The Suffering God
Christ is present in all the pain and suffering of the world, not safely separated from it but immersed in it to the hilt. “In all our affliction, he was afflicted” (Is. 63:9).
The cross of Christ is the sign to us whenever nature is red in tooth and claw and whenever men have to endure their agonies of bloody sweat and lonely darkness or are the victims of oppression, injustice or violence. There God is. Our feeling of exile on earth, our longing for Heaven makes sense and nonsense simultaneously, because where God is, there is Heaven.
One of my favorite saints is Dostoevsky’s whore, Sonia. In response to Raskolnikov’s cynical question:
“And what does God do for you?” Sonia replies: “He does everything.” She can only imagine what he does in the mountains, woods, lakes, oceans and deserts, but she knows what he does through the hopeless and incomprehensible tragedy of human destiny. She sees God in all and all in God.
So Mother Teresa of Calcutta put it: in the face of ugliness, meanness and squalor, she sees him “in his most disreputable disguise.” No sentimentality here; no escape from the scabrously raw matter of the world or the dirty devices of a dehumanized society.
Karl Jaspers gives it a philosophical twist: “God’s infinity does not face finiteness as other — for then it would be finite also. God is the complete infinity which includes everything finite instead of confronting it” (Philosophical Faith and Revelation, Collins, 1967, p. 260.).
That’s why I don’t understand the bewilderment of my philosophical friends when I say matter-of-factly, “God is the bear.” The more earthy stuff we uncover, the more heavenly glory we discover. The more distinctively and robustly human we become, the more divinely endowed we are.
With a soul-friend I passed through the pits of the purgative way, the lustral, lacerating sightings of the illuminative way and the bracing breakthroughs, that take forever, of the unitive way.
I saw the mysterious manifold presence of God in every light and dark aspect of that labyrinthine way. What might have seemed like a terrifying moment of divine absence was my own blindness in the face of Fire. Few make it to the unitive way, that is, to realized union with God.
It is with anxious misgiving that I mention “ways” — degrees of union — because if we concentrate on the ways, or become preoccupied with where we are along the passionate pilgrimage into the Absolute, we are bound to become priggishly or worrisomely self-conscious and so inevitably lose the Way — lose him: the Way, the Truth and the Life.
The main reason so few of us make much progress toward the perfection of charity is that we secretly know and are pathologically afraid of all the fierce and fiery refining required to Christen our deified hearts and minds. As I mentioned above, the final breakthrough takes forever. The other disconcerting thing is: the closer we come to Reality, the more obscure it is.
Clarity comes with metanoia — a radical change of heart and mind, a change so radical that our dominantly human mode of conception on the surface of things gives way to a dominantly divine mode of reception — wise passivity — at the heart of things. Then comes the pure and simple intuition of Reality — of God — born of love. This is contemplation. In the real world it’s “where the action is.”
No compulsions, fixations, addictions. No clichés, slogans, platitudes, disguised eroticism, narcissism or idolatry. Sheer action! Only the contemplative knows how stifi pure action and how active pure stillness is. After all, what is there to do or say when you suffer mindfully and joyfully the Divine Onslaught of Love!
Who is more involved and engaged, though leisurely and detached, than such a person? And who is more socially and politically relevant than such a person, silent and solitary presence at the Center, in communion with the Ultimate, committed to one thing, Christ, and frill of compassion for everything, interceding for all?
Apostolic hermits, the members of our community, are my favorite and most compelling examples of this kind of world-saving, joyful suffering and upbeat intercession based on coinherence enjoyed by all the members of the Mystical Body of Christ — a reference to the Church which is still, I think, unbeatable: especially when you think of what nonsense modem ministerial “mouths” have made of “the people of God” and brought to practical life by a carefree carrying the cross with such wild, wonderful gladness that it might seem to the dreary, driven crowd like a quixotic form of madness.
Among canonized saints, a recent good example is St. Thérèse. During a long siege of darkness she said:
I find only one joy, to suffer for Jesus .. . this unfelt joy is above every joy… I have hit upon the secret of suffering in peace. Peace does not mean felt joy. To suffer in peace it is enough to will whatever Jesus wills . . If you knew my joy, how great is my joy at having no joy, to give pleasure to Jesus! It is the essence of joy! The only happiness on earth is to train oneself to find delightful the lot Jesus gives us.
Don’t misinterpret. Thérèse wasn’t into real estate but into the state of being real. Von Balthasar says
of her: “it is not happiness which draws her. She longs not for happiness but for love. Eternal love, not eternal happiness, is the center of her being in God, and the laws of love are infinitely richer and deeper than the laws of happiness and repose” (St. Thérèse: The Story of a Mission).
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January 7th, 2010 at 4:33 pm
Dear Friend,
Thank you so much for the update on Abba Willie. I have been so
concerned about him, and I can see that you are too.
It hurts me so much to think that he is all alone now. He does need
help, and I pray the Lord will inspire someone to go there to care
for him.
I spoke with him this morning and he sounded quite ill. He is
waiting for reports from his doctors following the tests they took
last month. This will decide if they recommend surgery. I wonder
too how he could survive it if they do.
My consolation is in that he is in God’s hands, and that he has
friends like you.
God bless you for all you do for him. The web site is beautiful, and
I am so grateful to you for doing it!
Thanks for keeping me informed.
Blessings and peace,
Sr. Electa, OCD
San Diego Carmel.
September 18th, 2012 at 12:06 am
I would like to know his thoughts on “retired from being an active hermit ” I never heard of it before this year and I was wondering what he thought of the idea .
January 16th, 2013 at 2:48 am
I have had major conversions reading Abba Willie and with a grateful heart I have adopted him into my heart. I now receive Our Lord Jesus, in the Most Blessed Sacrament, in proxy for Abba Willie at least three times a week, for about a month now. Then on that day of unceasing prayer, I give all these merits to him also. My spiritual directors are the early Desert Fathers, but on my path of holiness, I consider Abba Willie is to be the pinnacle teacher of the Divine Union experience, for I know it as well as he, but no one has ever described it so beautifully and with such poetic command of our language. His writings are like bible passages and the reason for that is: it is the Same One and Only Holy Spirit, speaking through both. Delmar Hepperly