Lament for a Son

Nicholas Wolterstorff is a professor of philosophical theology at Yale Divinity School. In Lament for a Son, he reflects on the loss of his twenty-five year old son Eric, who died in a mountain climbing accident. Wolterstorff recalls fond memories of his son and the pain of his absence. Wolterstorff gives advice for those who want to comfort grieving friends and reflects on hope. The depth of reflection in this brief book has been helpful for me as I am living alongside people who are grieving. In our congregation, a mother recently lost her son. I plan to reread this book again and again. I would do a terrible injustice to this book if I merely described or summarized it. I would encourage any and all to read it; it’s brief but deep. The following are snippets from the book.

“Born on a snowy night in New Haven, he died twenty-five years later on a snowy slope in Kaisergebirger.”

 “He loved the mountains, loved them passionately…his love was his death.”

“We took him for granted. Perhaps we all take each other too much for granted. The routines of life distract us; our own pursuits make us oblivious; our anxieties and sorrows, unmindful. The beauties of the familiar go unremarked. We do not treasure each other enough.”

“It’s so wrong, so profoundly wrong, for a child to die before its parents. It’s hard enough to bury our parents. But that we expect.”

“Death is the great leveler, so our writers have always told us. Of course they are right. But they have neglected to mention the uniqueness of each death – the solitude of suffering which accompanies that uniqueness. We say, ‘I know how you are feeling.’ But we don’t.”

“I shall look at the world through tears. Perhaps I shall see things that dry-eyed I could not see.”

“There’s a hole in the world now. In the place where he was, there’s now just nothing. A center, like no other, of memory and hope and knowledge and affection which once inhabited this earth is now gone.”

“What do you say to someone who is suffering? Some people are gifted with words of wisdom. For such, one is profoundly grateful. There were many such for us. But not all are gifted in that way. Some blurted out strange, inept things. That’s OK too. Your words don’t have to be wise. The heart that speaks is heard more than words spoken.”

“The world looks different now. The pinks have become purple, the yellows brown. Mountains now wear crosses on their slopes.”

“For a long time I knew that God is not the impassive, unresponsive, unchanging being portrayed by classical theologians…but strangely his suffering I never saw. God is not only the God of the sufferers but the God who suffers. The pain and fallenness of humanity have entered into his heart. Through the prism of my tears I have seen a suffering God…Instead of explaining our suffering God shares it.”

“In the valley of suffering, despair and bitterness are brewed. But there also character is made. The valley of suffering is the vale of soul making…How do I receive my suffering as blessing while repulsing the obscene thought that God jiggled the mountain to make me better?”  

“Will I hear Eric say someday, really now I mean: ‘Hey Dad, I’m back.’ ‘But remember, I made all this, and raised my Son from the dead, so…’ OK. So goodbye Eric, goodbye, goodbye, until we see.”

Suffering, Theology, and the Church: a provisional reflection

When I was ten, I went to the Dominican Republic for the first time, and when I was twelve I went to Haiti for the first time. These trips have since shaped and colored my perception of the world; I knew then that not all is right with the world. In the backyard of the wealthy are people living in cardboard huts without clean water as if they do not exist. When I was in high school, my mom was diagnosed with cancer; the world collapsed. These moments in my life shook me, and I think in order to begin grasping the problem of suffering it has to shake you first.  

I remember sitting in my dimly lit dorm room at CIU during my junior year and reading Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov for the first time; I remember reading the chapter entitled “Rebellion” in which Ivan Karamazov graphically describes the suffering of children. After Ivan tells a story about a general casting a young boy to be sundered by dogs in front of the boy’s mother, Ivan declares,

“I absolutely renounce all higher harmony. It is not worth one little tear of even that one

tormented child…what do I care if the tormentors are in hell, what can hell set right here, if these little ones have already been tormented? And where is the harmony, if there is hell? I want to forgive, and I want to embrace, I don’t want more suffering. And if suffering of children goes to make up the sum of suffering needed to buy truth, then I assert beforehand that the whole of truth is not worth such a price.”

For the past eight months, I have been interning at a small Presbyterian church in Hollywood, California, and part of what I do is lead the congregation in prayer during the worship service on Sunday mornings. People offer their concerns, and then I pray for them. Invariably, on Sunday mornings I have prayed for people with cancer and for families that have recently lost dear friends and family members. In these moments I have often thought and felt, “What shall I say? How should I pray?” These questions have thoroughly shaped my subsequent theologizing. I am reminded of Dietrich Bonhoeffer when he asked, “What do we really believe? I mean, believe in such a way that we stake our lives on it?” (Letters and Papers From Prison, 382).

