但我是谁呢？我有什么资格对那些在极大痛苦中的人说这些呢？我一生中都很健康；不知饥饿为何物；对身体上的疼痛只是略有所知；尽管不配，如今我还娶到一位可爱且虔诚爱主的妻子；我有九个孩子，三个外孙和外孙女，他们身体都很健康；我的父母正要庆祝他们的结婚五十周年纪念日——我，凭什么对一个癌症末期的病人、或一个刚刚埋葬独子的人说，“会好的，会好的，一切都会好起来的”（好像上帝对 Lady Julian所说）……不，我不能够。对那些正在苦难之中的人，我只能将他们的目光指向那许许多多的前辈，他们踏过痛苦的荆棘之路，寻找到了最终的欢乐与荣耀。我只能让他们望向Corrie ten Boom①、Sheldon Vanauken②、还有使徒彼得、保罗……最终，仰望耶稣他自己。
①Corrie ten Boom: 1892年4月15日生于荷兰阿姆斯特丹,1983年4月15日去世于加利福利亚普拉森舍，Corrie是虔诚的基督徒，曾负责一个为脑功能障碍患者开放的教会，在家中也收养了很多孩子。二战中，Corrie和她的父亲及其他家庭成员一起接受犹太人躲在她的家中避难，从而逃过纳粹追捕。她与家人却均因此被纳粹逮捕。她的父亲被捕10天后去世，她的姐姐Betsie ten Boom 1944年在集中营去世，临终前她对Corrie说“苦难的坑再深，也深不过上帝的爱。”她的著作《藏身之处》（ The Hiding Place）被拍成电影。战后，Corrie被邀请至世界各地演讲，分享她在集中营的遭遇和靠着上帝的爱而生发的饶恕。
②Sheldon Vanauken： (1914年8月4日—1996年10月28日)美国著名作家，最出名的书是他的自传《A Severe Mercy》（1977年出版），书中回忆他和太太与英国文豪C.S.Lewis的友谊以及他们关于基督信仰和如何面对苦难悲剧的对话，此书也将被拍成电影。Sheldon与他的妻子Davy两人深深相爱，誓与彼此相伴终身，而且决定两人要分享所有的一切，甚至决定不要孩子以防孩子抢夺了任何一方的爱。他们在遇见C.S.Lewis之后被他的智慧和幽默吸引。Davy首先皈依基督，Sheldon感觉耶稣成了他们爱情的第三者，虽然心不情愿甚至带着恨意，他也被迫接受了基督信仰。随后Davy在1955年因病逝世，那时他们结婚有17年了。悲痛欲绝的Sheldon在C.S.Lewis的帮助下真正认识了上帝和基督耶稣。他终身没有再娶。
Some Highly Inadequate Words on Suffering
By：Kenny Pierce
My wife, from time to time, brings me questions that cancer patients ask her. She has a touching faith in my wisdom — entirely misplaced, but touching. I myself always think of C. S. Lewis’s imagined conversation with George MacDonald in The Great Divorce:
“But could one dare — could one have the face — to go to a bereaved mother, in her misery — when one’s not bereaved oneself?…”
“No, no, Son, that’s no office of yours. You’re not a good enough man for that. When your own heart’s been broken it will be time for you to think of talking.”
I am not a good enough man to talk of the mystery of suffering; nor have I suffered enough. I offer these few thoughts, unworthy as they are, simply because my wife has asked for my best, such as it is; and her service, and the remarkably brave hearts of the cancer patients she serves, are worthy of my best answer, however unworthy my best answer may be.
God’s purposes in suffering are, to my mind, among the greatest and deepest mysteries of the Christian faith; and nothing sets real Christianity apart from natural religion more deeply than the Christian attitude toward suffering. To enter into the mind of Christ is to find your view of death and suffering undergoing a profound transformation. It is a transformation that causes the saints to desire the day of death like the coming of a long-lost though never-yet-met lover; yet nothing could be further from the truth than to say that the saints are suicidal, for they have an unquenchable love of life and of those around them – and indeed, we Christians’ eagerness for death springs not from a hatred of life or from a desire for oblivion, but from our thirst for the unimaginably greater life of whose mansion Death is the doorkeeper. It is a transformation that brings the mature Christian to a place of sincerely rejoicing in sufferings; yet the sufferings are no less terrifying in prospect and no less painful in reality, and those who accuse Christians of masochism simply show that they cannot begin to imagine the lens through which we Christians see the world.
