Why Suffering Doesn’t Disqualify Theological Witness—It Often Demands It

Why Suffering Doesn’t Disqualify Theological Witness—It Often Demands It

I recently had a conversation with an interlocutor about my theological writing. They were genuinely concerned. I write about faith as drowning in a whirlpool, constantly grabbing for the lifeline of Christ. I write in fragments, repetitions, urgent dictations between crises. I admit to despair, to inability to imagine any happy future, to clinging to God even while angry at Him.

Their verdict: this is suffering being theologized. Stabilize first, then reflect. Your pain is real, but it’s distorting your theology. You need to get your life together before you can write about God.

I want to be clear from the start: what follows are survival notes, not systematic theology. They’re provisional, meant to provoke dialogue, not pronounce final truths. I’m writing from inside the whirlpool, not from the safety of the shore. These are field notes from the depths, offered as witness and invitation to conversation—not as doctrine.

But I think my interlocutor fundamentally misunderstands how Christian theology has always worked.

The Tradition of Theology from the Depths

Open the Psalms. Half of them are people crying out from pits, surrounded by enemies, drowning in chaos. David doesn’t write systematic theology from a place of spiritual stability. He writes from caves, from fugitive life, from the raw edge of survival. “Out of the depths I cry to you, O Lord.”

Job doesn’t lose his theological credibility when disaster strips everything away. His friends—comfortable, healthy, offering tidy explanations—are the ones God rebukes. Job, sitting in ashes, scraping his sores, is the one who “spoke rightly” about God.

Paul writes his most profound theology while dealing with a “thorn in the flesh” (whatever that was—chronic illness, persecution, psychological torment). He doesn’t wait until it’s resolved. He writes: “God’s power is perfected in weakness.” That’s not a coping mechanism—that’s revelation that came through the suffering, not despite it.

The desert fathers fled to brutal landscapes specifically because comfort seemed spiritually dangerous. They trusted the stripping away of ease more than they trusted abundance.

Mother Teresa—now Saint Teresa of Calcutta—experienced decades of spiritual darkness, what she called an absence of God’s felt presence. She didn’t stop serving. She said she wasn’t worthy to serve the suffering poor, that they were closer to Christ than she was.

The Cross as the Ultimate Proof

Here’s the thing about Christianity: when God shows up in human flesh, the world crucifies him.

That’s not a bug. That’s the revelation.

The cross isn’t a tragic detour on the way to resurrection. It’s the unveiling of what this world does to perfect love. It’s what reality looks like when you strip away the anesthesia.

If we only theologize from positions of health, stability, and comfort, we miss what the cross teaches. We risk building a faith that only works for the fortunate—and that’s not the gospel. The gospel is for the sick, the mourning, the persecuted, the ones crying out from depths.

What I’m Not Saying

I’m not romanticizing suffering. I’m not claiming pain is holiness or that struggle gives special insight. I’m not suggesting people should refuse help or healing.

The Christian tradition has always blessed healing—medicine, therapy, friendship, rest—as part of God’s provision. Grace comes in many forms.

I’m also not claiming suffering is the only reality or that resurrection is impossible. And this distinction matters: I’m not saying resurrection is false or that God’s promise is a lie. I’m saying I can’t imagine what resurrection looks like from where I stand—and that’s precisely the point.

Hope, by definition, is something I can’t manufacture or anticipate. If I could “gin up” a happy ending in my own strength, it wouldn’t be hope. It would be fantasy or projection.

No eye has seen, no ear has heard what God has prepared. That’s not just poetry—it’s the structure of Christian hope. We trust the promise, not our ability to picture it.

What I Am Saying

The whirlpool is real. The constant grabbing for the lifeline is real. And that’s not a failure of faith—it’s what faith is for many people.

Kallistos Ware describes faith as a spiral staircase, ascending upward. That always struck me as too neat. My experience is more like quicksand, more like drowning. You don’t climb—you cling. You grab the lifeline again and again, not because you’re making progress but because letting go means going under.

That’s not just my psychology. That’s the Psalms. That’s lament. That’s the cry from the cross itself: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”

The question isn’t whether suffering distorts theology. The question is whether we’re willing to do theology from inside suffering or only from positions of resolution and comfort.

Why Easter Is Not a Tragedy (Even When I Can’t Imagine It)

I wrote a piece recently asking: why is Easter not a tragedy? If life is suffering, if human existence is this grinding crucifixion, how could any continuation of existence be anything but more tragedy?

I can’t answer that from my own experience. Anything I try to imagine—any “happy ending” I conjure—feels hollow, contrived, drugged with distraction. My experience tells me continuation equals more suffering. Period.

So here’s where faith comes in: not as explanation, but as trust.