On All Saints Day in 1755 an earthquake shook the very foundations of Lisbon, Portugal. Fires broke out, and people fled to the shore. They watched as the ocean strangely shrunk from the shore only to return as a mountainous wall of water; thousands of people fled to the shore only to be swept away by a tsunami. Tens of thousands of people died. This sparked numerous responses. Some theologians asserted that it was the judgment of God, while philosophers such as Voltaire criticized Leibniz’s repugnant best of possible worlds argument.  

But we need not look back several centuries. Such tragedies are with us today. The tsunami that overwhelmed Japan a few years ago is not front-page news in the U.S. any longer, but nonetheless people are still recovering. The same continues to be the case with people in Haiti.

We would likely wish for a few giant miracles to eradicate suffering from the world in one fell swoop. Indeed with a few twirls of a wand that is what we would like God to do. However, an easy button may be consistent with our character, but however strangely it is not with God’s. Is God then a malicious demon? Or is God impotent?

In response to the question, “How can a good, powerful God allow suffering,” it may be retorted, “God created beings free, which entails the possibility of suffering.” I rather dislike this response because like Job’s interlocutors it pussyfoots around, holding the matter at a distance and pretending to have answers that are little more than half-baked clichés of self-congratulation (albeit I am not calling Alvin Plantinga’s freewill argument a half-baked idea).  

Leaving our armchairs in which we query only about the logical problem of suffering (such queries never get us out of our armchairs!), we should ask, “What has God done and what is God continuing to do about this terrible mess?” I would submit that God is not a malicious demon nor is God impotent; it is often the case that theologians are willing to relinquish God’s omnipotence for the sake of retaining his goodness (cf. Harold Kushner).

God has done and is doing something. The canonical witness describes God responding to human suffering. In response to theodicy questions, it may be said, “Christ and the Church.” 

Christ stood in solidarity with those who were suffering. Jürgen Moltmann says, “The apocalyptic sufferings of ‘this present time’ are gathered up into ‘the suffering of Christ’ on Golgotha. Jesus suffers them in solidarity with others, and vicariously for many, and proleptically for the whole suffering creation” (The Way of Jesus Christ, 152). 

The Church universal is Christ taking form in the world and bearing the world’s suffering. Bonhoeffer explains,

“Suffering has to be endured in order that it may pass away. Either the world must bear

the whole burden and collapse beneath it, or it must fall on Christ to be overcome in him.

He therefore suffers vicariously for the world. His is the only suffering, which has redemptive efficacy. But the church knows that the world is still seeking for someone to bear its suffering, and so, as it follows Christ, suffering becomes the Church’s lot too and bearing it, it is born up by Christ.” (The Cost of Discipleship, 92).

Theodicy questions then are as much ecclesiological ones as theological ones. What Christ did and continues to do is linked to the very existence of the Church universal. But this is not only a theology of solidarity, for this also entails empowered activism on the Church’s part. The suffering Church, the bleeding Church, the Church of the bread and the cup is the Church that knows the suffering of the world and seeks to bring it to an end with the knowledge that it will be brought to an end because the Church is the Church of the empty tomb. This does not mean that the Church mends wounds in the same way an atomic bomb destroys; rather, the Church works from weakness like Christ; the empowered Church works like a mustard seed. 

Don Quixote and the Gospel of Christ

What can possibly be said about that knight errant extraordinaire Don Quixote that has not already been said? He is that great knight who took his bidding from the brilliant books of chivalry. After having cleaned his long-forgotten lance, shield, and metal cap he mounted his steed to seek adventure. Don Quixote is that knight who with great determination sought to right wrongs, correct injustices, and rectify abuses. He also just so happens to have been that mad knight who mistook an inn for a castle and who was subsequently humored by a disgruntled innkeeper. Our magnificent Don Quixote read too many adventure books, which consequently so consumed his mind that it left him totally mad, and thus he rode into the sunset of absurdum charging at windmills with his lance mistaking the windmills for monstrous giants. And I suppose every lunatic needs a follower or two, and hence Sancho, a completely inane donkey-rider, followed Don Quixote into every contrivable misadventure imaginable.

