Thought for the Day at Easter

Octopuses are fascinating creatures. They are just about as weird as it gets. They have three hearts, a brain in each arm, and blue-green blood, and they can squeeze their bodies through a hole as small as their own eyeball. In fact, researchers tell us the octopus DNA is the closest thing they can get to studying alien DNA. Yet octopuses are still highly intelligent, and scientists believe they may help them prove that animals possess some kind of consciousness.

While each of God’s creatures are precious in themselves and full of God’s glory, one thing is certain, the consciousness of animals is very different from our own. Take the donkey that Jesus rode into Jerusalem. She would’ve been tied up after the triumphant entry and would’ve been quite happy to stand there for hours on end, waiting for the next person to jump on her back. But if you tie me up outside my local church and leave me to stand for many boring hours, I know I’d act very differently!

After all, we humans have been gifted this amazing, developed consciousness – a profound awareness. We are thinking beings, who can even think about ourselves thinking. Thought, consciousness, awareness – they are all amazing things. While it is mind blowing that we are living on a planet that is hurtling through space, travelling around the sun at 67,000 mph, it is even more astonishing that we know we are living on a planet that hurtling through space, travelling around for sun at 67,000 mph!

Consciousness, though, is also our curse. Our thoughts and awareness can hold us captive. Worry, anxiety, grief, pain, and suffering can keep us chained. All of us struggle personally in one way or another. And then we turn on the news and we see others facing simply terrible situations, whether through war, illness, disability, natural disaster, or grief. There is no sugar coating any of this – life can be harsh and exhausting, and our minds can very easily descend into despair.

But this incredible thing called consciousness also holds the key to the prison in which our minds can become incarcerated. Our consciousness can certainly be a curse, but it can also be an amazing blessing that God has gifted to us. Today, more than any other day, that fact is brought wonderfully home to us. It is Easter Sunday, a day of hope, a day of joy, a day of resurrection, a day of new life. Today we are offered a reassurance and a life-affirming hope that no octopus can ever grasp or comprehend.

God can, though, open the minds, hearts, and lives of us “thinking humans” to this mind-blowing event. And, by doing so, we are offered liberation from the chains of our daily concerns. Our burdened minds are freed to recognise God’s presence in our often-turbulent lives. We open our eyes, our ears, and our hearts to truly appreciate the small moments of joy breaking into our lives each day – new life moments – Easter moments. These are moments when sunshine breaks through the darkness we are facing. These are moments when God’s light dazzles us in unexpected ways, sometimes even in our ordinary, mundane events – an uplifting stroll in the countryside, a meal with your family, a walk with your pet dog, laughter shared with a friend, an act of kindness, a supportive word, a simple smile. Sometimes, as we face the storms of this broken world, it’s not easy to rewire our minds away from worry, anxiety, and pain. But, carried by God’s strength, we Christians are able to attest that this wonderful gift of life is beautiful.

Holy Week, culminating in Jesus’s crucifixion, affirms the reality of suffering and reassures us that God knows what it’s like when we are facing the storms of life. He knows pain, he knows loss, he knows tears.  Easter Sunday, though, affirms the reality of hope and reassures us that the grave is not the end of the journey, that there is a kingdom all around us that will last forever, and that the light of that kingdom will break through whatever darkness we are facing.

Miracles: What are they and do they happen?

I have been sharing a number of theological papers that I have written. This is a copy of my notes for a discussion that I took part in recently on the award-winning BBC radio programme ‘All Things Considered’.

What is a miracle?

The real difficulty in considering the possibility of miracles occurring is the difficulty of defining precisely what they are. The philosopher David Hume famously defined miracles as an event that breaks the laws of nature. But more things are possible and more things occur than our present understanding of the regularities of nature allows. After all, our experience of the laws of nature are regularly being revised. Developments in quantum physics, for example, have brought this sharply to mind. Quantum physics is showing scientists a world that is more unusual, indeterminate, and organic. It has even been argued that quantum physics is revealing a world that is more spiritual than we previously realised.

So, instead of breaking the laws of nature, perhaps we could define a miracle as something remarkable or spectacular. Some liberal theologians, such as Marcus Borg, actually refuse to use the word miracles and simply talk about “the spectacular”. Borg rejects supernatural interventions by God who is “out there” and instead talks about the God at the heart of spectacular in the world. The problem with that, though, is that there are many occurrences that we wouldn’t define as miracles, but they are still remarkable and spectacular – the birth of a child, medical procedures (like radiotherapy), and the sun rising up each morning.

So, defining what is a miracle is not as simple as it may first appear, and philosophers, theologians, and biblical scholars have long recognised the complexity of that seemingly basic question.

What about the miracles in the Bible?

The biblical world was a time when accounts of the remarkable and miraculous were far more common than they are today and many things that would have been considered miracles in the past may no longer seen that way today. But we certainly can’t dismiss or explain away the numerous miracles in the Bible by asserting that fact.

A number of the Old Testament miracles hold their own particular problems and difficulties in that they call into question God’s own character. For example, in the book of Exodus the great miracle known as the parting of the Red Sea– why would God perform a miracle that meant the drowning hundreds of Egyptian people? In response to such miracles, some theologians talk about “divine consistency”, a phrase made famous by Jean Dominic Crossan. Divine consistency affirms that we can only accept miracles if it is consistent with God’s loving nature.

In the New Testament, the gospels record 37 miracles of Jesus. Of these, 28 of them are miracles of healing, with God making people whole in mind and body. These miracles flow from Jesus’s compassion and love. Many theologians, whether liberal or more traditional, have little problem accepting that Jesus performed paranormal healings. He was certainly known as a great healer and exorcist, and so his healing cannot simply be explained in psychosomatic terms. But nine miracles involved Jesus has power over nature. So, what about walking on the water? Or silencing the storm? Or multiplying loaves and fish? Or changing water into the wine? It is not as easy to decide on the historicity of these miracles.