Easter is shocking. Resurrection is rupture—something that breaks into reality from outside, not something that emerges naturally from within. Christ doesn’t climb out of the tomb through heroic effort. The Father raises him. It’s God’s act, not ours.

That’s the only way resurrection doesn’t become tragedy—if it’s genuinely new, something we couldn’t manufacture or anticipate. If I could imagine it, it would just be my projections. And my projections, shaped by this broken world, would inevitably be tragic.

So I trust. Not because I feel hopeful. Not because I can picture the happy ending. But because the God who has walked with me through crucifixion after crucifixion tells me He’s making something new. And if He says it’s victory, I believe Him—not because my experience confirms it, but because He’s proven trustworthy in the depths.

The Apophatic Thread

There’s a tradition in Christianity called apophatic theology—the theology of negation. You don’t say what God is; you say what God is not. You approach the divine by naming what it isn’t, clearing away false projections.

I think hope works the same way.

I can’t tell you what resurrection will be like. I can tell you it won’t be what I imagine, because my imagination is shaped by this crucifying world. I can’t make myself feel hopeful by picturing heaven. Any heaven I picture would be hell in disguise—just this world with better PR.

So I clear away the projections. I refuse the “happy ending” talk that feels like denial. I sit with the reality: this world crucifies. Suffering is real. Despair is real.

And then I say: Christ meets me here. In this. Not after I’ve climbed out. Not once I’m stable. Here. In the whirlpool. In the pit.

That’s where the lifeline drops. That’s where faith happens.

Why This Matters (Especially for the Church)

If we say “stabilize first, then theologize,” we create a faith that only works for the stable. We build churches where you have to be okay before you’re allowed to speak about God.

But the biblical witness is full of people who weren’t okay. Prophets in exile. Apostles in prison. Jesus himself, crying out from the cross.

The danger isn’t that people theologize from suffering. The danger is when we only hear from the comfortable—and then wonder why the gospel sounds hollow to those who are drowning.

On Repetition

My writing is messy. It’s repetitive. It’s dictated between crises, unpolished, often raw. I call it “verbal vomit.” It circles the same core insight again and again: Christ meets us in weakness. Pain is the doorway. Surrender is the only posture that works.

I’m aware this repetition does several things at once:

Liturgical repetition — like the Jesus Prayer or the rosary, where the same words gain depth through rhythm and practice. Sometimes repeating the truth is how we learn to live it.

Pedagogical repetition — circling back to reinforce a core concept with new examples and contexts. The same truth applied to unemployment looks different than when applied to grief or institutional church wounds.

Compulsive repetition — honestly, I’m still metabolizing this insight. I haven’t “moved on” because I’m still living it. I’m still in the whirlpool, still grabbing the lifeline.

Maybe it’s all three. But it’s also honest.

I’m not claiming to have it figured out. I’m claiming that those in the depths have something essential to say about God. And that the cross—where God himself cries out in abandonment—proves that suffering doesn’t disqualify witness.

It often demands it.

A Note to Readers

If you’re looking for systematic theology, polished apologetics, or reassuring answers, this probably isn’t for you.

If you’re drowning—if you’re burned out on church, traumatized by religious language, desperate rather than curious—these are survival notes. They’re not doctrine. They’re not final. They’re field notes from someone clinging to the lifeline, hoping it holds. They’re offered as witness and invitation to conversation, not as the last word.

I can’t promise you resurrection will make sense. I can’t even picture it. But I can tell you the One holding the lifeline has been faithful so far. Even when it felt like He was the source of the drowning, He was also the one keeping me afloat.

That’s not much. But it’s real.

And in the whirlpool, real is all we’ve got.

Street Smarts: All Is Well?

I wanted to say a few words about the idea that all is well, all is well.

Point number one, it’s common to hear people in the spiritual world say that everything’s okay, all is well, don’t worry.

And if you just look at the world the way it is, that’s wishful thinking, that’s denial.

Bad things happen every day, look at the news, or better yet, look at the news carefully with others in your faith community and think about ways you can respond to it.

But clearly, all is not well and it’s tempting to listen to spiritual cleverness that tries to anesthetize us from this reality.

Two, what does the Christian faith have to say about this?

Well, the first thing it has to say is that not only is all not well, but it can’t get any worse.

In fact, it’s so bad that God’s children crucified, tortured, God himself, and God died.

It doesn’t get any worse than that.

Three, after God died, something weird happened and there are a lot of conflicting reports about what happened, even within the scriptures, even within the Bible itself, there are different conflicting reports about exactly what happened.

But for my money, what I look to is this outlandish claim that Jesus was raised from the dead.

And not only is that story still hanging around, but lots and lots of people then and now were and are willing to be tortured and killed rather than deny it.

So Jesus is still alive, and by alive, I mean literally alive, and it doesn’t matter whether you believe Jesus is literally sitting on a cloud, or my view is he’s kind of in a, there’s kind of a greater reality.