Proclaiming and embodying the gospel of Christ in our culture of pop psychology, preemptive-war, and self-obsession may seem as absurd as charging at windmills with a lance, though we might say that the person who charges at windmills is an intriguing case study.

Jesus looks like Don Quixote to our eyes. We, like the innkeeper, seek merely to appease Jesus. We go along with his fanciful babbling until it proves unprofitable and disruptive. We, like the innkeeper, wish for Jesus to leave us alone as soon as possible, and when he finally leaves, we are relieved to see him leave our peaceful town without further ado.

We seek to ensure safety and stability. Jesus did not make those things a priority for himself nor did he for his followers. It is easy to say the gospel is counter-cultural. However, I am beginning to feel the gospel’s foreignness. I am beginning to feel it in my bones. It seems so foreign to us that we don’t know what to do with it, so we make it into something else that we may continue augmenting our own priorities in our own way and according to our own rationality. We continue talking about “carrying our crosses,” but we make it compatible with our wish for safety, which is far more absurd than charging at windmills with a dilapidated lance.   

I imagine if Jesus were to walk down Wall Street or for that matter “Main Street,” he would appear to us to be a ludicrous dreamer, an absent-minded vagabond who has read Isaiah too many times and who knows nothing of honest pragmatism, for he is an alleged king who thinks victory comes through crucifixion. We wouldn’t vote for him; his health plan is too costly.  We do not want to carry a cross and walk a road that leads to bloody crucifixion. We, like Jesus’ disciples, duck for cover.

After spending several weeks eating, sleeping, and breathing the Gospel of Matthew, it struck me as foreign, foreign from the world we have constructed for ourselves. This feeling was accentuated when I watched the latest Batman movie. We simply do not want a king who is killed by his antagonists; we want a hero who protects us and who survives in the process. We want heroes who will keep us safe. None of us want a murdered king as our king. None of us believe that a war can be won without weapons, for believing that a war can be won without weapons would be like mistaking dangerous giants for harmless windmills.

We say it is “just” to kill rather than be killed. And so we kill our enemies and even celebrate their deaths. We murder for “liberty” and call it “justice.” If a person is a domestic murderer, then that person deserves the death penalty. However, this rationality knows nothing of the gospel of Christ, but we prefer doling out death because it is more conducive to our self-obsessed schedule and budget than the dangerous business of peace and restoration. At the foot of the cross, we divide and conquer instead of seeking forgiveness.

The absurdity of the gospel of Christ remains absurd without the vindication of Christ and those who follow him. It remains absurd without resurrection. We wish to make the cross and safety compatible because we have forgotten the last sentence of the Nicene Creed, the Apostle’s Creed, and the last act of the gospels. We have forgotten (or perhaps disbelieved) resurrection. And so the gospel of Christ remains absurd to our eyes. We then content ourselves with mythologizing Jesus, which is conducive to our attempts to live as long as possible at the expense of others. 

Suffering and the Presence of God

I remember when the phone range and my mom answered it. It was the doctor. There was silence. She hung up and walked into the living room. I remember standing, waiting for an explanation. She told us that she had been diagnosed with cancer. It felt like the world had imploded, but strangely it hadn’t. It felt like life had ended, but strangely we woke up the next morning the same as before. When my mom was diagnosed with cancer, I felt like my world had come crashing down, perhaps analogous to what many people felt on 9/11. For many long and excruciating weeks, my mom endured chemotherapy. I remember sometimes going with her to treatments and sitting with her on the bed. I didn’t have much to say, and there wasn’t much I could do. Most of the time, I just sat there with her.

I shall not build a theodicy. That is for someone else to do. But I will say that if a theodicy begins and ends “on paper,” then it isn’t a theodicy at all. Formulas, theorems, and syllogisms do no service for a mother who loses her daughter or for a son who loses his father or for a wife who loses her husband.

In The Sickness Unto Death, Kierkegaard sheds light on what may be a potentially redeeming quality of suffering. He says, “When life begins to quake, then it is immediately apparent that despair was what was lying beneath” (Penguin Classic, 74-75). It seems then that tragedy can potentially serve as a trigger to realize one’s despair and one’s need for deliverance. However, these words would seem cold and insensitive to anyone who is enduring tragedy and suffering.

Years later, my mom said that during those long weeks and months of cancer and chemotherapy she experienced a closer presence of God than she had ever before. She said, “I felt sorry for everyone else who had to be bustling about.” God was present with her in the midst of her cancer.

