That explains the old axiom, crux probat, the Cross proves everything." That is, the Cross (pain, suffering) is what transforms us. And yet most people do not know how to handle pain. Fear, anxiety, and negativity bang around inside them until they can't stand it, and so they look for ways to eliminate it. One quick way to diminish pain is to seek blame: "Whose fault is it?"That's when the process of scapegoating begins--as evidenced, in our secular culture, by the high number of lawsuits. Where you do not have healthy spirituality, pain is always someone else's fault.
The roots of this unhealthy thinking go deep, to the age-old notions of good and bad, worthy and unworthy. In such thinking, God and salvation are always found only in the pure, only in the good, only in the worthy. In such a dualistic world, there are always bad people to blame.
The revelation of Jesus, though, is that God is found in both the so-called good and the so-called bad. Most Christians worldwide haven't gotten this message yet. It is too shocking. It is too disappointing. In the Incarnation, in the entering of human flesh, Jesus reveals that God is found in the actual--not in the idealized, the "pure, good, worthy."
Pretend for a moment that all the good people are in your Church and all the bad people are "out there". Your Church is saved and theirs is lost. How nice for you. How very convenient.
Everybody--all Churches--think this way, because it's easy. It demands no transformation. You are saved because someone else is going to hell; you are smart because someone else is stupid.
Well, here's another shocking truth: Jesus is not upset at sinners. The tax collectors and the prostitutes are getting into the kingdom of God before you (Mt 21:31), and Jesus said so to the people in the synagogue. Isn't it obvious, now, why they killed Him? He broke down the distinctions that made their lives so clear and clean and nice.
The fact is, Jesus is only upset at people who do not think they are sinners. If I were to say that in half the churches in this country, I would have things thrown at me. And it is a disappointing statement. It says, No one else is your problem--not abortionists or homosexuals or your wife or the pope. You are your own problem. So many of us put all our energy into changing others, making them into Catholics, for example, but true spirituality is about keeping your feet to the fire. So you grow up. You become changed.
A large percentage of Christians, as I know them, don’t understand the distinction between theism and Christianity. A theist is one who asks, Is there a God? Of course, the answer is yes. Everybody wants a God, and in most of Western culture, the available god figure has been Jesus. In theism, God exists to solve problems, and if you are good and you honor God, God will oblige.
Christianity has a very different message. It says God does not really solve our problems. God reveals them, leads us to the solution, leads us through the solution, and--here is the mystery of the Body of Christ--includes us in the solution. And so we are transformed. In Christianity, sin and salvation are two sides of the same mystery. Salvation is sin overcome and used for better purposes. The question becomes, How do we use evil for good?
Mary offers an example at Calvary. She does not try to pull Jesus off the Cross or try to sue somebody, saying, "This should not happen! This is unjust!" Of course it is unjust. But what does it mean? What is the message of the Crucifixion? Christ offers a similar example. He hangs on the horns of the human dilemma and does not eliminate it. He just hangs there in a reality of pain and contradictions.
That is how transformation happens: by holding the tension instead of expelling it, holding it until it changes us.
Through the Cross, Jesus says you can love it all, even the enemy. There is no scapegoating. Everything, everyone belongs. There is only the broken and suffering Body of Christ eternally crucified, eternally resurrected: the human eternally crucified, eternally resurrected. What faith and surrender and courage it takes to hold the Cross and the Resurrection simultaneously, to let both simultaneously be true in you, in your body, in your marriage, in your children, in your neighborhood, in the Church.
Stop looking for some perfect institution or perfect religion. Stop looking for the perfect friend or partner, because you will be disappointed. He is not Mr. Universe. She is not Miss America. He or she is an ordinary person with faults and wonderful gifts at the same time. It is so hard--but so rewarding--to hold the gifts and the faults together!
There are those who insist that reality be consistent and logical, and those who insist that life is only chaos. Those are the two poles--perfect consistency or chaos. In fact, what Jesus did in the revelation of the Cross was tell us that life is neither of those poles. The pattern of reality is neither perfectly consistent nor perfectly chaos--it is cruciform. There is order and structure, but it is filled with contradictions. Once you learn to hold opposites together, you can find happiness. You hang in the middle with Christ, on the Cross, which bears the mystery of reality--at once fully human and fully divine.
Meister Eckhart, the wonderful Dominican mystic, said that however great one's suffering, God has suffered from it first. There is only one Cross, one Resurrection, captured in that microcosmic moment and person we call Jesus. We see it there; we understand it there. All the wars, the struggles, all resurrection and rebirth is about God. We are merely fragments in this huge flame of divine action.
Mystics and sinners understand this because, unlike the rest of us, they are not trying to create a universe they can understand and explain. They've let go, surrendered to a new identity.
Basically, there are two patterns of transformation into the mystery of God--the pattern of pain and the pattern of prayer. However, because most people do not surrender to real prayer until they suffer pain, you can say there is only one pattern. The fact is, normally we aren’t willing to give up ego control until we must, until pain forces us to do so. Nobody walks gracefully into the mystery of Crucifixion.
That is why the mystery of suffering is so central to transformation. The mystic lets go of the need to prove anything, protect anything, defend anything, be superior to anything, be anything. I am who I am who I am. I am who God is in me.
At that point in spiritual development, you are so grounded that you do not have to worry about your reputation anymore--you don't have to worry about seeking blame or using other people to make yourself feel good or competing or winning. You are basically invulnerable.
The Franciscan word for this is poverty. The Carmelites call it nothingness; the Buddhists, emptiness. It says, I am naked underneath my clothes.
This experience feels like dying. If you do not have good spiritual wisdom while it's happening, you will do everything you can to get back up. Yet, transformation is all about going down--into the pain, into the ordinary, into the physical, into the bloody, into the concrete. It's about descent not ascent, not heightened states of consciousness. In other words, until we can see God where we did not want to see God, the world remains a secular, dualistic world.
After we are transformed, we can look back and see that we were guided through this process by Another who is choosing us, desiring us, and is infinitely wise and compassionate. That means you do not have to figure out all the patterns ahead of time. You do not have to be that smart, that good. You just have to surrender. Good spirituality is not about being good. It is about God being good. When you keep your eyes on the reality of God's goodness, then God rubs off into you. You start being good almost in spite of yourself, but you do not even care about it anymore. You are not checking whether you are better than the next person. You have got something so much more wonderful to be excited about.
This is a difficult concept, and a long process. Most people do not get to this understanding until their 60s and 70s. I meet a lot of old nuns in motherhouses and infirmaries. All they keep saying--over and over--is that God is so good, God is so good. ....end
"Try looking at pain as something that transforms. Once you learn to hold opposites together, you can find happiness."
Julian of Norwich asked Jesus why there was so much suffering in the world and why God allowed it. "I allowed the worst thing possible to happen," Jesus told her. "I let humanity kill God--and I made it the best thing….There isn’t anything that I cannot transform into good."
Why Does God Allow Suffering?
By Richard Rohr, O.F.M.
Condensed from the Catholic Digest
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