The reality that we’re in is part of a larger reality, and that Jesus is certainly in our reality, but he’s also inhabiting a greater reality that is bigger and grander and more comprehensive than the reality that we’re in.

And that’s more along the lines of what the Church Fathers believed, and I think it’s also more in line with what modern cosmology tells us, but I’m getting a little bit out of my expertise there.

But Jesus is still alive, so it doesn’t matter if you’re liberal or conservative regarding the Bible interpretation, we can all agree that Jesus is still alive literally, not just symbolically, although he is alive symbolically too, because his literal being aliveness is also a symbol.

It’s more than a symbol in the sense that it relates and has relevance to understanding other things, but it’s not just an abstract concept.

And what does Jesus aliveness mean?

What does it literally mean?

It means that there’s nothing we can do to kill God permanently, and there’s nothing we can do to make God stop loving us.

It means that God is in the trenches with us.

He’s willing to get **way** down into the trenches by letting us kill him.

He’s with us.

He can experience death, he can experience our lot, but we cannot cancel his love.

And for those of us who are a little bit iffy about this idea of resurrection, not in terms of if it can happen, but in terms of if we wanted it to happen, if you’re a pessimist or maybe you’re struggling with depression and the idea of eternal life sounds a little bit horrible, well, that’s where I come back to my view of the resurrection, which is that if I could understand it, in other words, any concept of resurrection that I could conceive of that contained any of my life experience in this world, that’s not something I would want to eternalize.

And there’s a respected theologian that I won’t name because I don’t want to misquote him, but I don’t think he’s the first person to say this, and I think this is probably something that we assume too when we think about eternal life, but if there’s going to be any me on the other side of eternity, in other words, if I’m going to be eternalized, if my life is going to be eternalized, then it’s going to have to be my life, which has a lot of bullshit in it, has a lot of pain in it, and I don’t want that eternalized.

Not if that means I have to keep experiencing it for eternity or thinking about it for eternity.

Or going to therapy for it for eternity, but yet if I sweep the decks and dust everything away and get rid of everything, then it’s how is it me at all?

Well, let me cut to the chase.

My view is that I cannot get an answer to that question, and I don’t want an answer to that question because any question, any answer rather that explains to me why heaven is going to be great, is necessarily not good enough.

That’s where faith comes in.

And as one brilliant theologian said, Christian faith cannot be contained within human reason, and I think that’s a feature, not a bug, because if I’m a drowning man, if I’m existentially drowning, if I could think up a life ring, I wouldn’t need faith.

If I’m drowning, that means I need a life ring.

That means I need Jesus.

In other words, I need something that I don’t understand because everything that I do understand is leading me to despair, is leading me to distraction, maybe for some of us it’s substance abuse or it’s family patterns that we can’t escape because they’re so ingrained or whatever.

But basically, we come face to face with the idea that all is not well.

But we can have cheer, we can have hope, that’s what Christian hope is about.

That’s not the end of the story.

We can have resurrection.

That’s why Easter is actually good news, although I wrote a whole article as I said about it called, Why Easter Is Not a Tragedy.  

Well, it’s not a tragedy.

And it’s not a tragedy because it’s not just one more thing that I can think of, which is going to always give way to despair.

It’s something much bigger than that, it’s something much bolder than that, and it’s something that people have been willing to be martyred for from the beginning.

And as I heard at the Greek Orthodox Church, Christos Anesti!, Christos Anesti!, I think that means, I hope I pronounced it right, it means Christ is risen, and it doesn’t just mean Christ is risen when the Easter Bunny comes around and the flowers bloom, it means that Christ is risen right now, even if it’s the middle of December.

Christ has risen and all is well, and we can say that all is well, not because we’re closing our eyes to reality, but because we have a Savior, and we don’t understand it all, and we don’t need to understand it all, and we don’t want to understand it all.

And that is good news.  That is damn good news.  God bless.

Why Easter Is Not a Tragedy

The author poses a complex question: why is Easter not a tragedy, given the inherent misery of human existence. They acknowledge the critique from atheistic perspectives that see religion as a coping mechanism but maintain an unshakable relationship with God. Drawing on philosophical ideas and Christian tradition, the author explores the potential tragedy of any continued existence and the difficulty of conceiving a hopeful future that is not a mere fantasy or distraction. Ultimately, they conclude that true hope and victory lie not in our understanding or efforts to “gin up” a happy ending, but in trusting in God’s unexpected and incomprehensible resurrection power that breaks through the suffering and crucifixion of this life.
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podcast review
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Why is Easter not a Tragedy?

voice dictation: 

Well, I’m not an academic, but I have just enough academic exposure to make me discontent with most Christian talk, and yet not enough academic exposure to let me fully participate in academic discourse.