When it comes to dwelling in the presence of God, lying in bed with cancer is rather different than vogues in Christian circles that blur the boundaries of entertainment and the holy. I’m not suggesting we adopt a sort of Christian asceticism. But perhaps when it comes to dwelling in the presence of God, we are a bit off kilter and even upside down. Perhaps, we have forgotten to take off our shoes and childish desires. Instead, we have “satisfied” ourselves with sugarcoated experiences. It seems that we often associate God’s presence with health and surplus, and we play hot potato with suffering. It’s little surprise then that we in America don’t know what to do or say about the presence of God in the midst of suffering. But the testimonies of many around the world, including my mom, ought to teach us that God is present with those who are suffering, and perhaps they recognize God’s presence better than we who are “bustling about.”

A Puff of Smoke in the Imagination

In what I consider to be Camus’ greatest novel, the Plague, the doctor reflects, “And since a dead man has no substance unless one has actually seen him dead, a hundred million corpses broadcast through history are no more than a puff of smoke in the imagination.” If this is in any way true, then it should come as little surprise that news anchors speak of death and suffering without so much as a tear. They speak of tragedy without apparent remorse – it seems that this runs in accord with a long-standing tradition of reporting a neutral history (but that is another matter). For the moment, I would like to draw attention to the fact that we are a society saturated with simulated corpses, and we are blurring the boundaries of fiction and reality. There seems to be little difference between reality TV and the recent “high profile” court case. Though there is a large degree of difference between war in the Middle East and war in our local cinema, the two seem contiguous in American consciousness. We see corpses. We see lots of them, piles of them, and yet we do not cry out for a stop. We race to the cinemas for more. When we get home from the cinemas, we turn on our TVs and hear of more disaster. The transition from cinema to the evening news on TV, from fiction to reality seems slight. We have made life a stage and blurred the difference between fiction and reality, and consequently we have thickened our skin toward the wrong things, namely people. Our hearts seemed to have grown callous to the sight of corpses and familial deterioration. It is, after all, for our entertainment.

Without a doubt, social media has revolutionized cultures and societies. This is scary and exhilarating. There is such a great potential! However, “With social media we praise our Lord and Father, and with it we curse human beings, who have been made in God’s likeness. Out of the same social media comes praise and cursing. My brothers and sisters, this should not be” (James 3:9-10). There are living bodies on the receiving side of our messages. There are living bodies on the receiving side of our comments, pictures, and video posts. How long ago was it that a person was encouraged to commit suicide while on the Internet? And I’ll wager a guess that there are many other stories like it. “My brothers and sisters, this should not be.” Social media has a seemingly infinite capacity for good and evil. If never before has the human tongue been tamed, how might we tame the ever evolving world of social media?

I have never given Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath much credit. I often consider it an average novel, written for a few high schoolers who will hate reading it. However, it records the methodical deterioration of a Midwest family’s dignity as they seek merely to survive. With each step, they stoop lower; they are forced to stoop lower and lower. By the end, a reader must ask, “Is there any dignity left? And if there is not, when was the line crossed, when was dignity relinquished?” These are important questions, and I might add, “At what point do we murder other people’s dignity through social media?”

With the proliferation of technology, with the fast paced evolution of technological capability, the church needs to consider its profound situation. For now the value of both dead and living bodies seems to be losing their worth in the American consciousness, whether or not this is consciously realized. This is vitally important. The church must not miss the train on this issue; the church must not let this go unchallenged, unqualified. To this, to the rise of social media, the church must recover its prophetic voice more than ever, for even the sight of corpses and the knowledge of other living bodies are merely puffs of smoke in our imaginations.

Perhaps, a proactive start might be to hesitate and weigh carefully each word, picture, and video before posting. Perhaps, a proactive start would be to counteract the brutality with a few kind words and simple gestures of grace. This is surely possible. Just as the tongue may be used for good and evil, social media may be used for both good and evil. Let it be for good, and let us remember the value of other human persons.

A Few Variegated and Disjointed Words Concerning a Path of Least Resistance

Some of us have trekked down the cloudy road of doubt, while others have continued on sunnier roads. For those who have walked along the dreary path perhaps a brief reflection will serve as a flashlight, however infinitesimal it may be (even such a small flashlight is better than none at all).

