Prayerful Theology for Life

Suffering wears many faces. I know many of them. I have lived eighty-seven years and prayed that journey into old age. But suffering is not only about growing old, or even dying. It is about all of life. Consider the expectant mother waiting, counting each day until she will hold her precious child. Then there is a miscarriage, and she loses the little life. Dreams and plans give way to pain and emptiness.

Contemplate the wife or husband suddenly faced with the living death of divorce, faced with the feelings of abandonment, guilt, desertion. What theology of prayer do they live, what is the posture, the face of their prayer? Or think of the sorrow and pain of the aged spouse whose mate has died or suffered a massive stroke. Years of love and companionship, of trials and forgiveness are lost in the fraction of a second. What is the theological face of such tragic commonality of life?

The world we live in often seems far from the one promised to us by our faith. Our experiences of evil, suffering, injustice, and death seem to contradict the Good News. They can shake the foundations of our faith and become a temptation to its loss. How does one theologize the living face of suffering?

Our theology is rarely academic when we are in pain. A young woman shakes her fist at her pastor, screaming, "Where was God when my son was killed?" Softly the priest replies. "God was just where you were when His son was killed." Whose absence is experienced in the reality of prayer?

How difficult it is to see God's love, God's mercy, God's compassion, when racked with pain, sorrow, fear, and tragedy from which there seems no escape. Many persons turn from God when they need God most. They blame God for the devastating events that do not conform to their blueprint of life.

Another Lenten season has passed. Christians have relived the drama of love, a gift of sacrifice, unmatched, unconditional, given freely to those of faith, the saved and the sinner. Yet, the question of both remains the question of life: "Why? Why God? Why me?"

Philosophers, theologians, and persons of intellect and wisdom have postulated about the elusive subject of human suffering. St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas came to the conclusion that God allows evil for the sake of good. Yet how difficult it is to practice such conviction. How does one appeal to a person torn with grief to continue to love a God who allows, sometimes seems even to create, such anguish? Under what guise is good or God hidden?

St. Paul, speaking to the Colossians, says: "Now I rejoice in my suffering for your sake and in my flesh I fill up what is lacking in the afflictions of Christ on behalf of His body, which is the church." (Col. 1: 24) Since Jesus died once and for all, I have wondered at this statement of St. Paul. How could there be incompleteness in the gift of Jesus and his death and martyrdom? And today, what is the lesson to be learned from other martyrs dying for faith in cultures and countries around the world?

If only one's eyes and mind could penetrate the future to see the new life that may result. The childless couple may find happiness in adoption. The desperate young woman facing an abortion may find a way to give her child to waiting arms and hearts eager to receive. The suffering, lonely, or bereaved man or woman may find relief, comfort, support, and fulfillment in reaching out to others in similar need.

When our last page is turned, will we who walk the path of suffering be believing, praying, and hoping to find the good? Will those who learn that their own suffering is a sharing in the redemptive act of Jesus' suffering "fill up what is lacking in the afflictions of Christ on behalf of His body the church?" Will the stubborn remorseless one who suffers reach out and touch the cross in tears of sorrow and healing because someone else somewhere suffered in unity with Jesus for love's sake? Do we learn only late in life the wisdom in why God permits suffering and pain? We cry out, "Why? Why does God not send someone to earth to heal our suffering?" And the answer is, of course, as close as our breath. God did. God sends us.

Signs of life's spring are silently arriving as I write these lines. The crocus bloom, competing with the daffodils. A robin builds a nest for his mate, the brown earth slowly turns green, and there is a fragrant freshness in the air. It is good, and we rejoice. Is there a spring-filled face to our theology of prayer?

For those who suffer, who cry for loved ones that hurt in body and soul, who seem tied to the cross and only slowly learn patience, I urge: Hold fast. Pray constantly. God hears and promises, "Our faith has made us whole." It may not be a sophisticated theology, but it is one of eighty-seven years of praying life. I offer it to you as one perspective on prayer, my theology of experience.