Life Completely Lived

This reflection is part of the Lent Incarnate: And You Shall Live Incarnational Study. If you would like to see the whole liturgy, please click here.

By Andrea Lingle

Suffering exists. God is love. Love precludes suffering.

These sentences cannot stand without some really nasty ramifications.

Before we get started, I need to warn you: I am going to use the word sin. As a religious culture, we do not have a healthy relationship with this word. Some spiritually minded people use it like salt on popcorn, and others treat it like ragweed. But it’s hard to have a serious conversation about salvation if we don’t address what we are being saved from. Is it sin? Is it suffering? Is it discomfort? How about frustration? Being too hot? Hunger? Purposelessness? We are going to have to walk through the valley of the shadow of these questions. So, I am going to use the word sin, and I am going to use it in this way:

Sin is thoughts or actions that cause yourself or others harm.

We have a long, long history of equating all suffering with sin. We see the homeless man who lost his feet to frostbite and, if we are honest, hope that he has an addiction or a criminal background because we don’t have to wrestle with the problem of suffering if bad things happen because of doing bad things. I am not responsible for the one who has brought suffering on himself. Am I? I, like Job’s companions, am here to help my friend see the error of her ways so that she can escape suffering. We love it when Gaston falls from the tower to be shattered on the unyielding stones of the Beast’s castle, because that guy was nasty. Human civilization has a rather grotesque grasp on justice. Sin must be met with suffering—loss of freedom, health, or privileges. We are convinced, down to the marrow of our bones, that bad people deserve to suffer. While I think our ability to navigate justice well could use more than a little improvement, wouldn’t mentoring and healthy communities be a better approach, I do also appreciate the reality of bad behavior. Bad behavior often requires consequences, and consequences can be painful.

One could even write this rather convincing sentence: all sin causes suffering for the self and/or others.

This sentence is even true based on my definition of sin, but logic does not allow for the reverse sentence: all suffering of the self and others is caused by sin.

Suffering just is. Suffering is inherent to life. For those of us seeking to live a spiritual life, suffering is something we must contend with. We must wrestle to the break of day with poverty, hunger, and injustice because we are not free to dismiss them as the consequences of sin. We must gather the broken and bleeding to our very bosom, for, I suspect, it is in that way that salvation lies.

Suffering exists. God is love. Love includes suffering.