Doubt is analogous to a lens and when looking through it everything seems most dubitable. It is similar to a grey lens through which the entire world seems bleak and pointless. And then having grown accustom to the company of doubt’s seemingly honest company, the easiest thing in the world to do is to doubt, to doubt even oneself – that French mental magician, whose name I shall not mention, set an unfortunate precedent. In a way doubt becomes a self-perpetuating vacuum sucking inward. Even oneself is sucked into doubt, obliterating oneself.

Doubt is synergetic. It may be similar to a quagmire. If a person sinks into a deep muck and tries to wiggle free, the person will only sink further. It has been said that doubt begets doubt. This may not be too far off the mark, though a dose of doubt about some things may be good medicine to avoid gullibility, but I think at that point it’s not doubt anymore. It’s merely discernment. So doubt, in a sense, breeds itself, and once it begins it spreads growing stickier and stickier.

For some of us, doubt may be considered a path of least resistance. For some of us, it is a propensity. This is dangerous, for, though a measure of doubt may be good medicine as previously mentioned, doubt seems to be “engineered” in such a way that it can hijack human resources (such as reason, emotion, psyche, etc.) for their own self-destruction. In this way, doubt is analogous to the viciousness of cancer.

An ethics professor said during a lecture last fall, “Without community, we wither.” This is wisdom. Of course, “community” does not refer to arbitrary or affected groupings of individuals but of an authentically interrelated composite (though composed of individuals, the whole is distinct from the individuals individually) – let community be defined and judged not according to quantity of relationships but of quality. This composite can be synergetic, and this synergetic communion is, at least in part, an answer to the withering reality of doubt. A person must reach out for help from others in order to get out of the deep muck – this may not be the only way, but it is a way. Open dialogue within the context of authentic (unaffected) community is a healthy alternative and anodyne for the easy though treacherous path of doubt.

Kierkegaard’s technical use of the term “despair” and my generic use of the term “doubt” are not synonymous. However, as a tangential conclusion, I will parallel them here. When the despairer (I will not explain which sort of despairer, but you may read The Sickness Unto Death for further understanding on the issue) confides his despair to another, he despairs further. His despair intensifies. But let this not be a deterrence from confiding, for acknowledging despair and then confiding is of infinite value; it is the first step. The same goes for doubt. If it catches a person in isolation, it systematically appropriates and consequently disintegrates everything in its viselike clutches. However, if doubt is pinpointed and acknowledged, the low-hanging clouds may part, perhaps only for a moment, allowing a ray of sun to illumine the path.

A Winepress

Good writing seems to come most naturally to a few eccentrics every generation or so. This is likely the case for a multiplicity of reasons. One reason may be that many good writers lived lives just off the beaten trail and lived a few inches off kilter. They did not always tread on paved roads but on thorny and shadowy courses. Their paths contributed to who they would become as writers.

I doubt Fyodor Dostoevsky wished to face a firing squad. I doubt he wished to be sent to Siberia, but Siberia granted him torments that would shape the rest of his career as a writer. Of course, he published a few mediocre books previous to his time in Siberia, but he wrote his greatest and most existentially profound books after his sufferings in Siberia.

Flannery O’Connor suffered from lupus and died when she was only thirty-nine, but her pain seemed to have contributed to what she believed to be her calling, writing. For two hours each morning she sat in front of her typewriter in order to write, but she could not sit there any longer because the pain was too great. She did this in her twenties and thirties. Even on her deathbed she faithfully toiled over “Parker’s Back,” one of her many short stories. She did not choose this suffering or early death, but she persevered and let it shape her and let its intensity bleed into her writing.

These are just a few people who lived rather eccentric lives, lives just off the beaten trail, lives full of various torments, though there are many other torments I have left unmentioned. And it was these torments that shaped them and their writing. It was these torments that contributed to shaping what we now consider treasure, good writing filled to the brim with insight, horror, and wit.

It may be the case that the American Dream, if realized, cultivates poor writers with shallow content. Nobody desires to spend years in Siberia or to be essentially housebound in the prime of life. But such has been the case with some of the greatest writers ever to have lived. The American Dream, on the other hand, seems to quell potential hidden deep within.

Here I say that suffering can be a sort of winepress. This does not mean that all sorts of suffering are in this way a wine press. There are some sorts of suffering that seem absolutely unredeemable, that seem to be consequences of sheer brokenness. But here I note only that not all suffering is undesirable. Some suffering is the road to the highest quality wine. Some suffering is truly a winepress.