Some theologians would suggest that the miracle stories are metaphorical or symbolic. Even Jesus himself, of course, would have recognised that his miraculous deeds were symbolic – John’s gospel even refers to miracles as “signs”. In other words, there is deep meaning in the stories of Jesus’s miracles. So, the water into wine at the beginning of his ministry is symbolic of the new life he brings, while the calming of the storm is symbolic of God’s power over the waters of chaos and how he can calm the storms of our lives. The reality is, though, that we don’t know whether the nature miracles are literal or purely symbolic – or indeed a combination of both. What we do know, though, is that God’s power was recognised as present in Jesus in remarkable ways and God’s presence was identified in both his words and actions.

What about the miracles of St David, the Patron Saint of Wales?

St David lived in the sixth century, but most of the stories of his life or taken from Buchedd Dewi, written by Rhygafarch in the 11th century. So, that’s over 500 years after David’s death. It would be as if I was writing a history of Henry VIII with nothing but word-of-mouth and a few dusty documents found in a Cathedral archive. Many modern historians believe Rhygafarch exaggerated many of his stories, as he was trying to argue for some independence for the Welsh church.

The best known miracle of St David was when he was preaching in the middle of a crowd in the village of Llandewi Brefi. The ground beneath his feet rose up as he preached, allowing everyone to hear him, and a white dove flew down onto his shoulder. Perhaps this may have happened exactly as it was recorded, but perhaps people 1500 years ago simply had a very different way of describing things. Perhaps they were so inspired by this saintly man’s words that those present were saying things like “and it was as if the ground rose up beneath him and his words touched my soul and it was as if God settled on this man like a white dove”. Over the centuries that may have become “the ground did rise up beneath him and a white dove did land on his shoulder”. Either way, such descriptions are actually saying are that David was an inspirational and spiritual man, whether the miracle happened literally or not, and so our belief in the historicity of the miracle shouldn’t take away from what this remarkable man represents to us as Christians today or, indeed, as a nation.

Do miracles still occur?

The question of whether miracles still occur today brings us back to the question of what a miracle actually is. The theologian Keith Ward offers a useful definition of a miracle: “an extraordinary manifestation of spiritual power”. The reality is that unusual and extraordinary occurrences do happen in our world and there are sometimes no scientific explanation for those. If, as Christians, we believe in the Holy Spirit, then it follows that the Spirit can exert some influence on the world. After all, God is a personal reality to Christians and so he manifests himself in unique and distinctly personal ways.

So, Keith Ward suggests that we don’t view the universe as a machine, but rather we view it more like a body. Bodies, after all, do have reliable regularities, but we can also make decisions to do things and thus bodies are subject to personal action. Following this reasoning, the universe also has rigid definite laws, but, for reasons often unknown to us, God’s personal actions break into our world in some way or other. In other words, spectacular and extraordinary events can occur and, when they do, there are times when we may have to revise our understanding of the laws of nature. Miracles, then, could be seen as redefinitions of the laws of nature, rather than transgressions of it.

Is it possible or desirable to prove miracles?

I’ve always loved mystery. As a child I was obsessed with a book I had which detailed great unsolved mysteries such as the Loch Ness monster, the Bermuda triangle, the yeti, and UFOs. When I was a child, I thought like a child, but when I grew up, I left the mystery of conspiracy theories behind. I’m now more interested in the general mystery and miracle of life. In the breath-taking world in which we live we understand some things so well, but other things completely elude us. I’m not talking about the God of the gaps, as Fredrich Nietzche put it, where God is inserted wherever we don’t understand things. I’m talking about something far more spectacular and mysterious than that – questions of existence, wonder, sacrifice, truth, beauty, and love. And, however we define miracles, it is here where the miraculous resides – the spectacular, the extraordinary, the spiritual. As such, proving miracles is less important than welcoming the great mystery of life and showing openness and gratitude for how God’s power works in the everyday and ultimately transforms lives.

How do you respond to those who doubt miracles?

From a theological point of view, Christians do not regard God as a controlling, dictatorial superbeing, who makes arbitrary decisions about when and where not to intervene in our affairs. But neither do we hold that he is detached from humankind or dispassionate about our suffering. Rather, he is involved with the world and is able to transform it powerfully.

How God transforms the world, though, is a question that theologians have discussed for many centuries. For me, God transforms the world subtly – he leads, coaxes, inspires, persuades, and cajoles. This means his miracles happen every day in all sorts of ways. It’s not always huge spectacular things – sometimes it’s simply a smile or a kind word that lifts someone’s heart and sometimes it’s that deep sense of hope and peace that breaks into our troubled lives. As Jewish theologian Harold Kushner put it: “God’s job is not to make sick people healthy – that’s the doctor’s job. God’s job is to make sick people brave”.

And so God is not some dictator or superman who imposes his will from outside the world, but God is already in the world, inhabiting every atom of the universe, interacting into mingling with the laws and patterns of nature.

What about when people pray for miracles that don’t occur?

In the film Lourdes [2009], a wheelchair-bound young woman experiences a magnificent healing at Lourdes, a place famous for its miracles. She worships God and celebrates with joy. The problem is that all the other people with disabilities who are on the same pilgrimage question why this happened to her and not them. This starts to cause all kinds of difficulties and arguments within the group. Why did my miracle not occur? Why did her miracle occur because she’s clearly less pious and devout than I am?

At the centre of the Christian response to this is the great unknown. When we face the great unknown, then we have to really think about what we do know. Do we know God is in a healing miracle? Not for certain, but with God all things are possible, so possibly. Do we know God is in the suffering? Absolutely. After all, miracles aren’t God’s superpower. Love is God’s superpower. God’s love is far more powerful for transformation than random supernatural interventions. I’ve seen evidence of God’s love completely transforming people, events, and circumstances. That, in itself, could be seen as miraculous.

And so I have an open mind about supernatural, unexplained events, and I have an open mind about God’s involvement in those happenings. But what I do know that I have seen the miraculous happen in people’s lives through love, compassion, care, justice, peace, and hope. God is fully immersed in this world and, because we know he knows what it’s like to suffer on the cross, he’s also fully immersed in our pains and suffering. He breathes hope, life, and light into the most awful and traumatic situations. As one of my favourite sayings puts it: “sometimes God calms the storm, sometimes God calms the sailor”.

