Response to The Pummeled Heart

The spiritual journey begins when we enter into a dialogue with God in which we ask questions about the meaning of our lives. It takes faith, courage and knowledge of God to challenge God with our questions. Antoinette Bosco has used her faith and courage to claim God's help in negotiating her way through pain, toward healing. Bosco writes that she "felt like Job reincarnated" as she questioned the purpose of the pain in her life. Job had angrily challenged God to explain the cause of his suffering. He did not really expect an answer, nor did he get one. God responds to Job with a magnificent description of his power and creativity, angrily rebuking Job's comforters for their lack of understanding. This is a God of creation and order, not chaos and destruction. Job understands God's anger as a love with creative purposes. In challenging God, Job came face to face with God, and entered into God's mystery. Bosco's questions lead her into that same mystery.

Suffering is a radical challenge to the meaning of human existence. Whenever we question the problem of suffering, we find ourselves confronted with questions about good and evil. Bosco's faith is challenged over and over by the suffering in her life and in her body. Her losses brought her face to face with the shattering effects of unbearable pain and the reality of evil. Acknowledging the reality of evil is part of the healing journey as it causes us to become more conscious--helping us to recognize and deal with evil when we see it, rather than falling prey to it.1 We also learn to live with the paradoxes of living and dying. Bosco allowed herself to be plunged into the paradoxes--to enter into the pain, suffering, and emptiness within. In this symbolic act of death and rebirth, she encounters God and begins to experience healing.

However, Bosco sees this journey as "destruction of the encasement" of the self in which our selfishness dies "through having it beaten out of us...God gets closer--blow by blow..." She does not reconcile this destruction with a God she describes as loving and merciful. God is not a God of chaos and destruction. Change and spiritual growth are always painful and require death and rebirth. Other questions we might ask are: is God destructing or constructing this process? Is the power of evil and darkness at work in our lives? Or is it a loving God who comes to us in the midst of pain--not for blow by blow, but to gather us up in mercy? Bosco writes that "Theologians have spent centuries trying to explain the problem of evil and the answers remain elusive." There are many theologians who would say that accepting the reality of evil requires us to accept the dark side of ourselves and the dark side of God. These same theologians ask us to remember God suffers with us.2

Bosco rightly acknowledges that suffering leaves us angry and that we must acknowledge it or "it goes underground, settling into depression." Repressed anger may or may not appear as depression. Anger denied is more likely to appear as a destructive force in our lives. I would prefer to see depression treated here as a significant part of the spiritual journey. Her reference to Dante, the spiritual journey par excellence, suggests that she might be considering this.

Much of our anger at God may come in the form of asking hard questions about life, suffering and evil--for which there may be no answers. In questioning God, Bosco discovered the key to moving forward in the spiritual journey: Letting go. The journey of death and rebirth, of movement through the darkness and into the light is always about letting go. As Bosco says, "The mystery remains..."

References

1. Sanford, John. Evil: The Shadow Side of Reality. Crossroads, 1981.
2. P. Fiddes, J. Macquarrie, J. Sanford, M. Kelsey, K. Barth.