Tag: suffering

Lent and Living Saturday

Lent and Living Saturday

Lent isn’t pretty. It challenges us to look at the life we face each day, to look and really see. It calls us to be uncomfortable—to face sin, all that is wrong in us and our world, without looking away, acknowledge the hold it has us entangled in, and repent.

Lent is about death. Or at least it should be. Not just the physical death that awaits us all, or even that one death on a Roman cross two thousand years ago (though we’ll get to that), but the death that invades our lives every day. The death that sin—messing up and hurting each other—brings, both our own sin and the sin of others.

In our own lives, in the lives of people we pass, people we work with, people we sit beside in class, we are surrounded by invisible deaths every day. Dreams have died, relationships have died, hopes have died. Death is in our own failures and in the failures of those around us, the failures we have to live with whether they are ours or not.

But we are not made for death, and we can’t just sit and bear it without hope.

Most often, I try to find that hope myself. I try to find the problem I can fix or the reason that will let me understand how it will all turn out to be okay. I want the death to actually be an illusion: it only looks like death. And the more I turn from death, the more each death become invisible. Death is a denial of meaning, and I will insist on meaning. In my demand for answers, I want the hope first, even though it’s last in the list: suffering, endurance, character, and then, at the end, hope (Romans 5:3-4).

I don’t like that verse. Everything in me resists living in Holy Saturday.

Friday. The most horrific wrong. The most unjust death of all. On Friday it’s devastatingly clear: this is not the way it’s supposed to be. And on Saturday we have to live with that, with all the dissonance of what we don’t—can’t—understand. Sunday does come, not so much with answers as with life and hope. Sunday holds victory out before us, calls us to persevere. There is more, and that more is certain and sure.

But today is Saturday. We have to wait for Sunday, for that life that is surely ours but not yet.

I put a lot of effort into getting out of Friday and into Sunday. Lent tells me, stop. It’s Saturday. Face the dissonance. Weep. Get desperate. Live with the wrongness of injustice and death and this dying world.

Only then can I really hear the hope for all it’s worth.

Lent also tells me there’s an end to death. This is not how it’s supposed to be, and this is not how it finally will be. We live in Saturday, yes, but we’ve been shown the fullness of Sunday, and it is coming! Grace witnesses to that hope every day. Even as we begin to let ourselves see the invisible deaths, there is the grace of ordinary resurrections.

Ordinary resurrections: seeds of hope that come in this world. Death surrounds us, but so does life. And so I wait—trying to listen to Lent, to see both death and life—in Saturday.

Advertisement

Hope Comes

Hope Comes

Hope comes last.

Do you have any idea how much that bothers me?

In Romans 5, Paul says that “suffering produces perseverance; perseverance produces character; and character, hope.”

Sometimes I don’t know what kind of world he lived in to say such a thing. Not the part in the middle – “perseverance produces character.” That can make sense. Practice and exercise, sticking with it – I see that producing character in myself and others.

But “suffering produces perseverance”? No. It doesn’t. Not on its own, at least. Unrelieved suffering without hope produced despair. Then numbness. Deadening. Unrelieved suffering produces the realization that one can actually get through the unendurable, but not intact.

I’ve lived with enough suffering myself, and alongside the suffering of others, not to spiritualize it. Abusive relationships, abusive systems. Suffering kills.

Persistent suffering teaches a person that it won’t matter what you do. It kills agency. You feel like a placeholder in the world, but something knows you’re meant for more than that.

Suffering produces silence.

Without hope.

Hope can change everything.

Hope is a gift we can give each other, but we have to receive it, or give it to ourselves, first.

Hope says, this can change. I – we – can do something different.

Hope says, this world can change. We can grow and learn, and it can be filled with beauty, love, and peace. We can choose that.

Hope says, I can change. My life can change. But I have to choose to change things.

In so many ways, I was taught to wait for things to change. To “wait on the Lord” – for direction, for a date, for a calling, for life. I remember the day, Easter Sunday in the parking lot after church, when I first said it (to myself as much as to my friend). “If I want my life to be different, nothing is very likely to change unless I make some changes.”

That was the day I began to find my agency. When I began to go out to find direction, a date, a calling, a life. And it turns out, they are there for the finding (though not without that perseverance).

Suffering will happen – the result of wrongs done both intentionally and accidentally, by both ourselves and others. The result of death, that final enemy. The result of life that just is, changing seasons and moving ever onward with little regard for our three-score-and-ten.

But we have today – really that’s all we have. And we can chose beauty and love and generosity today, even if we know that choice will bring suffering tomorrow.

That’s the hope – that there is always beauty and love and generosity to be chosen.

Paul’s equation only works as a cycle. It only works when, in the face of suffering, we can share hope with each other. When we can choose together beauty and love with generosity in the middle of suffering. When we can fight alongside each other for the agency to right the injustices that so often trap us in suffering.

Then suffering can produce perseverance, and perseverance can produce character, and character can produce even more hope. Enough to infect the world.