The Christian View of Suffering (Ministry Blog Series – 8)

I have been sharing a number of theological papers on ministry that I have written. This paper was given during the pandemic at an international seminar organised by Canadian global think tank ‘Alternative Perspectives on Global Challenges’. Academics from different faiths were invited to present their faith’s perspective on suffering.

Christianity has always taken suffering seriously. In the Jewish scriptures, the Christian Old Testament, the history of Israel is one of struggle and pain, from the tribulations of the patriarchs, through to slavery in Egypt and exile in Babylon. The wisdom tradition of the Old Testament voices questions of justice in this context, as it ponders our daily struggles in relation to an omnipotent God. The desolation of a good person, for example, is the principal theme of the book of Job – if God is all-powerful, then why doesn’t he end the suffering of this faithful person? The psalmist, on the other hand, describes the silence of God in times of human challenge and difficulty.

In the New Testament, Jesus shows himself to be sensitive to the groans of a hurting world, as he offers healing and solidarity to the outcast and the oppressed. The anguish of Gethsemane and the blood and pain of Calvary then place suffering at the centre of the Christian faith. Mel Gibson’s controversial 2004 film The Passion of the Christ shockingly brings home to us the gruesome agonies of the Good Friday story. Another film, Martin Scorsese’s 1988 adaptation of Kazantzakis’ The Last Temptation of Christ, suggests, quite plausibly, that Jesus, who, we are told in the letter to the Hebrews (4:15), was tempted like us in every way, would have faced one final temptation – the temptation to resist the tortured death on the cross. So, one of Jesus’s great victories was in accepting the agony of the crucifixion and in overcoming the temptation to become a Messiah without suffering.

This, consequently, has always given Christians courage to take up their own crosses, as Jesus himself put it (Matthew 16:24), and accept their own suffering. Not that suffering should be celebrated or perversely enjoyed. Nor is suffering some test from God. It’s clear from the New Testament and from many centuries of Christian theological writing that, for Christians, God does not use suffering to punish, mock, belittle, or impart some sort of message to his people. The Christian faith does, though, teach that God meets people in their afflictions, bringing profound meaning, light, and hope at the most unlikely times.

St Paul, not a stranger to suffering, described his own personal torment as his ‘thorn in the flesh’, and he suggested to the church in Corinth that those who are strongest are those who find meaning in the apparent meaninglessness of affliction. He wrote these words: “Three times I pleaded with the Lord to take [my suffering] away from me; but he said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness”.  For when you are weak, then you are strong” (2 Corinthians 12:7-10). For the Christian, then, it is through discovering the presence of God’s love in suffering that renewed strength, hope, and meaning is discovered.

And so, from a Christian perspective, God is not an executioner or a tyrant. But neither is he a mere spectator, looking on as his children succumb to despair and disaster. Rather, as the Old Testament shows, God shares the pains of His beloved sons and daughters, as he suffers alongside the persecuted, imprisoned, and victimised. As Isaiah 63:9 tells us: ‘in all their distress, He too was distressed’.

In the New Testament, though, God not only shares our misery, but also dwells within our suffering, helping to redeem and transform it. In the words of theologian Jurgen Moltmann, ”the crucified God” takes on the role of the “suffering, poor, defenceless Christ”. Some early Christian groups claimed Jesus had escaped the crucifixion, but these ideas were quickly denounced as heretical. It’s paramount for Christians that Jesus himself experienced the rejection, torture, and pain of crucifixion and death. Through this fact, God is shown to be no stranger to suffering, and he continues to stand with those who take up their own crosses and encounter their own crucifixions. This, then, underlies the paradox that many Christians recount – that when they are stripped bare, when they touch the bottom of the abyss, when they experience death while living, it is then they encounter God in a vivid way and grow closer to him.

The former Dean of Westminster Abbey, Michael Mayne, while dying of throat cancer, wrote that God was, in a very real way, dwelling in the midst of his painful battle. He wrote: “The darkness will not overwhelm us and do us harm. Yes, I find God in the evil of my cancer. Not that he sent it, but that he is found in it and through it”. Mayne even refers to his terrible journey to the grave as God’s “dark glory”.

The great paradox for Christians is that the very real presence of God in suffering stands as a comforting reassurance. Yet, the practical reality is that, even to people of faith, God can seem distant, sometimes even absent, during our times of affliction. Christ’s impassioned cry from the cross, taken from Psalm 22, encapsulates the pain and frustration that can be felt: “my God, my God, why have you forsaken me?!”

Despite this, Christian tradition has always pointed to ways where we can actively search out and recognise God’s voice in our suffering. From John Cassian and the desert fathers, through Meister Eckhardt, Julian of Norwich, and St John of the Cross, through to Thomas Merton and Rowan Williams, the teaching is the same: that God does not want people to suffer, but, when they do, he can meet people in their affliction. As philosopher Simone Weil suggested, the Christian faith offers “no supernatural remedy for suffering”, but it does strive for “a supernatural use for it”. Like the risen Jesus, Christians believe they will always bear the scars of their suffering, the nail-marks of their own crucifixions, but they believe they can still emerge from their darkness transformed and redeemed. Followers of Jesus do not take up crosses of meaninglessness, but, rather, they learn to affirm life by equating their own suffering with the cross and its promise of resurrection.

The sixteenth-century metaphysical poet John Donne wrote that his periods of sharpest suffering were the times when his spiritual life developed most. A great picture, after all, has shades, shadows, and dark corners, alongside the bright colours and light. By recognising this fact, while pain holds the potential to dehumanise and destroy, Christians have to hold on to the truth that it can also be transformed and redeemed. It is, therefore, the way we approach our dark times that brings light to our lives. As the Jewish holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl put it, employing Christian imagery: “The way in which a person accepts their fate and all the suffering it entails, the way in which they take up their cross, gives them ample opportunity – even under the most difficult circumstances – to add a deeper meaning to their life”.

