The Generosity of a Suffering God

Some years ago over a shared meal, a woman spoke of “the generosity of suffering” in response to the shared musing on whether God suffers or not.

Western theology would have it that God does not suffer because God cannot suffer (since suffering implies change) and still be God.

Can such a statement stand?

At the time, I write, I think not, for ‘God’ and ‘cannot’ do not inhabit the same realm, for 

where God is . . . cannot cannot be.

For solidarity’s sake, I want to hope that God suffers, but dare I ‘wish’ suffering on God?  Doesn’t that make me a monster?

Do You suffer, Lord?

O Lord, I hope not.

But perhaps my friend was right – there is a generosity in suffering – a giving of self – that giving which is necessary before suffering can be – the kind of which she speaks, in any event – the suffering which is a gift.

What am I to do with that?

I Could be Talking to God: Which Woman Would I Be?

“I could be talking to God”:  my own ‘series’ of reflections that I could have/should have written instead of the one I did - thinking not of what others should do, but what I actually do do:  what I should do but don’t or shouldn’t do but do.  I ponder my own role and leave yours to you.  For the fact is, every time I open my mouth, I could be talking to God.

***

Written as my own ‘instead of’ to the post HEY WHITE FOLK

O God, the woman dressed so nice

to go out to dinner with her husband

the one who left her keys in his pocket

and stood behind the barrier of flesh

and prejudice

unable to do the tiniest thing of 

snatching the keys from his pocket

with a smile, a glint of the eye,

promise of things to come

back in the safe nest of their

own haven of love and goodness

that woman

the woman denied access

for the color of a skin

she cannot, will not, should not

hide

she and the other women

the white ones who walked by

pretending blindness

as she cried her shaming

burkhaed by their ignoring

into the oblivion of not

were I there, which would I be?

I want to be the hypothetical woman

the one who stops and stands with

(I am trained for that, you know)

who questions and insists and shouts

and speaks softly yet effectively

because I want to be the rescuer

but I wasn’t there

and if I were, who would I be?

For I am no one’s rescuer

that’s just the dreamscape

of my imagining where heroines

stride the land and look an 

awful lot like me

who would I be?

who would I really be?

I wouldn’t be her –

I am not sufficiently brown

to draw the stares, the sneers

I wouldn’t be her because I

can’t be her

but please, please, please, God

don’t let me be them –

the walking by ones

that’s my fear

the dread of my own closets

how easy from the sidelines to cheer

and shout and jeer

but were I there,

would I have been different?

Lord, I hope so

I pray so

help me to know so

help me to remember that

even though I wasn’t there

I am often there

that I am a human

and thus called to stand

with, be beside, solidify

myself to the hurting ones

the silenced ones

the pushed aside ones

the burkahed ones

help me to be, to become,

that woman

because I am there

because I am here

Amen

BethRant: HEY WHITE FOLK

HEY WHITE FOLK . . . and yeah, I’m one of you – of us, I should say.

Now that I have your attention . . .

Please read this article by an American woman physician about her ill treatment based only on the color of her skin.  Please.  Read.  It.  Please.

And when you’re tempted to argue, to disagree, to distinguish, please, please, take your fingers away from the keyboard and consider, if you will, for just a moment . . .

When you walk down a city street, have you ever noticed that the young men of color will often not look you in the eye?  Have you ever thought that maybe it’s not about them, but about you?  Have you ever considered how it must hurt them to see fear, suspicion, contempt or loathing in your eyes?  Have you?

When you sit and listen to that joke, that remark – yeah, that one – and don’t pretend you don’t know what I mean – we both know better, don’t we? – does it occur to you that in the mere listening, you and your own attitudes are being changed?  That your ‘tolerance’ for the intolerable is being built up?  That you are gradually, oh so gradually, becoming one with the one telling the joke, making the remark?  That there is a cost to us all when you are silent?

When you demand that brown people apologize for acts of terrorism around the world in order to make it clear to you that they do not agree, has it occurred to you that no one expects you to apologize for Timothy McVeigh?  For David Koresh?  For Jim Jones?  For Adolph Hitler?  For Joseph Stalin?  For the white person down the street who just broke into the house of your neighbor of color?  Did it ever even occur to you to go that neighbor and apologize for your kind?  Of course not.  Why, then, should it occur to ‘them’ to apologize to you – for something they did not do and with which they do not agree?

And to all the white women who passed by so easily, did it not occur to you not to pass by?  To stand with a sister in trouble?  To show your solidarity in rejection of this ill-treatment?

Because, you see, it isn’t just the one act that hurts so much.  That’s bad enough.  But when the privileged keep walking by as if it were our right, we reinforce the ugly.  We say it’s perfectly fine with us.  And it shouldn’t be.  But as Dr. Jilani points out from her own life experiences, unfortunately, it is.  It is fine with ‘us’.

If that does not sicken you, then I fear for us all.  A woman’s spirit was being annihilated.  And no one stopped to help.  Who taught ‘us’ that it is permissible to be so numbed, so indifferent, so afraid, perhaps, to the suffering of another happening right before our eyes that we could just walk on by as if it weren’t happening?  Shame on them.  Shame on us.

So some practical advice to the white folk:

1. Cut out the racism and the bigotry, the jokes.  Check your fears at the door and don’t make your fears someone else’s problem.  If you’re a Christian, remember that Jesus doesn’t like it.  Really.

2. Take up for other people when they’re being treated badly.  As a human being, it is your job.

3. Do not listen to the jokes and cracks.  I don’t care who's doing the telling.  Do not listen to them.  Say you will not listen to them.  If they do not stop, leave the room.