But setting that aside, the question on my mind tonight is–why is Easter not a tragedy?

I’ve been listening and watching some videos by Julie Reshe–I’m not sure how you pronounce her name–but she has a concept called negative psychology, which I find very appealing.

But as I’ve told some folks of that persuasion, I don’t have the luxury of being a death-of-God atheist.

I am, for better or worse, in an unshakable relationship with God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit.

And another common theme I’ve heard among the death of God or the atheistic modern folks is that all religion is kind of an older way of coping with reality, which is no longer valid, that we move beyond this religious phase of human development, and they see religion as kind of a, I wouldn’t say inauthentic, but they see it as kind of an artificial or unconscious coping mechanism for dealing with the human condition.

And I think that’s probably accurate for many religious believers, although I’m not here to judge.

I’ve often said that those who I disagree with the most theologically have been the ones that have helped me the most practically, and that’s not just an ironic statement.

I believe Ron Rolheiser, the Catholic blogger priest, is one of the more thoughtful bloggers out there.

I don’t read him very often though–there’s kind of something about his tone that I find a little bit hard to process or off-putting–but he did have an article, I can’t remember the philosophers he named, I think it was Nietzsche or some other folks in that category, if you will, but basically he was conceding that, I think he had a mentor, a Catholic priest mentor, academic, who basically conceded that the critique that the modern nihilistic, atheistic, philosophical crowd made against religion was accurate for most of it, maybe 90% or more of it, but it was the 10% that that critique could not apply to that made all the difference, and I’d like to think of myself in that category, I’d like to think of myself as one who has encountered, has continued to encounter the living God, the burning bush if you will, and even when I get really angry at God and curse him, which is not infrequently, I still know my bones that He’s a loving father, but that love does not mitigate my despair or my pain.  In many cases, it feels like He is the source of the continuation of my misery, and so my question is, you know, if life is miserable and we don’t have any understanding of what the afterlife or whatever you call it, whether it’s whether the afterlife is some kind of mythologized understanding of the present moment or whether it’s, you know, some kind of existential whatever, I mean nobody knows what it is or if it is, but whatever the payoff is, whatever the hope is, we have this hope in Christian tradition, and I’ve tried to clarify what that really is for myself, but my question is like if there is a new heaven or a new earth, if there is a new creation, if there is a resurrection for all of us, starting with Christ, why is that not a tragedy?

How could any continuation of this existence that we have be anything other than a tragedy?

But again, the question is really how can hope be anything other than a fantasy, and how could a fantasy be, how could there be any conception of existence that would not be hell, that would not be tragic, either tragic or looking away, a distraction?

How could there be any authentic existence, any existence that is not drugged or intoxicated or distracted, which is its own kind of despair?

How could there be any existence that is not tragic?

How could a continuation of this existence of this world be anything but tragic?

And as dark as that sounds, I think that it’s an important question, and I think until we ask that question, and we hold that question as a faith community and listen for Jesus’ answer rather than rushing to our own answer, I think until we can face that existential hell, that question of what is that old, ancient idea that better never to be born, and if not that, then better to die young, I mean there’s some ancient philosophical maxim that I heard somewhere, and I think that was before the internet memes were created all the time, so it probably has some basis in fact, but any event, I mean I think that the consensus is that we don’t know, we don’t know what’s next, we can’t know, we have to be humble, but what is the source of our trust, what is the source of our hope, and I think if we’re just hoping for a continuation of this life, then frankly we’re not really living, we’re addicted, we’re distracted, we’re not facing facts, we’re not facing the cross.

The cross reveals this life, it reveals what this world does to a perfect person, it crucifies them, and to the degree that we are more like Christ, we’re going to be more crucified, and there’s this talk of joy which I’ve discussed before, but there seems to be this popular understanding, or maybe it is the full understanding that somehow–it’s in the [devotional] books every day–that somehow if you follow Jesus the whole way, then you’re going to have this fairytale ending in heaven all the time, but I don’t see how any continuation of the being that I am with the being that anybody is, I don’t see how any life that has elements of this world and living in this tragic world, I don’t see how any of that could continue in an allegedly happy world, I don’t know how any world could be happy with contingent existence, and especially with contingent existence that has been baptized in the hell of this world, so I believe in Christianity because I believe in the God who has confronted me and encountered me, and I don’t have the luxury of walking away from that like some death-of-God people, but I think that one of the reasons that I’m thankful for my faith that I’ve encountered is that it allows me to stare very clear-eyed into the reality of living a human life in this hell, but it just seems a little bit dissonant or a little bit pollyannish or a little bit naive or dissociated to then claim that we’re all hoping for something radically different because in my understanding, in my life, to even hope for something in that category is both unprecedented, you know, completely outside the realm of my experience, and also something that distracts me from facing the reality that I am living in.