I do not wish to be misunderstood — suffering remains terrible to the Christian, as it is for everyone else. What the Christian knows is that God does His mightiest work in the sufferings of His saints, that God allows no suffering that He does not intend to bring great good out of, and that any Christian who endures suffering will one day, upon seeing what God has brought out of that suffering, rejoice to have suffered. As Rachael Lampa sings, “I know that God will never waste my pain.” That God calls His followers to suffer, we know; we all sooner or later will face our own personal Gethsemane. That we cannot at present imagine what purpose much of the suffering we see could possibly serve, certainly makes the path harder to walk. And, especially if we have only just recently become Christians and our instincts and emotions are still largely untrained, we very often feel that there can be no purpose that could justify such pain. Emotions are unruly things, and suffering is…well, it is suffering, it is pain, it is awful. Yet we know by faith and by the Word of God and (most of all) by the Resurrection of Our Lord that God’s purpose is always there and will always be fulfilled, to our ultimate joy. However our emotions may batter us, we still know that what St. Paul has said is true: we share in the sufferings of Christ so that we can also share in His glory (Romans 8:17). As he goes on to say in the very next verse, “I consider that our present sufferings are not worthy to be compared to the glory that will be revealed in us.”
But who am I to say such things to those in agony? I, who have enjoyed excellent health throughout my life, who have never known hunger and rarely and only briefly known agonizing physical pain, I who today find myself married to a delightful and godly woman whom I do not deserve, I who have nine children and three grandchildren all in excellent health and have just seen my parents celebrate their fiftieth year together — who am I to tell someone who is in the last stages of cancer, or who has just buried her only child, that “all will be well, and all will be well, and all manner of things will be well” (as the Lord said to Lady Julian)? I cannot. I can only point those who suffer now, to those who have gone before us and trod the path of pain, and found it, in the end, a path to joy and glory. I can only point them to Corrie ten Boom, to Sheldon Vanauken, to Dante Alighieri, to St Peter and St Paul…and ultimately, to Christ Himself.
I can, however, highlight one thing helpful, I think. It is useful to remember where we start, before we know Jesus. Religion has started, for the majority of mankind, precisely as a way to keep from suffering, to avert the wrath of the gods and to enlist their help in our struggles.Imagine that a Christian starts explaining that Jesus tells His disciples, “If anyone wants to be my disciple, let him deny himself, pick up his cross, and follow me.” For most non-Christians, the immediate and instinctive reaction is, “So you’re saying Christianity is useless.” If the Christian God can’t cure cancer, why should any cancer patient bother to pray to Him? And if the Christian God can cure cancer but chooses not to — what are we to make of that?
It’s not just that we don’t want to suffer. We naturally think, as well, that if God likes us, He wouldn’t want us to suffer either. We think that only a sadistic God would ask people He “loves” to suffer pointless pain. (Indeed, to an agnostic that seems the very definition of a sadist: someone who takes pleasure in hurting those he claims to love.) So the natural response that any of us have when catastrophe strikes us down without warning is the reaction Job had: we want to know what God thinks we have done to deserve this. My wife has herself been asked by more than one cancer patient, “What did I do that was so bad? Why is God punishing me like this?”
But here is how much the understanding of the Christian mystery revolutionizes our perspective: when the disciples were flogged for sharing the gospel, Luke records that they left the Sanhedrin “rejoicing that they had been counted worthy to suffer disgrace for the Name” (Acts 5:41). You see the revolution? Humanity’s natural response to suffering is to say, “God must be mad at me; He is making me suffer.” But the Apostles response to suffering was to say, “God must approve of me; He is trusting me with the task of suffering.” As devoutly Catholic Marty O’Reilly says to his heartbroken granddaughter Grace in the movie Return to Me, “It’s the strongest hearts that God gives the greatest burdens to. You can take this as a compliment.”
