Hope in the Midst of Suffering

The Jurgies — Andi, Angie, Elisabeth, Elyse, Luke, Ruth, Stephanie, and Tiffany — loved our meetings this trimester. We read about witnessing trauma and were witnesses to one another’s traumas. We studied Moltmann’s theology of hope and embraced each other’s hopeless moments with the hospitality of tender grace that leads us back to hope. We pounded the table and were angry about the suffering of child molestation and concentration camps while we wondered about the pain the perpetrators must have suffered before they could inflict such pain.

Jurgen Moltmann’s work on the theology of hope is his centerpiece. We set our round table discussions with Shelly Rambo’s theology of trauma and Bessel van der Kolk’s The Body Keeps the Score and Alistair MacFadyen’s Poesis, and let Moltmann’s theology of hope cast light on the suffering. I’ll describe a few of the ways we melded hope and suffering in our discussions at the table.

Moltmann sees that we have an actual reality in history of God’s love and welcome through the gift of the incarnate Jesus who lived with us, loved us, and had the authority on earth to forgive sins. This actual reality, this Logos, was hated and resultantly killed because it offered a welcome to a Kingdom that looked different than the kind of kingdom or system mankind understood or knew. This Logos who asked God to forgive us for killing Him even before He died, rose from the dead, and as the “forgiving victim,”[1] continues to extend the kind of forgiveness that looks like the ongoing process, again and again, of behaving as if death were not[2] and welcoming us to this Kingdom of hope. It is on the basis of this actual historical welcome of forgiveness extended by Jesus during His life, through death, and beyond death that we have hope in the meantime of our life.

True hope neither presumes impatient illusions that a pretended future has already happened nor assumes that there is absolutely no hope that what we have longed for will not be fulfilled. True hope is a “passion for what is possible”[3] because it can be a passion for what has been made possible. Because we are uncomfortable with death, pain, chaos and trauma, we would prefer to quickly turn toward resurrection, healing, wholeness and life — even if it means pretending that everything is ‘all better’ even if we know it isn’t. A witness who stands by to observe, providing a testimony of what has happened and is happening, on behalf of the one who is suffering, holds a steady, grounded place for the survivor. The witness’ outside-yet-inside perspective offers the traumatized person a space of welcome which serves to keep them from slipping into either a dystopic or utopic pit of unreality. Without a witness to welcome us into the unfamiliar, new ‘home’ of this middle space between death and life — this terrain where shadowy movements of life, in the wake of death, are the new normal — we might readily fall to the less demanding place of despair: “Ugh, everything is too hard and is hopeless. I don’t care anymore and I want to give up.” Or we might fall to the other side of complacency: presumption — “a premature, self-willed anticipation of the fulfilment of what we hope for from God.”[4]

So that was some of the conversation from the Jurgie table. Each person mattered at our table. If one person was gone, the whole conversation changed and we lost out on some of the beauty. Andi turned our theoretical concepts into practical questions that resulted in rich conversation. Angie sang the songs of complexity of our culpability for violence even as we are victimized. Elisabeth wisely wove words into comforting shawls that both wrapped up what we meant and held us. Elyse brought a fiery, practical understanding straight from ER rooms about abuse and overuse — legitimately asking us to discuss ‘what is the use?’ Luke tipped his head with a thoughtful gaze, always looking for ways to move philosophy out of minds and books into an embodied, earthy existence. Ruth, old as the hills and glad of it, kept insisting that all of our theology about suffering and hope doesn’t mean a thing until we can explain it to children. Stephanie’s fingers typed our thoughts fast and furiously while she voiced deep, probing questions about words and meaning. Tiffany sensitively mirrored back our smallest comments with wonder, curiosity and gentle grace. A bunch of individual instruments played together sure makes great music.

[1] James Alison, On Being Liked (London: Darton, Longman Todd, 2004), 42.

[2] Ibid., 42.

[3] Søren Kierkegaard and R. Payne, Fear and Trembling (Mansfield Centre, CT: Martino Pub., 2014) 37.

[4] Jürgen Moltmann, Theology of Hope (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1993), 23.