She Who Is

Bonhoeffer's insight continues to inspire religious reflection: "God allows himself to be edged out of the world and on to the cross...and that is the way, the only way, in which he can be with us and help us...Only a suffering God can help." But how can a suffering God be of any help? There is an element of truth to one woman's appalled objection to this kind of language with which many would sympathize. If I were at the bottom of a deep pit, aching, cold, and nursing a broken arm, she writes, "what I want and urgently need is a Rescuer with a very bright light and a long ladder, full of strength, joy and assurance who can get me out of the pit, not a god who sits in the darkness suffering with me." What she rightly rejects is the notion of a suffering God who is powerless, the antithesis of the omnipotent God. However, the human situation of agony and death is more internal to ourselves and more socially complex than this example would allow. Closer to the point is the reflection of another woman who spent endless days and nights on a hospital ward with her tiny, sick daughter, helping the nurses with the other babies when she could. It was a dreadful exposure to the meaningless suffering of the innocent. "On those terrible children's wards," she writes, "I could neither have worshipped nor respected any God who had not himself cried out, 'My God, My God, why hast thou forsaken me?' Because it was so, because the creator loved his creation enough to become helpless with it and suffer in it, totally overwhelmed by the pain of it, I found there was still hope."
This is one way the symbol of a suffering God can help: by signaling that the mystery of God is here in solidarity with those who suffer. In the midst of the isolation of suffering the presence of divine compassion as companion to the pain transforms suffering, not mitigating its evil but bringing an inexplicable consolation and comfort. In her phenomenology of compassion Wendy Farley notes how compassion with its sympathetic knowledge:

does not stand outside the suffering in handwringing sympathy. It does not peer down on the victim and demand a stoicism that denies the pain. It begins where the sufferer is, in the grief, the shame, the hopelessness. It sees the despair as the most real thing. Compassion is with the sufferer, turned toward or submerged in her experience, seeing it with her eyes. This communication with the sufferer in her pain, as she experiences it, is the presence of love that is a balm to the wounded spirit. This relationship of shared, sympathetic suffering mediates consolation and respect that can empower the sufferer to bear the pain, to resist humiliation, to overcome the guilt.

Communion becomes a profound source of energy for the healing of suffering. Knowing that we are not abandoned makes all the difference.

Excerpted from: Elizabeth Johnson, She Who Is, pp. 266-267