And so as I talk this out, I think that maybe the answer is, if there is an answer, is to face down the reality of the death this world offers, face down the reality of being crucified.

As I’ve said other places, I believe that the root that gave rise to the mythology of the Holy Christian [sic], or I would say middle-aged type of Christian [sic], these mythologies that fell apart that sustained Western culture for so long, although my history is just very poor, but that’s my understanding.

But I do think that that live root that gave rise to these mythologies that were then demythologized, I think that live root is still there.

And so I think that the best thing for us to do is to embrace the absurdity, embrace the contradictions, embrace the crucifixion, and then just wait.

And if there is a resurrection, great, but don’t cling to it.

I think that reminds me of that passage in the Gospels where the risen Christ says to Mary Magdalene or whoever says, don’t cling to me because I have not yet risen to my Father.

And I think that there’s no way to escape crucifixion in this world.

So I think that there’s no way to understand anything happy about anything.

And I think St. Paul says, no eye has seen, no ear has heard.

I don’t want to hear or see anything because anything that I could come up with is necessarily broken and flawed and unsatisfying and tragic because it exists in this world.

And I was thinking along these lines earlier that the idea of the apophatic tradition where you know, this is probably a dumbed-down explanation that I picked up, but basically it’s like the apophatic tradition says, you don’t say what God is, you say what God is not.

And I picked up that phrase somewhere, the luminous darkness.

So for me, I think that you have to be honest and reject any of these happy ending speculations or whatever and just embrace metaphorical existential death.

Not self-harm, but just accept that this world has nothing to offer me that’s going to satisfy.

Even if I use the word Christ, if it’s not the real Christ, if it’s some Hollywood version or if it’s some version that I made up or whatever, but follow Christ and cling to Christ as best I can, the Christ crucified.

And then if there is a resurrection, then that’s not my problem.

If God wants to resurrect me, let Him resurrect me and don’t be surprised when he crucifies me again with existential experiences because that’s the nature of being human.

And so I picked up that phrase from Julie’s [online conversation]–salvation from salvation.

I think I have to go back and look at the definition of hope, but off the top of my head just thinking about it, I think hope, it can’t be concretized, it can’t be concrete.

It has to be, hope has to be by definition something that I don’t know what it is, otherwise it wouldn’t be hope.

And I think the more I try to anticipate how I feel or try to gin up some good feeling about some possibility, I think it just makes it worse because nothing I can gin up will actually satisfy me.

So I think what I have to do is embrace the cross, embrace death, which is to say embrace what it is to be human.

And then any joy or resurrection, or as I might say in Catholic spirituality, consolation, which may not be the same thing, but just surrender, surrender to not knowing, surrender to being powerless, to being unable to make myself happy and just live in that authenticity.

And then leave the rest up to God, otherwise I’m just making an idol.

And even the apostles didn’t believe that Christ had risen.

They had to be transformed, but they didn’t transform themselves, and yes, you’ve got it, it takes two to tango, and yes, you have to do your part, but let Christ through the heavy lifting, not me.

Let Christ do the heavy lifting.

And so I would say that if we try to fill in the blanks, if we try to write the ending, if we try to say what resurrection is, if we try to speculate about what’s happening or what’s going to happen after death, if anything, if we try to pin it down and explain why we should be joyful, then it’s a tragedy.

Because then Easter’s a tragedy, because then we are trying to go back and resurrect ourselves again, which is the exact problem that we had as humans.

Christ trampled down death by death, and in the tombs bestowing life is my butchered version of the Eastern Orthodox liturgy goes, like Christ was resurrected by the Father.

We can be resurrected, but we can’t resurrect ourselves, and sitting here trying to think about, well, what is it like to be resurrected, or I don’t feel good, so let me try to think about the resurrection, or let me try to feel better, let me try to think about what it might be like, and that way I can feel it, and I’ll be better.

No, I think we have to just face reality, and the reality is we can’t understand God except to the extent He’s revealed himself, and even then it’s challenging, but in the same sense it’s not challenging, because Christ says to be like children, but again, I think that the true Easter, true resurrection, is victory.

But there’s no way that I can gin up that victory in my own strength.

There’s no way that I can anticipate what that might be like.

It’s shocking.

Easter is shocking.

Easter is sudden, it’s unexpected.

It’s not something that is part of a natural flow of events.

Just like, as I’ve said, the incarnation is a rupture.

The incarnation is a rupture, it is something that is not expected, and Christ’s Way, as He demonstrated in His life, which ended in crucifixion, which was a victory.

These are not normal things.

This is not the way that humans normally operate.

Christ had His disciples walk on water, not walk around as a peripatetic philosopher in the university.

What did they call it back then?