We know that it is a compliment, because we know the story of Jesus. I think it was Saint Augustine who said, “Deus unicum habet filium sine peccato, nullum sine flagella,” which I would translate, “God has only one Son who did not sin — but He has none at all who have not suffered agony.” The very Son of God, God Himself incarnate, came to earth for one sole purpose: to suffer and die for the world God loves. No one can say that God has an unrealistic, ivory-tower, purely theoretical understanding of pain – He has personally drunk the cup to the dregs and knows our suffering from the bitterest of experience.
The thing is, the agnostic who thinks that God is a sadist is wrong, because he imagines that God not only allows us to suffer, but actually takes pleasure in our pain – otherwise (so goes the reasoning) He would step in with all that Omnipotence of His and do something about it. And this is simply not the case. One traditional prayer for those in trouble or bereavement begins, “O merciful Father, who hast taught us in thy holy Word that thou dost not willingly afflict or grieve the children of men…” Remember the story of Jesus’ friend Lazarus (John 11)? It was God’s purpose to allow Lazarus to die, in order that he could be raised from the dead to show the power of God. Jesus knew this; He knew all along that He was going to raise Lazarus from the dead; He knew that His Father would repay Lazarus and Mary and Martha a thousand times over for what they had suffered; He even deliberately delayed going to Bethany for two days specifically for the purpose of giving Lazarus time to die instead of healing him immediately. Yet what does Luke say Jesus did as he stood at that soon-to-be-empty tomb?
He wept. And the people standing by said, “Look how much he loved Lazarus!” And they spoke in all truth.
For whatever reason, God’s purposes in this world cannot be achieved even by God Himself without suffering; and so He chooses to allow the suffering even though He is grieved by it. He knows full well the price of His purposes – He has paid it Himself. But He thinks the purpose is worth the price, not just to Himself but to those whom He has called, as well. We can be baffled by the mystery of how the Omnipotence could will into existence a world in which even He works under self-imposed constraints (though the artists among us are likely to find that rather less baffling than do the engineers). We can speculate as to why He might have such purposes. If we are philosophers we can wrestle with the interplay of omniscience and omnipotence and the freedom to constrain oneself all in the context of a timeless Deity who experiences all His works as a single eternal Act rather than as a succession of events, and we can ultimately come to agree with Augustine that “since God is the highest good, He would not allow any evil to exist in His works, unless His omnipotence and goodness were such as to bring good even out of evil.” But in the end we really don’t know what lies in the deepest heart of God’s purposes; it is a mystery we cannot penetrate. In the end we know only a few fundamental truths about the God Who loves us, about the God Who suffered for us, about the God in Whose sufferings we share — but if our heart clings to them with all the passion of faith, these few truths are all we need to know:
We know that in God’s judgment (and He surely knows better than we what is best), it was better to allow evil to exist and then bring good out of it, than not to allow it to exist in the first place. (But He will bring good out of it. There is no suffering that is not meant to end in glory beyond our imagining.)
Yet we know that He takes no pleasure in the evil or in the necessity for the suffering, and he weeps on our behalf as He sees our pain, like every loving father who has ever said to his little princess, “This hurts me more than it hurts you.”
And we know that He plays by his own rules: He has laid on us no burden that He has not been willing to carry Himself; He calls us to no path of pain that He Himself has not already walked before us.
We know that in the end there are only two paths: the path that leads to Hell, and the path that leads to the Cross, and that we are called to “have the same mindset as Jesus, who humbled himself and became obedient to death — even death on a cross!” (Phil. 4:5, 8) But we know at the same time that the Cross is nothing but the door to Resurrection glory: “Therefore God exalted him to the highest place and gave him the name that is above every name.” (Phil 4:9) “O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory?” (1 Cor 15:5)
And most of all, from Romans 8… “We know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to His purpose. Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall trouble or hardship or persecution or famine or nakedness or danger or sword? No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.”
Before you close the book / turn to the next chapter, will you join me in a prayer?
A Prayer for Those in Trouble or Bereavement
(adapted from The Book of Common Prayer)
O merciful Father, you have taught us in your holy Word that you do not willingly afflict or grieve the children of men. Look with favor, we pray, on the sufferings of your servants. Remember them, O Lord, in mercy; nourish their souls with patience; comfort them with a sense of your goodness; lift up your countenance upon them; and give them peace; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