4. Stop complaining about how hard it is to be white.  It isn’t.  It’s hard to be human.

5. The Golden Rule has all kinds of applications.  Consider this: the next time you’re afraid of someone because they’re different than you, ask yourself why they might be afraid of you.  Put yourself in their shoes and act accordingly.  It is, after all, the Rule.

6. The idea that if one person of a group acts in a certain way means that they all do is just foolish.  Think not?  Well, if we’re to follow that line of thinking, every woman on the planet must hate, fear and suspect all men, because virtually every woman on the planet has been endangered at some point in her life by a man – not all men, but a man.  Does that mean no man can be trusted?  Of course not.  Does that mean you men must apologize to we women for your kind?  No.

7. It is not the job of the one suffering to explain themselves to you.  Don’t ask them to.  It hurts too much.

8. Stop thinking, acting, believing, as if we’re better than everyone else.  We’re not.  Nor are ‘they’ worse than we.  Life is not a contest and the ‘who’s better’ game is a destructive waste of time.  Consider that those you fear and hate the most are probably more like you than you can imagine – wanting simply to live in peace, provide for their families, have enough to survive.

9. Mom wasn’t wrong.  If you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all.

RantEnd

Labor Day Tip of the Hat, Wage of the Finger

Do you remember this man?  If not, you
might need a refresher on the history of
labor unions & their influence world wide

With all-due-respect hats’ off to all of us in our many and varied labors, rich and poor alike, this day is reserved to remember and acknowledge the contributions organized labor (that’s right: unions) has made to the betterment of our lives.

And the contribution is not insignificant.

Before you chastize me or suspect my leftist leanings, you should perhaps know that I was not raised to appreciate labor unions much.  And growing up in West Virginia, that was no small feat on my parents’ part, I can assure you.

But here’s the thing: I take the challenges and concerns as a given – that unions can and have often become the very thing they opposed – wealthy and autocratic; that violence often accompanied their efforts (but never forget the violence of starvation and captive labor that began the ‘wars’); and that paying union-negotiated wages and benefits is costly (of course, I think it should be – why on earth would I think that I am somehow ‘entitled’ to purchase cheap goods as a virtual constitutional right without questioning on whose back I stand while I wave my Wal-Mart bargain-basement priced newest gadget?).

So, to borrow from Stephen Colbert, here is my Tip of the Hat, Wage of the Finger list for this Labor Day:

Tip of My Hat

1. Weekends, paid holidays, paid vacations, pensions, and group health insurance, are but a few of the things that up until now, workers both union and non-union in the United States could largely take for granted.  It didn’t happen without a struggle.  And it didn’t happen without organized labor.

2. Labor unions, yes, labor unions, had far more to do with the dissolution of the Soviet bloc than did anything Ronald Regan ever said or did.  Remember the Gdansk Shipyard strike in Poland in 1980, led by Lech Walesa, co-founder of the Solidarity labor union and Time magazine’s Man of the Year for 1981?  Oh, and Mr. Walesa won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1983.  And he was elected President of Poland in 1990.

3. Women in the work place.  We’ve always been there.  That’s right – always.  We just weren’t noticed much down on all fours scrubbing as the fellows walked by.  Or hidden away from view in the sweat shop sewing rooms.  Securing a place for women in the work place included the securing of a safe work place.  In the late 1990's, I visited just across the border in Mexico.  It was a NAFTA tour of sorts, wherein lawyers were shown the effects of so-called free trade on those on the receiving end.  On one of the factories was a sign asking for workers, which specified that the company sought only girls between the ages of 14 and 20.  When I asked our guide the reason, he said there were two: (1) the work required needed small fingers; and more importantly, (2) girls would not organize and would simply do as they were told.  Absent protections from some source, free trade is just another word for exploitation.

4. End of child labor.  As early as 1836, trade unions in the United States proposed laws to establish a minimum age for factory work.  Wikipedia

5. Workplace safety.  Consider one particular example: the fact that buildings in which you do your business today have fire exits and building codes that enforce safety from fire is directly due to the efforts of the ILGWU (the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union) in the aftermath of the Triangle Shirtwaist Company fire, in which more than 100 workers died (largely due to locked fire exits.  That’s right: the exit doors were locked.)

Wage of the Finger

I learned an axiom in seminary: The oppressed becomes the oppressor, referring to our tendency when moving out of oppression to reenact the very abuses once levied against us.  Perhaps this is understandable the same way child abuse is replayed across generations: we do that which we have been taught to do.

In biblical terms, the ‘wage’ of sin (meaning its consequence) is death.  Perhaps the ‘wage’ of oppression is more oppression.  Thus do the imprisoned levy the same abuse upon their former guards once freed and revolutionaries reenact the very abuses that led to revolution in the first place.

It is tempting to say ‘thus it has ever been, thus it will ever be.’  Perhaps.

Organized labor in the United States has succumbed all too often to the very sins they decry.  In my own native West Virginia, the conflicts between management and labor in the mines were, quite rightly, termed the mine wars, for that is what they were.  Meeting violence with violence in the heat of ‘battle’ is one thing.  But the violence didn’t stop there.  It seldom does.

Just as troubling has been the historical tendency for union leadership to more closely resemble the corporate ‘fat cats’ than their own rank and file.  Too many, seduced by wealth and power, have forgotten whose interests they represent.

All of this, however, does not, in my view, argue for the elimination of organized labor.

Years ago, I asked my uncle, who spent his working life in Central and South America working for North American corporate interests there, what the solution was to the exploitation, poverty, and general unrest there.  Much to my surprise, his response was as clear as it was terse: “Labor unions.  Genuine international non-aligned (meaning not controlled by the governments) labor unions.”

He was in a much better position to know than I.