answer or consolation because whatever I thought sounded too intellectual, self-righteous and smug. In this post Dan of poserprophet reflects on the debate between Bart Ehrman and the Bishop N.T. Wright of Durham and gives what I think is a good description of how a Christian could talk about suffering. Read the whole article for a good summary and his reflection. A small quote below :

"Thus, in response to Ehrman's question, "Why do we suffer?", I wish Wright had responded, "I don't know. But I continue to believe in God, and here's why...". Of course, I don't believe that others will find the "here's why..." to be compelling, because I think that the only reason why we continue to believe in God, when confronted with the magnitude of suffering, is because we have met God. The reason why I find faith to be compelling is because God has chosen to come out to meet me, and I suspect that the only reason why a person like Ehrman would believe in God would be because God comes out to meet him as well. Now I can't help but wonder if Wright, in his efforts to engage in a substantial and reasonable dialogue, deliberately avoids this track, and where it leads, because it seems entirely too subjective and experiential."