This Present Suffering

Read this book NOW!

The first time I read Gilead was in the Neuro-ICU at University Hospital while my mom's body rebelled against the shock of an aneurysm and the attendant surgeries and we were waiting to know if she would live or die. And, if life won, to what degree that life would be impaired going forward. In other words, I was suffering, perhaps for the first real time in my life. By God's grace my mom lived. And thrived.

But the book was an epiphany for me and a great gift. A literal gift, I had received it as a graduation gift from my best friend some six months before but, not being a reader at the time, it had sat on my shelf until then. Somewhere in the funk of that period, and the days bleeding into days, and the deep tiredness, I began reading. And I will read it every two or three years until my body or mind is taken from me. 

Here is one passage that stuck out particularly to me the first time I read. It was pertinent, then, in a way it is not necessarily so now. But I believe it more than I did at that first reading. Experience and age have taken the initial raw emotion of the reading, but it is no less precious for that exchange.

Time, like an ever-rolling stream,
Bears all its sons away;
They fly forgotten, as a dream
Dies at the opening day.

Good old Isaac Watts. I've thought about that verse often. I have always wondered what relationship this present reality bears to an ultimate reality.

A thousand ages in Thy sight
Are like an evening gone. . .

No doubt that is true. Our dream of life will end as dreams do end, abruptly and completely, when the sun rises, when the light comes. And we will think, All that fear and all that grief were about nothing. But that cannot be true. I can't believe we will forget our sorrows altogether. That would mean forgetting that we had lived, humanly speaking. Sorrow seems to me to be a great part of the substance of human life.

It is unnecessary to point out how little our culture enjoys suffering or cultivates the ability to suffer with dignity. To say we are addicted to comfort is simply to say, at this point, that we are Americans living in the 21st century. 

But, if Robinson is right (or her mouthpiece, the Reverend Ames, is right), then suffering is something inextricably human, something upon which our very humanity is predicated. In other words, to be human is to suffer. And these sufferings are not without purpose. They are, according to the Apostle Paul, achieving for us an eternal weight of glory that far outweighs them all. As we suffer we approach the sufferings of Christ, our elder brother and co-heir. As we suffer, too, we prepare to share with him in his glory. We might, some day and by God's great grace, come, like Paul, to rejoice in our sufferings. Though I know no one granted that type of sainthood.

This is not to say that we seek out suffering or become indifferent to it when we see it ravaging the lives of those whom we love; rather, it is to acknowledge the beautiful truth that on the day when every tear is wiped away from every eye the joy we feel will be all the more joyous for the sorrows we once endured.