Lent – Holy Week: Open our Pain to your Peace

Recently, I was sitting on a bench facing our local city lake, Roath Park Lake. I noticed how calm and serene that lake was – the trees around it gently swaying, the ducks and swans gliding in the rippling water, even a heron fishing for his lunch. Peace. And then I glanced at the road around the lake – the hustle and bustle of buses taking people to and from city centre, children screaming and running as they came home from school, police cars with sirens speeding past, frustrated people in cars beeping their horns at each other.

We are now entering Holy Week. A week when Jesus faced betrayal, rejection, torture, pain, and death. And then we will come to the resurrection on Easter Sunday. The risen Jesus repeats two related phrases that can speak into our Holy Week this year. He says “peace be with you” and “do not be afraid” or “fear not”. After all, this journey from the cross to the tomb, and then from the tomb to new life, reassures us of two things. Firstly, it reassures us that Jesus knows what it’s like when we are going through difficult times –and he stands alongside us, with tears in his eyes, when we suffer. But, secondly, Jesus speaks into our pain and suffering – he says “peace be with you, do not be afraid“.

Now in Welsh we have two words for peace – heddwch and tangnefedd. Heddwch is a peace on the outside of us – a peace between people or between nations. Tangnefedd, on the other hand, is internal and eternal, a peace which reaches the depths of our souls. Tangnefedd is what Jesus offers us, “a peace that is beyond understanding”, as St Paul puts it, even when there is no peace outside of us.

And so this week, I want to challenge you, through remembering the suffering and abandonment that Jesus himself felt, to allow his peace to soothe your own worries, your own pain. Even though the stress, busyness, and anxiety of the world continues all around, your hearts and minds can have something of the calm and peaceful Roath Park Lake. It’s not that God’s peace will take away our problems. But it centres us, calms us, and helps us to view those concerns differently.

With everything we have been through over the past year, peace of heart may sometimes seem a distant dream. But Jesus speaks to us through our stress and struggles – he says: “peace be with you… do not be afraid”. Even if the world around us is turbulent and chaotic, our hearts can still be opened to the living water of peace, of tangnefedd. As theologian Andrew Todd put it when reflecting on the pandemic: “this is the peace which touches and holds us when we cannot touch and hold each other”.

This is the transcript of a video recorded for the Diocese of Llandaff. Click here to view video.

Opening our Lives can be purchased at any major online bookstore, including BRF, Amazon, Eden, Independent Booksellers, Church House, and Aslan.

Prayers for the Week

As we wonder about the ups and downs of your final week as a human

Lord, we ask you to

Open our pain to your peace

As we contemplate the highs and lows in our own lives

Lord, we ask you to

Open our pain to your peace

As we ask ourselves how we can best use of our days

Lord, we ask you to

Open our pain to your peace

As we are conscious of our own limitations

Lord, we ask you to

Open our pain to your peace

As we look upon our own wilderness

Lord, we ask you to

Open our pain to your peace

As we reflect upon the causes of the world’s suffering

Lord, we ask you to

Open our pain to your peace

As we call to mind people who are wrongly convicted

Lord, we ask you to

Open our pain to your peace

As we try to identify with those who are betrayed

Lord, we ask you to

Open our pain to your peace

As we ponder that isolation can occur anywhere

Lord, we ask you to

Open our pain to your peace

As we think about being transformed by you

Lord, we ask you to

Open our pain to your peace

As we remember that you are the God who brings peace out of pain, strength out of weakness, triumph out of tragedy

Lord, we ask you to

Open our pain to your peace

Amen

With thanks to Eleanor Williams, Christ Church, Roath Park, Cardiff for the prayers each week

What has the Trinity got to do with everyday life?

Today is Trinity Sunday, when the Church remembers that God is “one God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit”. Three in one, one in three. If that has always confused and perplexed you, then welcome to the club! It’s no coincidence that many priests make sure their curate is on the rota to preach on this particular Sunday! But just because it is a complex doctrine, it is far from an outdated or pointless belief. In fact, as much as any other Christian belief, the Trinity gets to the heart of what God is all about and what he expects of us. There are, after all, two important things we can say about the Trinity.

Firstly, the Trinity is a mystery. However much thought goes into it, however much we study, we’ll never fully understand the Trinity. I used to ask my students to think of analogies of what “three in one” could mean – some would follow St Patrick in suggesting shamrocks (three leaves in one sprig), others would suggest water, one element that can be three forms: liquid, steam or ice. And I even remember one group being particularly inventive by suggesting the theology of a creme egg – one sweet in three parts: the chocolate, the sickly sweet white part, and the smooth yellow centre. All this, of course, is not particularly helpful to understanding what is essentially a great mystery about God. And perhaps understanding this mystery is less important than asking why our faith teaches this mystery – what does it mean to us that God is three in one?

Well, that is where we come to second point and this turns everything else about the doctrine upside down. The philosopher Martin Buber wrote: “In the beginning was relationship”. And that little word is at the heart of what the Trinity means – “relationship”. The early church theologians described the Trinity as a dynamic dance of love between the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. After all, love can’t exist in isolation, it can’t exist by itself. So, yes, the Trinity is a mystery. It is, though, a mystery that discloses something very simple about God. It reveals that God, in the very depths of his being, is relationship; God is love.

This has huge implications in our world of suffering, illness, grief, oppression, prejudice, violence, and inequality. It is when we step out of our isolated, selfish selves, it is when we enter into caring, peaceful, and compassionate relationships with each other, with nature, with our environment, that God is revealed to the world. The Christian philosopher Gabriel Marcel talks about “absolute availability”. Because God is relationship, love is not an optional extra for Christians and that has, in our local and global world, far-reaching expectations of each of us. The doctrine of the Trinity demands that availability, responsibility, relationship, care, compassion, and love permeates all that we are and all that we do, whether in person or online, in our thoughts, in our words, or in our actions, in how we spend our money or how we spend our time.

