Introductory Words

I do not know
How to exist, how to love.
Whether I sit at night or lie down.
The night is long, the time sad;
Troubles there are, low is my strength.
Long drawn-out are my evenings,
Grievous are my mornings;
Then at night it is more unpleasant,
While I am awake more grievous.
It is not long drawn-out because of the evenings,
Not grievous because of the mornings,
Not an affliction merely because of other times;
It is long drawn-out because of my lovely one,
Grievous because of my beloved,
An affliction because of my darling.

-From the Kalevala
(tr. Francis Magoun Jr.)

Sermon

If one survives long enough to reach retirement age, one has likely encountered some difficulty in life. Many have had some sort of serious illness at one time or another that caused physical discomfort. Many have raised a family with its trials and tribulations. Many have laid friends and family members to rest, some prematurely in the midst of a vital existence. In short, we all have become quite familiar with the pain and suffering which are unremoveable components of human existence.

For all these hard times, there are human torments which far exceed the pain and suffering most of us will experience in a normal span of life. There are human experiences of misery which crush the spirit, betray the heart, and devastate the body.

When I heard of the tornado which destroyed the church in Alabama, I felt deeply for this congregation. As you may remember, "The tornado's funnel touched down on [the] Goshen United Methodist Church near Piedmont exploding windows, collapsing the roof and toppling brick walls on a pew of children in bright Easter outfits who were waiting to sing in a pageant. At least 80 other people were injured. Six children, from 2 to 12 years old, were among the dead[1]."

In all, four other churches were hit by tornadoes that day. Three just after the churches had emptied at the conclusion of the morning service. "In nearby Ohatchee, Alabama, the pastor of the Ten Island Baptist Church received a tornado warning and led his congregation of 75 people into the church basement just before the storm struck the building.[2]" The Goshen Church did not have a basement, nor enough warning to have used it.

After a week of funerals, survivors returned to the site to plan for an outdoor sunrise service on Easter. ... The faithful gathered to begin again, even as they sifted through unanswered questions. Why did the tornado choose 11:32 a.m. to strike, the only hour all week the church was full? Why was there not a mark on the empty cotton and soybeans fields nearby? Why did it not hit drug dealers or murderers instead of six children under 12 in Easter outfits?

"People keep asking, 'How can you have faith after all this?' " said the Rev. Dale Clem, [husband of the pastor, Rev. Kelly Clem] whose 4-year-old daughter, Hannah, was killed. "You don't need faith for the things you understand. You need it for the things you don't."[3]

Juxtapose his remarks with the comment of the woman whose car was rolled on the bridge to Punta Gorda Tuesday evening, "God is the only thing that delivered me out of this."

There is a certain Biblical character that come to mind, of course. His name was Job. God, we are told, smiled on his faithful servant Job and gave him great prosperity. Suddenly everything of value is stripped away from him as the Lord and Satan make sport of his faith. Job had a religious faith akin to most fundamentalists. "If I love God and follow his law, I will be rewarded on earth and in heaven. God wants to open the door for my prosperity!" Calvin helped systemize this view for us in the concept of the Elect, which is really a revision of the Jewish concept of being chosen by God. "My righteousness is proven by my prosperity and my power."

When Job loses everything and is covered with boils, losing friends, status, and family, he is devastated. His pitiful cry for understanding of his suffering resonates with anyone who has endured such horror. Listen to Job's words:

I loathe my life;
I will give free utterance to my complaint;
I will speak in the bitterness of my soul.
I will say to God, Do not condemn me;
let me know why thou dost contend against me.
Does it seem good to thee to oppress,
to despise the work of thy hands
and favor the designs of the wicked?[4]

And now my soul is poured out within me;
days of affliction have taken hold of me.
The night racks my bones,
and the pain that gnaws me takes no rest.
With violence it seizes my garment;
it binds me about like the collar of my tunic.
God has cast me into the mire,
and I have become like dust and ashes.
I cry to thee and thou dost not answer me;
I stand, and thou dost not heed me.
Thou hast turned cruel to me;
with the might of thy hand thou dost persecute me.

What Job, and many others since, experienced is something that goes beyond the usual misfortune of daily living, something Simone Weil called "affliction".

Simone Weil, a French thinker, born in Paris in 1909 and died of starvation and poor health in 1943, is one of the great philosophers of the 20th century. I read some of her work as part of a seminary class at Starr King. I was particularly taken by an essay of hers called "The Love of God and Affliction". Raised in an assimilated Jewish family, she developed her own faith that was theologically linked to Christianity but she could never bring herself to embrace the Church as an institution. Weil was a tormented woman because of her great creative intelligence and inability to get recognition in French academia. She left her teaching position to be among the people, work in a factory, and bring her learning to their experience practicing some of her socialistic ideas. She risked everything to go and fight in the Spanish Civil War. Although these experiences brought her into contact with great misery, I suspect the extreme migraine headaches she suffered from were the personal root for some of her thoughts on affliction.