I don’t think it was… the Lyceum, whatever, but Jesus doesn’t do things normally, and I think the resurrection is the ultimate symbol of that.

It’s not normal, and I think it’s not normal to want to continue life.

If it is a new life, if Christ is creating a new world that contains the Old World, he has to create it in us.

We can’t know what that is.

If we can know what it is, then it wouldn’t be new.

It wouldn’t be Him creating it.

And so, I think we can develop trust, we can trust God, we can trust the Lord as we go through our day, and we learn to walk with the Lord, and He can help us with practical problems and give us peace in the day-to-day world.

We build up trust with God, and then we have to trust Him with these harder questions.

If we can trust Him to help us find a job, if we can trust Him to help us pay the bills, if we can trust Him to help us get through a hard time or whatever, if we learn to trust God with these little things, and we trust Him more and more and more, then I think we can trust Him, and we can trust that He says that the next life is going to be great, and He says it’s a victory, and we can be happy because we know that this God who has walked with us and who has delivered us from everything, from hangnails to hurricanes, He’s the one that’s saying that it’s going to be good, and that’s where our hope is.

That’s how Easter is a victory, and if we make Easter into something that we gin up, then it’s a tragedy, because that just means we’re going back to our old ways.

Nothing’s new, we’re just making deaf and dumb idols, and we’re putting Christian labels on them, but if we can trust, if we can trust in the Lord with all our heart and lean not on our understanding, and we can trust that this God who has brought us this far, and in His weird, crazy ways, He has taken us this far, and He has told us that He’s going to make it better, and He’s going to redeem everything, and He’s going to make a new world, I can’t comprehend what that would be like.

Only that I can come up with in my brain sounds awful, sounds terrible, because my experience of life is tragic and terrible, and I hate it, and I have good people around me that keep me safe, and that keep me going, but I think that I can trust the Lord, and that is what my hope is in.

My hope is in the Lord’s resurrection, my reason for hope, and for hope that there could be something better is not in my experience, because my experience is one crucifixion after another, and I’ve found that Christ has walked with me through those crucifixions, and He has delivered me, and it’s only on His Word, and it’s only on His life that I can trust that He has achieved victory.

Tragedy, Resurrection, and Facing Reality

The author reflects on the importance of confronting the tragic aspects of the human condition, such as suffering, pain, and depression, drawing on thinkers like Julie Reshe, Jessica Coblentz, and Rowan Williams. He argues that a refusal to face this reality, often found in “toxic positivity,” prevents a true understanding and appreciation of the Christian gospel and the resurrection. Referencing Thomas Hopko, the text suggests that deeper knowledge can lead to deeper suffering but also a greater capacity to experience the redemption offered by faith. The author contends that one must experience the darkness and the pit of human experience to fully grasp the light of Easter and the meaning of salvation.

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voice dictation

I have been listening to a little bit of Julie Reshe, the proponent of negative psychology, and I was observing a discussion she was having with another online thinker, and the phrase came up, “salvation from salvation,” and if I could kind of put my own spin on things, you know, this dialogue with Julie and this other guy, as well as some other videos from her, got me thinking about, and also some reading I did in Jessica Coblentz’s book called Dust in the Blood, and some of the excerpts she took from Rowan Williams’ work on the concept of tragedy in the ancient world and how it’s distinct from the Christian tradition, but one that we should be engaged with in order to walk with those of us who are dealing with depression, but I guess I think, you know, I’ve done some thinking about joy versus happiness in the current, you know, as Julie might say, toxic milieu of toxic positivity or whatever, but I think about it as I’ve been reflecting this evening on the concept of the tragic, just briefly, it made me think about the gospel as a contrast to tragedy, and the stark relief of between, you know, the tragic situation where you are just forced to look at horrible things about being human that just have no answer, that nothing can be said, all you can do is just sit there in the theater or whatever they called it back then, with the community as they had back then, and just be in awe or in shock at the tragic happening or whatever, and how the gospel interfaces with that milieu, the idea of the resurrection, and I think to me, maybe why I’m drawn to the crucifixion more than the resurrection, it seems, is because in this environment that we’re in of toxic positivity, of a refusal to look at the dark side of life or as a, you know, as a superficial engagement, you know, Julie had this picture of a fish on a slide, and the fish said that the deeper I swim, the darker it gets, and I think you have to really swim deep sometimes to order to appreciate the light of the resurrection, and I think if you’re just trying to contemplate the resurrection in the atmosphere of regular American life, and the general cultural presuppositions that we tend to take for granted, you know, the idea that you deserve to be happy, the idea that you, you know, all these things that others are more articulate at, but I guess the bottom line is I’m trying to say that if we’re not willing to face the tragedy of the human condition, then we’re not willing to face the joy of the resurrection.