In other words, the Trinity demands that we are “absolutely available” to others, to be a loving and life-enhancing gift to them – to stand alongside them in their pain, to weep with them in their grief, to rejoice with them in their good news, to stand up against oppressive systems that dehumanise them, to shine the light of justice on those who misuse power, to call to account those who blindly ignore our groaning earth, to expose those who pedal lies and falsehoods, to speak up for those whose voices are silenced. After all, it is because God is the Trinity, because God is relationship, that Martin Luther King stated that life’s most persistent question, life’s most urgent and important question, is: “What are you doing for others?” So, I challenge you to reflect on your life and ask yourself that little question – “What are you doing for others?”

A prayer
Father God,
Through the Power of your Spirit,
And the Grace of your Son,
Help us to each to play our part in turning the world upside down
Through your compassion, care, peace, hope, and love.
Amen.

Storms of Life: Finding Hope in our Suffering

Since I underwent spinal surgery 12 years ago, I have had to face daily pain, but, through exercise and pain management, I have been able to manage its intensity. Eight weeks ago, though, only a day after I finished a 135-mile pilgrimage, I felt a level of pain I had not experienced in a decade. In the following few weeks, the pain got increasingly worse and I have had to endure numerous medical appointments and scans. Alongside the physical pain, there has also been the accompanying mental angst. These worries about the future have torn me away from the present and are invariably worse in the dead of night, when I’ve had no distractions to keep negative thoughts polluting my mind.

We live in a society that attempts, as best it can, to avoid pain and suffering. Sometimes, though, the storms of life are inescapable. Last week, someone visited me as I lay on my sofa. “You need to face your pain like the great Bear Hunt”, they said, rather cryptically. It was only when my four-year-old son chose “We’re Going on a Bear Hunt” as his bedtime story a few nights later that I understood something of what she meant. In this classic children’s book, we join a family as they search for a bear by facing various challenging terrains – forest, mud, long grass, and snow. With each different environment, we are told that “We can’t go over it; We can’t go under it; Oh no, we have to go through it!”

Sometimes we have to face the reality that our times of pain, hurt, affliction, or grief are unavoidable. At those times, we have to “gird up our loins”, as the Bible puts it (Job 40:7; 1 Peter 1:13), and face the misery of suffering head on. At those times, we cannot be like rugby players, skilfully sidestepping opponents. Instead, we are forced to be like American football players, confronting opposite numbers head-on by crashing into them. Each of us will face, in the words of St Paul, a “thorn in our flesh” (2 Corinthians 12:7), and sometimes there is no other path other than to “take up our cross”, as Jesus told his disciples (Luke 9:23).

On my long pilgrimage which followed the coastline of North Wales, I spent many hours gazing out at the Irish Sea as I rested with my lunch or my trusty flask of tea. During those three weeks of walking, I noticed how the sea was brimming with life and activity – seals, porpoise, puffins, gannets, boats, fishermen, surfers. But I also observed how quickly the sea could be transformed, sometimes slowly from day-to-day, but other times in a matter of hours. When my four-year-old son is drawing the sea, he will immediately reach for the blue crayon. By spending a length of time staring out to the changeable sea, though, a plethora of beautiful colours emerge. These are often related to the sea’s condition – sometimes threatening and disturbingly dark, but, on other occasions, calm and crystal clear. One day, as I sat on a rock on the edge of a clifftop, I wrote in my notepad that the waves were like rolling, unforgiving white juggernauts crashing against the headland. The very next day, by now on a sandy beach, I jotted down that the sea was a serene stillness gently caressing the golden shoreline.

Like the changeable sea, our life journey is ever-changing. Sometimes all seems tranquil – we are blessed with times of joy, times of pleasure, and times of celebration. But sometimes storms rage around us – we have to face times of pain, times of anxiety, and times of grief. “There is a time for everything,” ponders Ecclesiastes (3:1), “and a season for every activity under the heavens”.

At those seasons of suffering in my own life, it has helped to remind myself that, like the rolling waves of the tide, our lives have a natural ebb and flow. Life is not a straight line, from birth to death, emerging from darkness and returning to darkness, or, indeed, from light to light. Rather, life is cyclical. The winters of our suffering can certainly be dark, long, cold, and painful, but spring will always burst forth. We wait for the snowdrops, because we know the daffodils will soon follow. We trust the nature of the seasons that this will happen, just as those of us who are Christians learn to trust that God will lead us out of our wait, however long and painful. The sixth-century theologian Boethius describes life as a wheel: “we rise up on the spokes, but we’re soon cast back down into the depths. Good times pass away, but then so do the bad. Change is our tragedy, but it’s also our hope. The worst of times, like the best, are always passing away”.

This thought, and this way of viewing the world, is helping me face the difficult wait of my own recuperation. As such, it is gradually transforming my anxious thoughts by giving me the strength to notice and value those little signs of spring breaking through the harshness of winter – to notice and value those daily moments of joy and grace that break through my continuing pain and frustration. This is as powerful a healing as any physical healing could offer. As an old proverb puts it: “Sometimes God calms the storm, but sometimes God calms the sailor”.

God and Grenfell

Aberfan Memorial

Recently, our family travelled up to the “book capital of Britain”, Hay-on-Wye, for the day. We hadn’t banked on our three year old demanding a book in every single bookshop we stepped foot in, but, apart from a continually screaming child, we had a lovely time. On the way back, we saw signs to Aberfan, and, as my daughter was studying the tragedy that had taken place there at her school, she asked whether we could take a detour to the memorial. The memorial is on the site of Pantglas school where, fifty years ago, over 100 young children, a whole generation, were lost with the collapse of the colliery tip. There are two sections to the memorial – first, a beautiful and peaceful garden and, second, a lovely playground for children. As I watched my daughter playing on the swings and the slide, knowing she was the same age as the primary-school children who had lost their lives, my mind slipped into a prayer of protest – where were you, Lord, on that horrific day? Were you sitting on your hands on your golden throne?

