The Discipline of Suffering: Redeeming Our Stories of Pain

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The Discipline of Suffering

What happens when you grow up in a church tradition that sees life and belief in God as simple, factual and straight forward, and then you get plunged into suffering that raises complexities about faith that are not easy to answer?

There is always a choice. We can take the easy way out and stay with simplicity and safety and deny the contradictions of our experience. Or we can do the opposite and walk away from what we believe. The third option is the hardest; it requires grappling with the deep issues and making sense of our situation. That is what this book is about.

I am grateful for my church tradition because it taught me that the most important thing in my life is my relationship with God. This gave me a great foundation for my faith. However, it did not give me a safe place to ask the hard questions that suffering raises. Neither did it equip me with the tools to do this task well. I had to find them on my own. This took work, and the task is by no means complete, as with older age comes more and new issues to face. Life can be cruel and kind. It is unpredictable, hard and often unfair. And yet a life built on the living Jesus Christ is one where if we are courageous enough to step out into the unknown of the whys, we will find he is Emmanuel, God with us.

Perhaps the biggest challenge we face when we try to make sense of our experiences and who God is in the midst of our suffering is the paradox posed by our circumstances. Suffering can make us better people, and it can take us closer to God. But the deep, confusing pain can also take us further away from our faith. So, the challenge of suffering becomes one of finding a way to God through the darkness of our pain. When we step out and do this, at times we will feel like we are going around in circles making no progress, or that we are groping along the ground not seeing clearly where our next step is meant to be. We might think that it would be great if someone would give us a candle, a match, or perhaps a glow-worm – anything to help us see the way forward to a solution. We find it hard to understand when God seems silent and unresponsive, not appearing to answer our requests for assistance.

As a child of postmodernism,¹ I understand the dark loneliness of this process to be one of deconstruction, where we question everything we believe to try and resolve the inconsistencies between our understanding and experience, to find a new meaning that makes sense within both the story of our life and the greater story of who God is. Faith in this context of suffering should not simply react against our experience in anger and disillusionment. It needs to push through our despair and doubt. We need to reach beyond these stumbling blocks and find a way to grow, learn and change despite them.

For followers of Jesus, then, the challenge when we are suffering is to match our intellectual understanding of our faith to the way we live and experience life. A gap or contradiction between these two things is not sustainable. It causes cognitive dissonance, not to mention its emotional fallout. So, if how we see and understand God is undermined by our life experience, we need to do some soul searching to reconnect these two things back together. Either how we understand God needs to change, or who we are and what we are doing needs to change. More often than not, the two processes need to happen in unison.

We do not need to be fearful of this process of deconstruction. This is because faith in God challenges the nihilism and apathy of postmodernism by offering us hope and a purposeful way forward out of doubt and despair. It embraces the process of picking our situation apart and spurs us on as we move through reconstruction to the other side, healing and making sense of who we are and who God is. It is about going deeper.

I believe that successfully reconstructing our life in the face of suffering transforms us; we grow in our faith and become more Christlike. The good news of Jesus Christ invites us to persevere in our pain, reconnect to ourselves and God, reconstruct our faith and find hope.

Plenty of people have trodden this path before us and succeeded. Paul says in Romans 5:3–5 that

we also glory in our sufferings, because we know that suffering produces perseverance; perseverance, character; and character, hope. And hope does not put us to shame, because God’s love has been poured out into our hearts through the Holy Spirit, who has been given to us.

We find a similar sentiment in James 1:2–4:

Consider it pure joy, my brothers and sisters, whenever you face trials of many kinds, because you know that the testing of your faith produces perseverance. Let perseverance finish its work so that you may be mature and complete, not lacking anything.

Yet this is such a countercultural way of thinking, as our society tells us that we need to feed our happiness and dull our pain any way that we can.

Scripture tells us that pain is an opportunity for growth. It is the challenge to finally grow up and become mature. And this is why suffering is a spiritual discipline.

In Christian mystic tradition, the pathway to God was thought to come through love or suffering. Both ways involve giving up control of our life – either by choice or because everything of value has been forcefully taken from us through our circumstances. Whichever way this happens, we end up rethinking our life and what we are living for. In a postmodern context, it means pulling our story about our life apart and then trying to rewrite it God’s way. In the process, we find a new knowledge and understanding that brings hope and freedom amidst the struggle.

If life was a jigsaw puzzle, it would be true to say that many of us spend our time constructing our life on our own, carefully working to place each piece, with the hope of creating a whole picture at the end. The fault in this approach is that it is we who are placing the pieces, and the picture that we thought we were going to end up with might not be the best outcome for our life. When our life is deconstructed through suffering, the puzzle is smashed. We lose sight of the picture we are making, and we have to start placing the pieces all over again. This time, the challenge is to place the pieces with the help of Christ, working to God’s agenda for the finished design and not ours.

I share this metaphor of the jigsaw puzzle as a way of illustrating why the path of suffering is one of the main pathways to God.² The key lesson is letting God dictate the direction and terms. Counter to what society tells us, we find redemption of our pain through embracing it and trusting God with it and despite it, rather than in seeking escape from it. This process requires endurance and perseverance. The discipline of suffering is not a process that can be rushed. Patience is required.

My own journey with suffering – and, as it turns out, the pathway to developing a strong faith – started when I was 14 years old. At the time, I struggled with acute back and nerve pain because one of the vertebrae in my back had slipped out by seventy-five per cent. I should have been enjoying my life in north-west Tasmania as a carefree adolescent, self-absorbed, doing the things I liked. Instead, my life was derailed. I was used to getting the highest mark in most of my classes at school, but my health problems caused me to miss months of school because basic tasks like sitting in a classroom became impossible. I had two spinal fusions, and my education became completely disrupted. This was further compounded by my parents’ decision to move to Melbourne, which removed me from my extended family and friends.

