We suffer. Life is a gift wrapped in shit.
All kinds of suffering prevail against the seething masses of humanity. We can analyze and dissect violent wars, looking for the causes and effects, but we can never find a true reason or justification for such destruction and subjugation.
Physiological pain and mental anguish motivate fear and desperation, often perpetuating the cycles and exacerbating the causes and conditions of our suffering. Whether it is the debilitating scourge of a migraine or the crippling grief of suddenly losing a loved one, suffering overwhelms us.
Why do we suffer? How can we have hope for the future despite suffering? How is it that some grow and learn and rise up from suffering, yet others perish? Should we or should we not think of this as good or desireable? Is our collective suffering a lamented but necessary consequence of free will of the human spirit in a world being created by God? It seems impossible from any angle to see our world as the best of all possible worlds.
Why so often do we return to and seek out the causes of our suffering? What is this sickening dance?
These are the questions that we face. The only answers come in accepting that we are temporal creatures, bound by time and space. Our subjective context as individuals constrains us from recognizing
Job's friends understood Job's suffering as proof that he was being punished for his sin, but God rebuked them for this assumption. God's Justice is more profound and lasting than we can understand, and will not match up with our ideas of what it is to be God's people. In Job, God rebuked our conventional wisdom that prosperity is the natural God-given result of righteous living, with the inverse being implied as well.
The truth and purpose of suffering and struggle is not to be found in answers, but in questions.
No comments:
Post a Comment