On Wednesday morning, as I watched the news on TV, I found myself asking the same questions. I watched the harrowing images of the fire in the Grenfell Tower, the tears and grief of the friends and relatives, and the photos of the smiling children and adults missing. How could a loving, caring Father God allow this to happen? I started feeling disappointment with God, disheartened in my faith, a little angry even. A church in Tamworth was vandalised earlier this week, with “God has Failed” sprayed on its walls. However inane that act of vandalism was in itself, part of me could understand how people could come to that view in light of tragedies, wars, terrorist attacks, and natural disasters. If we are truthful with ourselves, many of us feel like the 50% of participants in a recent US opinion poll who, when asked for their “approval rating” for God, thought that the Almighty should be able to handle things in our world a little better.

When we Christians start feeling that way, though, we actually stand in a long line of faithful who have challenged God when facing pain, grief, and suffering – Job, the Psalmist, Julian of Norwich, Teresa of Avila, C.S. Lewis, to name but a few. Even Jesus himself cried out on the cross, “my God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” Such a response is natural in light of our personal relationship with our Father. As in any intimate relationship, nothing is too trivial or too important, and nothing too painful or too secular, to be excluded. A father-child relationship allows us to lay bare all our humanly experiences and emotions before our creator God – not only our joys, but also our pain, our despair, our questioning, our cries for help. God is not threatened or intimidated by our prayers of protest and our honest cries of confusion. In fact, as John Bunyan wrote, “the best prayers have often more groans than words”.

None of us, whether we are people of faith or not, have any answers to explain, in the words of Dostoevsky, “the human tears with which the earth is soaked from its crust to its centre”. In facing suffering, we cannot explain away or justify its apparent senselessness. But, in asking where God is in such tragedy, we are led to relate suffering to love and hope, as St Paul does in Romans 5 (see verses 1-11). In light of my own experience of ministry to those facing so much tragedy and grief, I have come to recognise that God’s kingdom does not simply break through in our stirring moments – in beautiful walks in the countryside, uplifting pieces of music, and heartening moments with our friends and family. Instead, God’s kingdom also breaks through the dust, dirt, and despair of our suffering, and our call as Christians at times of tragedy is to focus our gaze through our tears to recognise glimpses of his love.

In an article in the Sunday Telegraph in 2004, Rowan Williams, the then Archbishop of Canterbury, reflected on the horror of the Boxing Day tsunami, which had just devastated South Asia. In facing such horrors, he wrote that our faith has no “answers”. Yet we still witness the kingdom in the sacrificial compulsion of people to care for each other and the impulse they have to make a difference. It is in those driven by, in Rowan Williams’s words, “the imperative for practical service and love” that we see God’s light shining. After all, when pain and suffering are countered, the kingdom breaks through. When people reach out to those in need, those who are oppressed, those who face heartbreak, and those who feel they have no hope, then God’s will is being done.

We’ve seen this in just the most amazing way these past few days. Alongside the tireless work of the emergency services and the hospitals, we have seen, on the ground, “an army of caring”, as the press have dubbed it – huge distribution centres, with donated toys, water, food, and clothes; churches, mosques, synagogues, temples all open and welcoming those of any or no faith; sports centres and community halls open; individuals travelling many hundreds of miles to help; celebrities, politicians, and bishops pulling their sleeves up and standing alongside those in their loss; locals opening their gardens and houses for anyone to pop in; people cooking meals and giving them out freely; and three million pounds donated within 48 hours.

A friend of mine who lives directly opposite Grenfell Tower posted the following on her facebook page yesterday: “There is a place for God in this. He is in the hearts of those who feel empty and want to do something, he is with those who give money or time to help, he is with us as we weep and mourn. But can we see it? Do we recognise him where he is to be found?” There are certainly times when we, his followers, can’t offer any words to explain tragedy, less still can we take any pain away. But we are comforted that, through the cross, God knows about grief, loss, pain, abandonment, and fear, and, because of this, he stands alongside those who cry out in distress and agony. In very real and practical terms, he does this through the love and compassion of those who are made in his image. As Teresa of Avila put it: “Christ has no body now but yours. No hands, no feet on earth but yours. Yours are the eyes through which he looks compassion on this world. Yours are the feet with which he walks to do good. Yours are the hands through which he blesses all the world.” On Mount Sinai, God revealed himself as “the God of compassion and mercy” (Exodus 34:6), and so when his people, of whatever background or tradition, are inspired to reach out in compassion, God himself is present. That is the hope that springs from suffering, that is the glimpse of God’s kingdom, that is the rainbow in the storm.

 

Stephen Fry, Russell Brand, and the Theory of Everything: Part 2

I have just returned from watching The Theory of Everything in the cinema. It was a wonderful example of finding hope and love in our broken lives. At times during the film, though, the uplifting element feels merely a superficial bandaid to cover up our feeling of helplessness and anger at the unjust pain and suffering that we witness in the film. Not only do we see Motor Neurone Disease ravage Professor Stephen Hawking’s body, but we also see the mental anguish his friends, wife and children go through as they face the consequences of a terminal disease. Like Stephen Fry, I felt like screaming to the heavens in outrage and indignation. There is certainly no “theory of everything” for Christians to explain the presence of suffering in the world. Like most people, my family and I have had our share of suffering, and, as a member of the clergy, I also have pastoral care for many who go through all manner of heartbreaking situations. The irony is, though, the only way this pain and suffering makes sense for me personally is in light of a loving and compassionate God, who reassures us that he knows what it’s like to face such anguish, stands alongside us in our tears, and affirms hope and meaning in seemingly hopeless and meaningless situations.