My back pain forced me into solitude, as did our move to Melbourne. I started to discover that God was my place of refuge and provider of strength. Looking back, I now see that my suffering allowed God to lay a firm foundation for my faith – a faith that was real and lived out daily.

I gradually recovered, although I expected my disability would catch up with me later in life and lived with a fear that the severe pain would return. This happened at the age of 27, when I was pregnant with my son. I struggled just to walk. Since this time my pain has been fairly constant, and my disability continues to worsen with age. It has caused me to make some hard choices, including to only have one child and take positions at work that are sustainable with regards to my health.

Now in my 40s, the pain has become a normal part of my life. It keeps me honest, and it means I rely on God for everything. It has forced me to let go of any illusions I am in control. I’ve had to completely overhaul the way I live. The limited energy that I have is carefully channelled into the few things that really matter and which I feel God has called me to. Through this hard road, God has changed my character and shown me his faithfulness and compassion. I still get afraid of what the future might bring, but I am continuing to learn that my help comes from him (Ps 121).

Through my experience of suffering, I have discovered that I am not alone. And you are not alone either. Jesus Christ is our brother in suffering. In his death on the cross, he entered into all our pain and journeyed with us in it. The good news of the resurrection is the hope that our suffering can be redeemed both now and eternally. The discipline of suffering is a partnership between us and God to start the process of redeeming our pain, and that of the world around us. This does not mean stopping the pain. It is a creative process of bringing transformation, new life and hope to the present and the future.

STORIES, LANGUAGE AND MEANING

To inspire and comfort you, I will share the stories of other people who have courageously made this journey and come through the darkness with their lives and faith reimagined.

God invites you to take a similar journey together with him, so that he can co-author your story and give you hope and light in a dark place. This book will provide you with some tools for this journey – tools that help you move from feeling shattered, deconstructed and stuck to a place where you can start to dream again.

One of the most useful tools is the humble story, redeployed to help us explore our own thoughts. People think in words and pictures. Emotional pain and problems can lead to unhealthy thinking, which damages and disfigures us in all sorts of ways – seen and unseen. Such thinking can leave us in a vacuum where we have no words at all to describe or express our experience and make sense of it. This is one reason why we benefit from going to see a pastor, therapist, friend or family member when we have a problem. Talking it through helps us to take a group of disjointed ideas and memories and place them into a meaningful narrative. Prayer can serve this same purpose, because whether out loud or within our head, we are speaking to God using our thoughts.

This is important, because words, language and stories provide us with our identity. When we place our experiences into a sequential order, we form our autobiographical memory – our unique life story. When we process an individual event down to the last detail, we reframe the impact that this has on our life, our understanding and how we see the world. These stories do not have to be based on our own experience. Our lives can be shaped by the stories and experiences of other people, through conversations, books, media, songs and the Bible.

It is possible to study these words, language and stories in a more formal manner using specific, knowledge-based tools, or processes. These can help us to get to the bottom of how we formed our beliefs about our life and who we are, and how we understand our faith and who God is. We will focus on two of these processes:

descriptive contextualising

functional contextualising.

These processes sound more daunting than they are. When put into practice, they can help open up whole new ways of thinking and allow God to have the space to speak into our lives.

Descriptive contextualising

The process of descriptive contextualising³ helps us study our words and actions in context, leading to greater understanding. It is used in a variety of disciplines – including philosophy, sociology, anthropology, literature and biblical studies. The common thread is the search for meaning through story, language and words.

In this book we will look at three approaches to descriptive contextualising:

social constructionism⁴

narrative therapy⁵

hermeneutics.⁶

All three emphasise the importance of examining meaning – either within our society, within ourselves, or within a piece of literature (e.g. a biblical text). They pick apart how our culture informs our identity, what our internal narrative says about ourselves, and how our understanding of the word of God contributes to our thoughts and beliefs.

They are all language tools that help us to probe our knowledge of the world and bring in light to help us see where our dreams for our life and self-narrative might have gone wrong, and how we move forward into a healthy faith and life.

Functional contextualism

Functional contextualism focuses on a detailed analysis of an individual person’s thinking patterns. With origins in behavioural psychology and science, it is another postmodern deconstruction tool that helps us address the individual thoughts that subtly shape and direct our actions. These idiosyncratic smaller stories play in our heads throughout the day – as words, phrases, pictures and memories – telling us very specific things about ourselves and who we are. Their presence is so familiar that we often do not even notice them. Collectively, these thoughts can be a problem. Placed alongside the good news of Christ, we are invited to allow God’s Spirit to change these patterns of thinking and renew our minds so that we are no longer trapped in our pain.

In this book, I invite you to go on a journey of exploration to look at your own stories of suffering and deconstruct any unhelpful knowledge and understandings that you have been holding onto. In doing so, you will be able to re-evaluate the dreams you have for your life and your narrative about yourself and God, and transform those subtle but powerful thought stories that come into your mind. We will do this through examining

our myths, which can get us stuck in a painful place and distort our idea of God

our dreams, which can be shattered but then re-dreamed in light of the good news

our narratives, which can get us stuck in a problem but can be re-storied with hope

our stories, which can be identified, renewed and rewritten with the help of the Spirit.

It is my prayer that through this journey, you will gain