By Susan K. Smith
Sometimes, life is so painful that we actually shut God out.
The fact that life can and does throw hardballs that knock us down is something we all know about. We have been there. We have found ourselves trying to get up and regain our footing, and our stability in a world that so often keeps us off-balance.
The unfairness of the surprise attacks we experience is what is so difficult to endure. I have a friend who had a stroke a year ago – and for one whole year, she has been confined to a bed. She cannot live at home because she needs 24-hour home health care that her insurance will not pay for. Her mind is sharp but her spirit has sunk to a deep low because, she says, “there is nothing I can do. And it doesn’t seem like God is doing anything, either.” She is angry and depressed.
Howard Thurman made a powerful observation about pain and God in his book, Deep is the Hunger. He writes:
All travelers, somewhere along the way, find it necessary to check their course, to see how they are doing. We wait until we are sick, or shocked into stillness, before we do the commonplace thing of getting our bearings. And yet, we wonder why we are depressed, why we are unhappy, why we lose our friends, why we are ill-tempered. This condition we pass on to our children, our husbands, our wives, our associates, our friends. Cultivate the mood to linger. … Who knows? God may whisper to you in the quietness what [God] has been trying to say to you, oh, for so long a time.
The words “cultivate the mood to linger” gripped me. Why would anyone do that? Thurman apparently penned these thoughts when he noticed the continued suffering of Black people during and after the Great Depression and the Second World War. The “New Deal” was a raw deal for Black people, and returning Black soldiers were greeted not with respect but with a renewed spirit of racism and hatred, and he wondered how much pain and disappointment would the disinherited – Black people in this country – have to endure as they waited for the marginalization to end?
Maybe nothing would ever stop it but, he decided, there might be a way to deal with it. Maybe the way to survive and then to thrive would be to ride with it, even as we fought against it, but ride with it so that the toxicity of the anger would not overtake our spirits and the resolve to continue working and believing. In that place of pain, he wrote, “God may whisper to you …”
Can it be that our pain is good for us if we allow it to be, if we “ride with it” and not rage at it and thus keep our strength? Growing hurts. I remember growing up that my legs used to ache all the time at night and my mother would say that it was “growing pains.” I dismissed her explanation, but there is such a thing. As a child grows, pain may result from excess activity, flat feet, or excess joint movement. It has been shown that pain in the legs is often a companion to growing and that the pain is most often felt during the night.
Is it possible that much of our spiritual pain is a result of growing, a companion of our growing? And is it possible, as Thurman suggests, that some pain might be allowed by God to happen so that we will stop and “check our course? Do we move so quickly that even when we are not conscious of it, we are shutting God out, but that the pain life throws us forces us to have to acknowledge God, even as we try to ignore God, and thus, be forced to hear what God has been wanting to say to us for a long time?
When we are children, and we have to listen to our parents tell us things we do not want to hear, we shut them out, but when later in life, as we grow and make mistakes and wrong turns, their words and lessons come back into our spirits and whisper to us what we refused to hear when the words were actually spoken.
Maybe that’s what God is doing when we are in our darkest moments – bringing back to our consciences what God told us long ago but that we have been actively ignoring. In our pain, in those desperately dark moments, God may well be getting our attention in the way God has needed to do for a long time.
Maybe we should, as Thurman suggests, “cultivate the mood to linger” if we are in pain, depressed, angry, confused, or all of those things so that we can hear God in the way that we need to hear Her. Even in our work for justice, as we deal with anger so much of the time, maybe that anger is a gift from God, a way for God to stop us for a few precious moments and listen for God’s whisper.
Maybe it is the way of the God of justice to remind us that our work is not what it can be until we acknowledge what we are feeling and cultivate the newness that God can and does plant in our spirits when we reach the point where we just cannot take the pain another moment.
Amen and amen.