Nicholas Wolterstorff on Suffering and Love

To continue the discussion on suffering - beautiful words from Nicholas Wolterstorff.

CRIES OF THE OPPRESSED

... Slowly I began to see that the Bible is a book about justice; but what a strange and haunting form of justice! Not our familiar modern Western justice of no one invading one's right to determine one's life as one will. Rather the justice of the widow, the orphan, and the alien. A society is just when all the little ones, all the defenseless ones, all the unprotected ones, have been brought back into community. Biblical justice is the shepherd leaving the corral to look for the hundredth one and then throwing a feast when the one is found.

LAMENT FOR A SON

This was all before. I now live after: after the death of our son, Eric. My life has been divided into before and after.

He loved the mountains, loved them passionately. They lured and beckoned him irresistably. Born on a snowy night in New Haven, he died twenty-five years later on a snowy slope in the Kaisergebirger, Austria.

Never again will anyone inhabit the world the way he did. Only a hole remains, a void, a gap. My son is gone. The ache of loss sinks down and down, deep beyond all telling. How deep do souls go?

The suffering of the world has worked its way deeper inside me. I never knew that sorrow could be like this. I do not know why God did not prevent Eric's death. To live without the answer is precarious. It's hard to keep one's footing. I can only, with Job, endure in the fact of this deepest and most painful of mysteries. I believe in God the Father almightly, maker of heaven and earth and resurrecter of Jesus Christ. I also believe that my son's life was cut off in its prime. I cannot fit these pieces together. I am at a loss. My wound is an unanswered question. Lament and trust are in tension, like wood and string in bow.

To love is to run the risk of suffering. Or rather, in our world, to love is to suffer; there is no escaping it. Augustine knew it well, so Augustine recommended playing it safe, loving only what could neither die nor change on one - God and the soul. My whole tradition had taught me to love the world, to love the world as a gift, to love God through and in the world - wife, children, art, plants, learning. It had set me up for suffering. But it didn't tell me this: it didn't tell me that the invitation to love is the invitation to suffering. It let me find that out for myself, when it happened. Possibly it's best that way.

I haven't anything to say beyond what I've already said in Lament for a Son. There's a lot of silence in the book; no word too much, I hope. In the face of death we must not chatter. And when I spoke, I found myself moving often on the edges of language, trying to find images for what only images could say. The book is extremely particular; I do not speak about death, only about Eric's death. That's all I could do. But I have discovered, from what readers have told me, that in its particularity lies universality.

I see now, looking back, that in writing it I was struggling to own my grief. The modern Western practice is to disown one's grief: to get over it, to put it behind one, to get on with life, to put it out of mind, to ensure that it will not become part of one's identity. My struggle was to own it, to make it part of my identity: if you want to know who I am, you must know that I am one whose son died. But then to own it redemptively. It takes a long time to learn how to own one's suffering redemptively; one never finishes learning.

Though there are strands in the Reformed tradition for which sovereignty is God's principal attribute, I don't think I ever thought of God much in terms of sovereignty. God was majesty for me, indescribable majesty. And graciousness, goodness; God is the one who blesses, blessing calling for gratitude. To be human is to be the point in the cosmos where God's goodness is meant to find its answer in gratitude: John Calvin told me that.

Now everything was different. Who is this God looming over me? Majesty? I see no majesty. Grace? Can this be grace? I see nothing at all; dark clouds hide the face of God. Slowly the clouds lift. What I saw then was tears, a weeping God, suffering over my suffering. I had not realized that if God loves this world, God suffers; I had thoughtlessly supposed that God loved without suffering. I knew that divine love was the key. But I had not realized that the love that is the key is suffering love.

... It moved me deeply to discover one day that John Calvin alone among the classical theologians had written of the suffering of God. Whenever he wrote of it, it was, so far as I could discover, in the same context: that of a discussion of injustice. To wreak injustice on one of one's fellow human beings, said Calvin, is to wound and injure God; he said that the cry of those who suffer injustice is the cry of God.

And sometimes when the cry is intense, there emerges a radiance which seldom appears: a glow of courage, of love, of insight, of selflessness, of faith. In that radiance we see best what humanity was meant to be. So I shall struggle to live with the reality of Christ's rising and death's dying. In my living, my son's dying will not be the last word.

Taken from 'The Grace that Shaped My Life', from the book Finding God at Harvard: Spiritual Journeys of Thinking Christians, edited by Kelly Monroe.

Nicholas Wolterstorff, a former president of the American Philosophical Association, has a joint appointment as a professor in the philosophy and religion departments, and the Divinity School, at Yale University.