Finding God in Suffering:. Bruce G Epperly
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kataphatic (in Greek, “with images’) approach treasures our experiences of God and the words we use to describe our relationship with the Creator. We sing praises to God, describing God as friend, companion, healer, and rock of ages. We create creeds and holy books to portray God’s nature and relationship with humankind. Worship demands that we articulate words and images for God. Still, we must be careful in our descriptions of the Holy One in order to avoid localizing God’s presence to one place, culture, or religious tradition. One of the problems with Job’s friends’ orthodox theological affirmations is that they claim to know too much about God. Like Aslan, the Christ-lion of C.S. Lewis’ Chronicles of Narnia, God is not “tame,” nor can God’s nature be limited by human language, worship, or doctrine. Believing they have figured God out and banishing mystery from their religion, they have little sympathy with Job’s experience and assume his suffering can easily be explained as punishment for his sins.
The apophatic (in Greek, “without images”) approach serves as a type of “theological Lysol,” eliminating the germs of theological pretense and reminding us of our mortality, error, finitude, and sin. God is more than we can image, the apophatic path asserts. When God speaks out of the whirlwind, God shows Job the wondrous beauty and complexity of the universe. Job is overwhelmed and confesses that his quest to fully define God’s ways is misguided. God is more than we can imagine, whether in Job’s mystic vision or in the descriptions of today’s cosmologists who imagine a 125 billion galaxy, 13.8 billion year old, cosmic adventure, and then remind us that our beautiful earth is just a speck in our home galaxy, the Milky Way.
The book of Job testifies to the importance of faithful agnosticism: if we think we can know God or God’s ways fully, we have created an idol of our own making, subject to our cultural norms and ethics. Still, in a spirit similar to the Greek sage Socrates, Job reminds us that, at the very least, we are obligated to challenge harmful and parochial images of God. The book of Job’s many voices provide us with a deeply faithful agnosticism in which we devote our lives to a Reality that is always more than we can imagine. The adventure of faith is always on the move, always growing by trial and error. It always stays honest and healthy through the humble recognition of our limitations and the impact of our community’s finite and biased perspectives on our understanding of the Holy One. Faithful Job will test his own faith and challenge the God he once believed in, looking for an answer that goes far beyond the certainties of his religious tradition. He risks losing his religion, but in the process he may discover the living God.
Journeying With Job
Each chapter ends with a simple spiritual practice and a few questions for reflection. As I have written elsewhere, I believe that holistic theological reflection involves the interplay of vision and practice. Our personal or community vision is our tentative and humble understanding of the universe and our place in it. Our vision can be described as our theological perspective and involves our images of God, human life, the cosmos, our vocation, the meaning of suffering, and survival after death. Though some persons seek unchanging absolutes, a healthy vision is always on the move, open to growth and new insights, grounded in the recognition that every belief system and faith tradition is finite, time-bound, and reflective of certain perspectives on God and the world. Spiritual practice involves ways that help us experience life in its depths and discover God’s presence in life’s joys and challenges. Practices open our hearts and connect us with the wellsprings of God’s healing energy. Practices are not ways to avoid pain or deny our suffering and the suffering of the world, but pathways to gracefully and courageously face the deepest realities of life, including death, diminishment, grief, loss, and beauty.
In our first spiritual practice, take a few minutes to pause and gently breathe. Imagine that each breath opens you to God’s Spirit moving through your life. After you experience a sense of calm, take a few minutes for a life review, considering the following questions:
1 What is your first recollection of the world as a place of pain as well as joy? What event awakened you to the pain of the world? How did the people around you, especially adults, react to that event?
2 What has been the most devastating experience in your life? What was most difficult about that experience? How did you respond to that experience? What helped you make it through this experience?
3 Where have you experienced God’s presence in moments of suffering?
Conclude this time of reflection with a prayer that your heart might open with compassion toward your suffering and the suffering of the world.
Questions For Reflection
1 Do you think religious faith guarantees well-being and success? How do you respond to the three stories with which the chapter begins? In what ways might faith improve your life? Are there any limits to the impact of our faith on our life situation?
2 How do you explain the evils of the world? What are the sources of the suffering we experience?
3 A prominent religious figure stated the following: “The impact of Hurricane Katrina on New Orleans was divine punishment for the city’s tolerance of homosexuality.” How do you evaluate this statement? Does it reflect your understanding of God?
4 Old Testament scholar Terrence Fretheim once noted that the most important theological question is not “Do you believe in God?” but “What kind of God do you believe in?” What do you think of his assertion? Can our images of God be harmful to ourselves and others?
5 Do you think that faith and doubt can coexist in a person’s experience of God? Is doubt always a bad thing in the life of faith?
6 In what ways is the apophatic, negative, approach to understanding God helpful? Why is it important to recognize that there are limits to what we can know about God?
7 What images of God give you comfort? What images of God are problematic to you?
1 I have chosen pseudonyms to affirm the privacy of persons mentioned in this text.
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