You know, Thomas Hopko, who I like, in his lecture called The Word of the Cross, which is one of the most foundational things I’ve ever read or listened to, actually listened to it.

It’s a lecture, and you can read it online too, on ancientfaith.org.

He says that the deeper the, the deeper the knowledge, the deeper the suffering.

And I think that, you know, I used to think, well, maybe that’s just God being God, and maybe that’s just God being a dick, you know, as I think a lot sometimes.

I mean, Saint Teresa has that story about, you know, saying to God, like, you don’t have many friends because, you know, you treat your friends poorly, and it had to do with falling off a horse or whatever, but sometimes I just think God’s a dick.

But I guess, you know, I trust Providence, and if you think that’s harsh, then read the Psalms.

But look, I think that at the end of the day, you know, if you are, if you are only living in this toxic positivity, general American-Western mindset, I often feel like you’re living like an animal, because you’re just being driven by these primal, you know, eat, drink, and be merry type of, you know, you’re not really engaging with the human condition.

You know, those of us who have been, have dealt with tragic circumstances or with depression or whatever, I mean, we’re forced, we’re forced to deal with reality.

We’re kicked off our horse or whatever, like Saint Teresa says.

And you know, as Rowan Williams kind of said in that book or in that phrase or in that page about Martin Luther, that I like so much, talked about, you know, I might not get the words exactly right, but the only in the deepest depths of hell can the good news be tasted and seen for what it is.

So if you’re not really dying, you can’t live.

If you can’t really, if you’re just living in, you know, blah, blah, toxic positivity in American culture, you’re not facing reality.

That’s one of Thomas Hopko’s maxims.

You have to face reality and facing reality means tragedy.

The great tragedies faced reality.

That is reality.

That is the human condition.

And Rowan Williams cautions that we don’t want to try to Christianize Greek tragedy, because if I’m remembering correctly, he says that’s their own genre.

We don’t need to try to, need to let that be, but I think we can, we can look, I mean, that’s the crucifix reveals reality.

This is what we do to each other, and I think we have to look at the absurdity and the violence and the meaninglessness and the pain and the depression and the death wish that’s inherent in being alive.

And that is the backdrop that, that allows us to contrast with the, with Easter, with the resurrection.

And I think that otherwise you’re just living in a greeting card world, and it’s meaningless.

And I think if you are in the dark place, Easter doesn’t necessarily sound like good news, because it sounds like a continuation.

And all you want is a discontinuation when you’re in that pit.

You don’t want it to continue.

And the idea of a rebirth or of a new creation sounds like necessarily a continuation of the existing creation.

And a lot of ways it is, theologically.

But the idea of saying yes to reality sounds very painful and forced.

And in my own life, I’ve often reflected that what guarantee do I have that whatever comes after life is going to be any better than this life.

But again, I think that, I think the point of this is to say that, that the, in order to, in order to appreciate the life ring, you have to be drowning.

And you have to actually know that you’re drowning.

You have to know the pit in order to see the, in order to see the light.

And otherwise, if you’re, if you’re in the false light of toxic positivity and general Americanish culture and all that stuff, you’re, you really, you really are turning away from true reality.

And it’s only from a place of true reality that you can appreciate the redemption of Easter.

Bible Belt vs. Christ

Minute by gruesome minute: From his last words to the final horrifying spasm on his gurney, how America’s first nitrogen gas execution saw killer Kenneth Smith thrash around while his wife wept during grisly 22-minute death in Alabama prison

. . . . . . . . . .

“A sermon by the Archbishop of Canterbury at a Parish Eucharist at St Andrew Holborn, London, during which a new icon of the Resurrection (painted by a sister of the monastery of Vallechiara) was blessed.

“For some people, when they first encounter the classical Byzantine icon of the resurrection, it’s just a little bit puzzling. Here is Jesus descending to the dead, taking Adam and Eve by the hand, surrounded sometimes by prophets and kings of the old covenant. And it seems rather a long way from the scene described in the Gospel that we’ve just read (Luke 24.1—9) or even the narratives that St Paul recalls in 1 Corinthians. Surely the resurrection is about those precious moments of personal encounter with the risen Jesus on the part of a range of people, those mysterious and elusive meetings described in the gospels?

However, here in this icon, we’re taken into another realm, another frame of reference. That of course is what an icon does: it takes you to the inner story, to the bedrock of what’s going on. And what this icon says to us is that the bedrock of what is going on in the resurrection of Jesus Christ is the re-making of creation itself. Here are God and Adam and Eve: this is where it all began and this is where it begins again. The resurrection is not the happy ending of the story of Jesus: it’s the story of the word of God speaking in the heart of darkness to bring life out of nothing, and to bring the human race into existence as the carriers of his image and his likeness. That is what happened on Easter Sunday and what happens whenever Easter is re-enacted, commemorated afresh in the life of the believing community as we do this evening. It’s why so often in the early Church – and today in the Eastern Church – Sunday is the ‘eighth day’ of the seven day week. It’s the start of the new world because it’s the day of the resurrection of Christ.