Towards the end of The Theory of Everything, as the couple face separation and divorce, Stephen Hawking looks at his wife, tears running down both of their faces, and utters four words that are so difficult to hold onto when we face times of darkness – “everything will be ok”. The wonderful peace behind those words, affirmed by Jesus himself and then countless Christian thinkers down the ages from Julian of Norwich to Dietrich Bonhoeffer, is at the heart of the Christian response to suffering. The following extract is taken from my book Finding Hope and Meaning in Suffering and asks whether we can make any sense of our suffering:

“In the film Cinema Paradiso (1989) the character Alfredo voices a sentiment that many of us feel at times in our lives. ‘With all due respect to the Lord who made the world in two or three days,’ he says, ‘I’d have taken a bit longer, but certain things I could have done better’. If we were playing God, there are certainly things about our fallen world that we may well want to change. Even at happy and upbeat times in our own lives, twenty-four hour news channels serve as a constant reminder that the dark side of life is uncomfortably close. The world continues to be troubled in so many different ways – wars, natural disasters, murder, child abuse, prejudice, hatred, and racism. When we personalise suffering, the situation seems even worse, as each one of us has endured pain and suffering at many levels during our lives. We may have lost someone we love, have been affected by illness or disability, have experienced broken relationships, have lost a job, or have experienced other traumas in our lives. Such incidences often take us by surprise, as they strike without warning and with devastating consequences. The playwright Christopher Fry compares the impact of suffering on our lives with an innocent walk on a minefield. ‘One minute you’re taking a stroll in the sun,’ he writes, ‘the next your legs and arms are all over the hedge’. He simply concludes that ‘there’s no dignity in it’.

The presence of such awful and indiscriminate suffering in the world is certainly one of the greatest challenges to belief in a loving God. As misery breaks through and our worlds are turned upside-down, words like ‘grace’ and ‘mercy’ often seem defunct. It is, therefore, unsurprising that the unfairness and injustice of life is one of the principal reasons given for rejection of God. In the song ‘Dear God’, the 1980s group XTC stood alongside many of their fellow agnostics and atheists in positing the depth of pain and misery in the world as a reason for their apostasy. God stands accused of failing His creation, as wars, natural disasters, and vicious diseases render him culpable. The song concludes that Father, Son, and Holy Ghost are nothing but ‘somebody’s unholy hoax’.

Christians themselves have long recognised that suffering has the potential to alienate people from the faith. ‘If this is the way you treat your friends, it is little wonder you have so few of them’, the sixteenth-century mystic St Teresa of Avila was overheard screaming up at God when her ox cart overturned. The consequence of suffering is, however, often more wide-reaching than a mere rejection of faith. Many fall into resentfulness, intolerance, callousness, or insensitivity as a result of their afflictions. It is certainly not our place to judge those who succumb to such bitterness or hard-heartedness, but each and every one of us does have the option of taking a different path through the dark night of our pain.

In facing our suffering, then, our aim should not be to explain away or justify, in the words of Dostoevsky, ‘the human tears with which the earth is soaked from its crust to its centre’. Rather, our aim should be to start to make larger sense of, and ultimately learn through, the apparent senselessness of our circumstances. After all, if we are to find meaning and hope in our lives, then it must be equally valid, if not more valid, in times of suffering as it is in times of comfort. Furthermore, at the centre of that search for meaning and hope must be the experience of the world’s freely-given love. Our world may well be deeply flawed in its present form, but it still offers us a wonderful experience of the love that flows from joyous and life-affirming gifts such as laughter, nature, memories, art, and other people. Nietzche reminded us that ‘he who has a why to live can bear with almost any how’. It is in these gifts, which for Christians could be termed ‘glimpses of transcendence’ or ‘rumours of another world’, that we can discover the why in our torn and troubled lives.”

(extract taken from Trystan Owain Hughes, Finding Hope and Meaning in Suffering SPCK, London 2013)

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See also:

Stephen Fry, Russell Brand, and God in a suffering world: Part 1

Finding Hope and Meaning in Suffering (blog post)

“Love reminds us why”: God and the mystery of suffering

Finding Hope and Meaning in Suffering

Recently I was privileged to have been asked to contribute a guest post on my story for the “God and Suffering: Our Story” series on the wonderful Thorns and Gold blog. The Thorns and Gold blog explores themes of suffering, faith, and hope, and is certainly worth following. Here, though, is my own guest contribution to that blog:

Ten years ago my life changed completely when I was diagnosed with a degenerative spinal condition and required major back surgery. This story would be a far more interesting if I could write about an injury playing rugby for my beloved Wales or while skiing at the Winter Olympics. Alas, no. It was an injury sustained playing badminton in the local sports hall that led to the investigations that discovered prolapsed and degenerative disks. Within three months of the initial injury, the pain in my lower back and my legs was excruciating and unceasing. I was unable to sit or stand for longer than a few minutes. I was stuck, quite literally, lying on a sofa all day, unable to go to work or to socialise outside of the house.

Six months later I was lying in a hospital bed in the Royal National Orthopaedic Hospital in London and I opened my Bible on Psalm 22. “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Why are you so far from saving me,
so far from my cries of anguish? My God, I cry out by day, but you do not answer,
by night, but I find no rest”. My eyes filled with tears as the words echoed the emptiness and frustration I was feeling. Physical pain, combined with the mental anxiety of facing a long-term, chronic condition, led me to ask questions most of us face at some point in our lives: What’s the point of this suffering? Why doesn’t God stop suffering? Is life really worth this pain?

During a lengthy recovery, which included hospitalisation for two months, my view of these big questions of theodicy began to change. I saw that the mystery of suffering was far less important than the mystery of love. On returning to ministerial work in churches in Cardiff, Wales, I came to realise that the most joyous smiles often mask terrible pain and tragedy – bereavement, divorce, illness, disability, addiction, or chronic pain. At some point in our lives, each of us has to face suffering. Whilst none of us are given the option of rejecting suffering, we are blessed with the choice of the path that we take through the dark night of our pain.

Through my own experience of suffering I realised that, while I couldn’t change the pain I was feeling, I could change my attitude towards the situation. Slowly, but surely, I began to re-wire my ways of viewing the world, as I embarked on a journey of forging meaning from the apparent meaninglessness of suffering. This was certainly not an easy process, and involved soul-searching, tears, and prayer. I was convinced, though, that the one thing that we have left through any amount of suffering, great or small, is a choice of how we react to what we are enduring. As an Arabian saying reminds us: ‘The nature of rain is the same, but it makes thorns grow in the marshes and flowers in the garden’.

