The Deepest Wound
by Jon Dengler
We all experience pain. We all suffer. We all encounter tragedy and evil. All of us, have our hearts ripped to shreds. All of us will die. We all know pain and suffering in some way. None of us would dare deny its power. Nobody disbelieves in pain. It is, arguably, the most real thing.
At some point we all encounter a horrific ordeal that undoes us to the core of our being, wounded in our heart of hearts. When this happens to us we fall into a void unlike anything we have ever known as we realize the loss of something that meant more to us that everything else combined. Perhaps it is the loss of a parent, a spouse, or a child.
When we suffer in such profound ways, it is not uncommon for a believer to wonder where God is? We cry out those words that echoed from the cross itself, “My God, why have you forsaken me?” And maybe we lose faith that there is a god at all.
While the heart, the core of our very being, is crying out in anguish must not be insulted or belittled by our minds and their philosophical musing, there is an appropriate posture for the mind. Pay attention. This experience of the heart is, I would argue, an experience of sobriety unlike any other in life.
There is a lot for the mind to glean under the tutelage of the decimated heart. These lessons, though, the insights and wisdom to be found there, will beat the mind into submission to the wound itself. The mind will learn that all of those things that it spends so much energy tending to and worrying about everyday are meaningless and trivial. It will learn that, while it thought it had solid apologetics and reasons to believe in a good and powerful god, perhaps Freud was right, that at the core it was a wishful thinking and an avoidance of the anxiety produced by the very void before which we are now on our knees. All of sudden the mind can understand how irrelevant most of its theological positions are. It is here, in the confrontation with pain and chaos that the mind understands that theology is only relevant when spoken in direct response to the profound questions emerging from our pain, our suffering, our existential condition. The mind cannot treat this as an emotional episode for it is an encounter with something ultimate, and ultimately concerning.
Maybe up to this point we believed that we believed in God. Maybe we even did. We would pray and ask for protection and favor. We trusted in this god for safety and security. We believed in that image that we absorbed as children, of a good and benevolent father figure that would always protect his children and never let anything harm them. Our suffering, however, is too real to deny and so this god that wouldn’t allow anything to happen to us seems absent and we wonder “where is god?”
Suffering, that scorching fire, the great spiritual teacher, burns up our false, fake, fairytale gods. It smashes our idols and reveals that our religion has been blasphemy. Our sufferings seem to compound as we face such a cosmic crisis that is this death of our god. He doesn’t stop it. Where once you acknowledged this powerful god you must now acknowledge the power of suffering as a real and undeniable power that is greater than yourself. If you have ever encountered something that might be worthy of being called a god, perhaps it is the suffering itself.
This, by the way, is exactly what the ancients would have called it. The gods were horrifying and an encounter with a god always involved radical suffering which one could not have been prepared for. These are the powers that grab ahold of us and have their way with us. Whether love or anger or death, these are transcendent personalities, they are everywhere, they live forever, and they control you. The gods are very real. Suffering, it seems, is Supreme.
The real gods are not the ones that we pray to or invite into our homes, they are the ones that our homes were designed to protect us from. If there is a God, a God of Gods, a King of Kings, and if we are honest, we want nothing to do with that horrifying Other before whom we are undone. It was one thing to believe in a god that existed, and helped to order and maintain our world. God was a nice reality that made us feel some sense of comfort with which to cope with our deepest fears and angst. God, we thought, held our cosmos together but that God crumbled along with our entire cosmos under the impact of this suffering. Suffering is not something that happens in our world, it is an apocalypse that happens to our world.
At some point we realize that there is no returning from this. The self that we have been is dead. The control we thought we had is gone. The things we cared so much about don’t matter. The ideas about god that we neurotically clung to, seem silly.
Suffering crisis leads us to the very place we have spent our entire lives avoiding, it leads us to humility and surrender. It leads us to that cross from which He cried “my god my god why have you forsaken me?”
St. John of the Cross, in his Dark Night of the Soul, reminds us that the experience of God’s absence is God’s presence. Just as a baby experiences being set down and left alone by it’s mother as utter abandonment and terror, we experience the absence of God in much the same way. The obvious truth is that a good mother must set the child down if it is ever to develop and stand on it’s own. This painful absence is a loving presence.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, from cell 92 of a Nazi prison camp, less than a year before his execution wrote, in a letter to his friend Eberhard Bethge, these words:
…And we cannot be honest unless we recognize that we have to live in the world etsi deus non daretur [translation: “as if there were no God”]. And this is just what we do recognize — before God! God himself compels us to recognize it. So our coming of age leads us to a true recognition of our situation before God. God would have us know that we must live as men who manage our lives without him. The God who is with us is the God who forsakes us (Mark 15:34). The God who lets us live in the world without the working hypothesis of God is the God before whom we stand continually. Before God and with God we live without God. God lets himself be pushed out of the world on to the cross. He is weak and powerless in the world, and that is precisely the way, the only way, in which he is with us and helps us. Matt. 8:17 makes it quite clear that Christ helps us, not by virtue of his omnipotence, but by virtue of his weakness and suffering.
Where is God in our suffering? The wisdom gleaned from suffering reveals Him, incarnated in the wound itself.