So far, so good. The resurrection is the beginning of the new creation; the resurrection is the rising not only of Jesus, but of Adam and Eve. Then you look more closely at Adam and Eve in the icon, and you see that this is Adam and Eve grown old. They are not the radiant, naked figures of the first beginning of the story. Their faces are lined by suffering and experience, by guilt, by the knowledge of good and evil, scarred by life and by history. This is Adam and Eve having lost their innocence – the Adam and Eve who are of course ourselves, we who carry around with us the marks of history, of experience, of the knowledge of good and evil, hurts received and hurts done. Those are our faces on the icon, Adam and Eve ‘four thousand winters’ on, as the carol rightly puts it.1 Because the history of Adam and Eve is a wintry one, and we know that in ourselves.

So, when we speak of the resurrection as a new beginning, a new creation, it is in the sense that the risen Jesus reaches down and touches precisely those faces: Adam and Eve grown old. He doesn’t wave a wand and make them young again, strip off their clothes and leave then standing in their first innocence. What he deals with is humanity as it has become, our humanity, suffering and struggling, failed and failing. The resurrection is not about the wiping out of our history, pain or failure, it is about how pain and failure themselves – humanity marked by history – may yet be transfigured and made beautiful. Perhaps the most poignant feature of this and indeed all such icons is those aged faces. Adam and Eve four thousand years old in winter, turning to their spring, and being renewed.

So what the Christian gospel offers is indeed a new beginning. It is indeed something from nothing, life from death, light from darkness. And at the same time it is, mysteriously, the transformation of what we have become: real flesh and blood human beings with our histories, with the lines etched in our faces by those four thousand winters. If we did not believe that, what a very strange and hopeless world we would inhabit: a world in which again and again, when we turned to God, we would have to write off what had become of us and say ‘all that is to be discarded’, and the tape is simply reeled back to the beginning again. No: God ‘wonderfully created us’ as the prayer says, ‘and yet more wonderfully restored us’.2 The re-creation, the new beginning of resurrection is more wonderful because it is the planting of newness and freshness, beauty and vision and glory, in faces like yours and mine, in lives like yours and mine, in Adam and Eve as they are there depicted. And that is why the resurrection is good news for those in the midst of what seems to be incurable, intractable pain or failure, in the middle of a world or an experience where, practically speaking, there seems so little hope. It’s not that the risen Christ appears saying, ‘By magic I will take away your history and I will smooth out your faces’; but that the risen Christ says, ‘In the depth of this reality I will speak, I will be present and I will transform.’

There are many icons of course depicting the great saints of the classical era of Christianity, but there are also icons now of the saints of our own age, saints whose photographs we can see. And it’s one of the most intriguing and challenging things you can imagine: to look at a photograph of someone whose icon you can also see. Any fool can take a photograph (within reasonable limitations!) but only someone living in the light of the resurrection can paint an icon. And it comes home when you see the lined, ordinary, prosaic faces of modern people who have been recognized as saints; when you see those faces transformed in modern icons to show the glory and radiance coming through their very specific, recognizable contemporary faces, it is then that you see something of what this image of the resurrection is telling us. It’s this flesh and blood, this history, these sufferings and these failures that the risen Jesus touches and transfigures.

So, as we come to bless this icon of the resurrection, this image of the new beginning, we are asked to look at Adam and Eve as if in a mirror: to see there the ups and downs, lights and shadows of our own actual, complex, uneven lives, and to see that as the place where the risen Jesus begins. Because God begins always with who we are now and what we are now: and it’s there, now, that life comes from death, and light from darkness. We may begin again at every moment by the power and strength of the risen Jesus. But more: that new beginning is also the gathering-together, the leading-forward of all that we actually are and have become.

May God give us the freedom and the courage to look into that mirror: that mirror of the wintry face, of Adam and Eve grown old, and in that moment to see something of how the spring begins in its heart. The spring of Jesus’ own Easter, his rising, his ‘eastering in us’, as the poet (Gerard Manley Hopkins) says. In him our life begins afresh day by day.

To him be glory for ever and ever. Amen.

© Rowan Williams 2009

1 From the famous medieval English carol which begins ‘Adam lay ibounden, bound in a bond, Four thousand winter thought he not too long.’

2 A collect used in the Church of England at Morning Prayer during Christmastide:

Almighty God, who wonderfully created us in your own image and yet more wonderfully restored us through your Son Jesus Christ: grant that, as he came to share our humanity, so we may share the life of his divinity; who is alive and reigns with you, in the unity of the Holy Spirit , one God, now and for ever.”