She wrote these words to describe her understanding of affliction of which Job is a model:

Affliction is an uprooting of life, a more or less attenuated equivalent of death, made irresistibly present to the soul by the attack or immediate apprehension of physical pain...There is not real affliction unless the event which has gripped and uprooted a life attacks it, directly or indirectly, in all its parts, social, psychological, and physical...As for those who have been struck the kind of blow which leaves the victim writhing on the ground like a half-crushed worm, they have no words to describe what is happening to them... Affliction causes God to be absent for a time, more absent than a dead man, more absent than light in the utter darkness of a cell. A kind of horror submerges the whole soul.[5]

For Weil, affliction is an unchosen, dehumanizing state one cannot escape in any way. The last stages of terminal illness can have the character of affliction as the physical pain overwhelms one's voluntary control of one's mind. Some of the people I cared for during my internship at the Delaware State Mental Hospital would have fit into Weil's definition of affliction - especially the ones who had enough intelligence and awareness to realize their condition. These poor souls were the unhappiest people I dealt with.

Now, you have probably heard me say things that have a Pollyanna-ish tinge from this very spot about the imminence of the divine in all things. Our Universalist heritage asserts the goodness of God, and the Unitarian heritage asserts the inherent goodness in humanity. We have an upbeat, positive, forward looking faith. And many criticize us for not adequately dealing with the darker aspects of existence. How can all this goodness co-exist with so much evil?

I think Simone Weil has some insights for U.U.'s even though the Christocentric language might put a few off. I will share with you her ideas and then translate them into a theological language more widely acceptable to U.U.'s. It will also give you some idea how I roam the diverse ideology of the world's scripture and their interpreters finding meaning useful for U.U. reflection.

Weil uses Jesus as the supreme example of affliction. In the moment he cries out "Why hast thou forsaken me?" on the cross, he is in the same position as Job. He is an infinite distance from God. Nothing in that moment can bridge the separation. All who experience affliction are thus at the foot of the cross themselves.

The universe is the physical manifestation of the divine in time and space. "Everything we call evil is only this mechanism.[6]" In affliction we become reduced to inert matter. We become reduced to, in her words, slavery, obedience to God in our helplessness. "Men can never escape from obedience to God. A creature cannot but obey. The only choice given to us, as intelligent and free creatures, is to desire obedience or not to desire it. If a man does not desire it, he obeys all the same, perpetually, inasmuch as he is a thing subject to mechanical necessity. If he does desire it, he is still subject to mechanical necessity, but a new necessity is added to it, a necessity constituted by the laws pertaining to supernatural things. Certain actions become impossible for him; others are accomplished by means of him, sometimes almost in spite of himself.[7]

So for Weil, affliction is a form of divine education in the nature of existence. Through affliction the wrapper is peeled back and we see human existence as it really is. This experience is extremely unpleasant. People's lack of preparation for seeing the gruesome beauty of the time-space continuum can destroy them. The only preparation for this experience is the strength of our faith.

What saves us in these moments? Surely not our possessions, for they can be swept away in a moment as a tornado scatters them in every direction. Surely not our friends, for they can easily turn against us. Surely not the merit of a lifetime, for this can be erased in a moment by a false accusation. Surely not the contents of our mind, for they can create as much torment as assistance in the hour of need. Even our feelings of love can be swept away as a wave of suffering crashes down.

Weil feels the only choice we have is to willingly submit to the circumstances of the moment. We might translate that to living in the moment; living one day at a time. For Weil, this is the key to loving God - this spirit of willingness to not resist the nature of reality. We might translate this as a willingness to hold on to our desire to love against all odds and all evidence that love is impossible.

I attended the Holocaust service last Sunday put on by the Charlotte County Minister's Association. I was struck by the sacrifice of the Catholic saint for whom the Church was named: Maximilian Kolbe. He was a priest who was a concentration camp prisoner during the war. One day, a man was selected for execution who had a family. Kolbe offered his life so the man might live. It was an act of love in the midst of affliction.

My hunch about the members of the Goshen Methodist Church is that many now are tasting an affliction that will shake them to the core of their being. What will save them will not be trying to escape the circumstances of their suffering through distraction. Hidden hurt can become a deeply internalized poison. What will save them will not be some pabulum about the separation of the divine acts of God in Nature being different from the divine acts of God through the love of Christ. What will save and sustain them is allowing the crushing blow of chance capriciousness to expose their false gods so they may see them as empty figments of their imagination. While passing through this place of emptiness, if they can hold on to the desire to love even when the heart turns to stone, they will come to a real, enduring faith that will show them the true meaning of following Jesus.

All the world's religions attempt to reveal a truth that already exists right now and is staring us in the face. This truth does not bend to our will, we bend to its. Affliction is a powerful path to this truth. All we can do is faithfully attempt to witness it and allow our lives to be shaped by what we see, as the willow moves in the breeze.

It is not ours to judge, only to learn, to love, and to follow.

Closing Words

I'll close as I began. See if these words have any more meaning now:

Intense, and long-drawn-out physical pain has this unique advantage, that our sensibility is so made as to be unable to accept it. We can get used to it, make the best of, and adapt ourselves to anything else except that; and we make the adaptation, in order to have the illusion of power, in order to believe that we are in control. We play at imagining that we have chosen what is forced upon us. But when a human being is transformed, in his own eyes, into a sort of animal, almost paralyzed and altogether repulsive, he can no longer retain that illusion. . . . So it was that to Job, when once the veil of flesh had been rent by affliction, the world's stark beauty was revealed. The beauty of the world appears when we recognize that the substance of the universe is necessity and that the substance of necessity is obedience to a perfectly wise Love.

Go in Peace.
Make Peace.
Be at Peace.

Copyright (c) 1995 by Rev. Samuel A. Trumbore. All Rights Reserved.