For all of us, opening our eyes to moments of God’s light and grace, even in our times of suffering, have a cumulative ability to transform, illuminate, and bring us hope. Held as a hostage for many years in a dark room in Beirut, Brian Keenan recalls how he made a candle from small pieces of wax and string from his clothing fibres. ‘Quietly, calmly a sense of victory welled up in me’, he later wrote, ‘and I thought to myself without saying it, “They haven’t beat us yet. We can blot out even their darkness”’. Light, of course, does not avoid darkness. Rather, it confronts it head-on. ‘The light shines in the darkness but the darkness has not understood it’ (John 1:5).

Ten years on and I am still unable to sit or stand for long periods. Much of my life is, therefore, spent pacing around rooms (even during meetings) or lying down (while I prepare lectures or sermons). I also use icepacks, heat patches, and a tens machine on a daily basis. Through the whole experience, though, my view on suffering has changed radically. No longer do I regard suffering as something that stops life from being lived. Instead, I aim to find hope and meaning in those small, seemingly insignificant areas of life that I took for granted before my injury – in nature, in friendship, in family, in laughter, in the arts, in memories, and so on. Most of us, after all, are like flies crawling on the ceiling of Sistine Chapel – we are unaware of the depth of beauty and joy all around us.

I can truly say, then, that God has been vividly present in my pain. Not that he wants us to suffer, either directly or indirectly. Rather, he is present in our suffering, helping to redeem and transform it. As the Old Testament shows us, God suffers alongside the persecuted, imprisoned, and victimised. ‘In all their distress, He too was distressed’ (Isaiah 63:9). Likewise, Jesus’s sorrows on the cross show us that God truly understands our dark times. As such, he can meet us in our afflictions, bringing meaning and hope at the most unlikely times. God is love, and just a glimpse of that love can powerfully illuminate the darkness that we are going through. ‘And here in dust and dirt, O here,’ wrote Welsh poet Henry Vaughan, ‘The lilies of His love appear’.

Those times when the still small voice of calm seems mute may well be frequent for us, but my own experience is that, even in that silence, we can actively listen for his voice. By doing so, we affirm the importance of love, joy, hope, and meaning in our dark times, rather than dwelling on the horrible reality of suffering. Even though it may not feel like it at the time, our trials and tribulations are, therefore, turned into triumphs of our will and spirit. After all, like diamonds, which sparkle all the more brightly the more facets are cut, our lives reflect God’s light all the more brilliantly when we have many cuts.

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See also my book Finding Hope and Meaning in Suffering and the following blog posts:

“Love reminds us why”: God and the mystery of suffering

‘The path of peace’ (Luke 1:79): Can our faith help us when we face depression, anxiety, and stress?

Worry may not kill you, but it can stop you living

“Love reminds us why”: God and the mystery of suffering

“Pain may well remind us that we are alive, but love reminds us why we are alive” (Trystan Owain Hughes)

Since Wm Paul Young chose to include this quotation from my book Finding Hope and Meaning in Suffering in his book Cross Roads, the follow-up to his multi-million best-seller The Shack, I have had enquiries from as far as Sweden, Brazil and Australia asking me about where the quotation appears in my book. As I recently stumbled across that same quotation on a wonderful picture by the Disney fine artist Noah, I thought that this might be the time to post on this blog the section of my book (pp. 16-17) that includes the quotation.

Finding Hope and Meaning was written when I was diagnosed, at the age of 34, with a degenerative spinal condition. Health is the one quality that is widely regarded as determining a person’s happiness and fulfilment. Despite pain and frustration, though, my illness inspired me to reflect on where meaning and hope can be sought in our suffering and then to apply the fruits of this reflection in my day-to-day life. The book, therefore, does not try to offer a comprehensive theology of suffering, but it simply muses on one personal way of approaching suffering, a way that affirms the paradox that learning how to suffer and how to wait patiently is the secret of finding joy and hope in our lives. When reading the following, then, please keep in mind that it is taken out of context, so may not, without the rest of the book, do justice to the complexity and horror of our pain and suffering.

“The concept of growth through the long wait of our suffering is not specifically Christian.  Other world religions, contemporary psychology, and secular culture in general recognises that meaning, formation, and development can be forged through trials and troubles.  ‘It’s only when you’ve been in the deepest valley,’ mused Anthony Hopkins in his role as Richard Nixon in the film Nixon, ‘will you ever know how magnificent it is to be on the highest mountain’.

The uniqueness of the Christian response to suffering is, however, found in the centrality of God’s grace. As such, we are faced with yet another paradox. The tears and tragedy of the cross is a sign of God’s love for us precisely because it guarantees His loving presence in our own tears and tragedies. God is love, and just a glimpse of that love can powerfully illuminate the darkness that we are going through.  ‘And here in dust and dirt, O here,’ wrote the Welsh seventeenth-century poet Henry Vaughan, ‘The lilies of His love appear’.

We can, then, aim to draw closer to God’s love in the midst of our suffering. Pain may well remind us that we are alive, but love reminds us why we are alive. Thus, we need to re-train our minds to recognise those times in our daily lives when God’s light breaks through our darkness – times we hitherto have taken for granted or ignored. These moments have a cumulative ability to transform, illuminate, and bring us hope. Held as a hostage for many years in a dark room in Beirut, Brian Keenan recalls how he made a candle from small pieces of wax and string from his clothing fibres. ‘Quietly, calmly a sense of victory welled up in me’, he later wrote, ‘and I thought to myself without saying it, “They haven’t beat us yet. We can blot out even their darkness”’. Light, of course, does not avoid darkness. Rather, it confronts it head-on.  ‘The light shines in the darkness’, asserts the Gospel of John 1:5, ‘but the darkness has not understood it’. Likewise, love’s concern is not the avoidance of suffering, but rather its transformation, as our painful experiences become productive and strengthen us.

Jesus certainly knew that the existence of evil and suffering was a mystery to humankind. He would have been well-acquainted with the book of Job and with the psalms of sorrow, and he stood before his people as the suffering servant of Isaiah.  Yet, he himself was more concerned to proclaim the mystery of love than give hollow platitudes about the mystery of suffering.  Love, like suffering, cannot truly be explained. It can, however, be experienced.”