Several years ago a friend of mine was on the scene of a freak accident in which a young child was killed by a car backing out of a parking space. A (well-meaning?) pastor who happened to be in the parking lot at the time of the accident told the mother that he hoped one day she would find out what she had done that had caused this tragedy.
I am not a pastor or a therapist. I am not a counselor or a spiritual director.
I am a theologian and an ethicist and an academic. And I teach and work and worship and live with real people, many of whom have experienced very real suffering and trauma. And too many times in the aftermath – or even in the midst – of horrendous pain very real people have heard (and even said) things like that pastor. Often from, or even as, someone who claims to be speaking on behalf of God.
I am not a pastor or a therapist. And like most folks, I imagine, I often feel at a loss for what to say to someone who is suffering. But I do believe that sometimes – probably always – the best pastoral care is good theology. Only, even as I write that I hear Stanley Hauerwas saying that “Good is not a theological category.” So, it would be better to say that the best pastoral care is faithful theology – theology that is true to the story of God in Jesus.
And sometimes the truest thing we can say in the face of suffering is this: it sucks.
It sucks.
But that is not the only truthful thing we can say.
After the shooting in Charleston this summer, the families at Emmanuel AME almost immediately offered words of forgiveness to the shooter. Their words and actions – words of love and hurt and anguish and anger – showed the nation (and the world) why theology matters. Their words of forgiveness did not try to make sense of the tragedy. They neither blamed nor exculpated God. They grieved deeply and honestly and openly. And though words of forgiveness were quickly spoken they were neither glib nor trite and they were not without anger. No one suggested that they would “forgive and forget.”
Real suffering imprints itself in the soul of those who have suffered, making forgiveness impossible. Theology matters in the midst of suffering because theology is really just an academic way of talking about a particular story. Theology is the story of God – in the midst of all of the brokenness and suffering that shatters the lives of many – making all things new.
And sometimes – by sheer grace – we experience glimpses of what God is up to in the world. These glimpses most often look like the faces and hands of other very ordinary people an awful lot like us, people who have suffered and never forgotten the paralysis of suffering, and who offer words and deeds of kindness and compassion and hope and dignity. And of forgiveness and love. These glimpses of grace can never erase the suffering, but they help us learn to live in a story that is defined, not by the suffering itself, but by its very slow, and all-too-partial, redemption.
The Practice of Story: Suffering and The Possibilities of Redemption is now available through Baylor University Press, Amazon, and Barnes & Noble.
Mindy Makant 