"Tell me yourself, I challenge you-answer. Imagine that you are creating a fabric of human destiny with the object of making men happy in the end, giving them peace and rest at last, but that it is essential and inevitable to torture to death only one tiny creature-that little child beating its breast with its fist, for instance-and to found that edifice on its unavenged tears, would you consent to be the architect on those conditions? Tell me, and tell the truth."
"No, I wouldn't consent," said Alyosha softly...
It was a Sunday evening. I sat alone, propped up against the bunks in my room on the sixth floor of Houghton Hall, my college dorm. Outside, the noises of the city and the voices and laughter of young woman, filtered into my silent space, and I encountered the above words from Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov for the first time. It was one of those moments (and I had several in college) in which everything I had staked my existence was rent from me. I felt as if my heart had been ripped out of me, chewed up, and spit into a thousand pieces upon the floor, and somehow I was to put it all back together. Feeling abandoned and nauseous, I wept.
How can a benevolent, loving God allow suffering? Where is He when His creation seems to reek with misery? Frankly, in my opinion, there is no good answer. But what I have come to accept over the course of the years is that suffering is inevitable; it is part of the very fabric of our lives, and not one of us will escape its claws. But I have also come to believe that we each have a choice: we can either lapse into bitterness because of it and become less than human or we can acknowledge it as a gift which enables us to transcend our selves so that we can become what we were truly meant to be.
Moreover, at the heart of Christianity, is the Incarnation. Though God, Jesus Christ became man and lived in the very flesh in which we live, that flesh which often seems so cumbersome, that flesh which feels pain, bleeds, and dies. And so over the years I have come to recognize and more fully believe that God is still with us. To draw from St. Patrick, He is within us, beneath us, above us, beside us, around us. He is in the heart of all who love us and in the mouth of friend and stranger. He suffers with us and comforts and restores us.
Today is poetry Wednesday. My choice for this week is John Updike's, "Seven Stanzas at Easter."
Make no mistake: if He rose at all
it was as His body;
if the cells' dissolution did not reverse, the molecules
reknit, the amino acids rekindle,
the Church will fall.
It was not as the flowers,
each soft Spring recurrent;
it was not as His Spirit in the mouths and fuddled
eyes of the eleven apostles;
it was as His flesh: ours.
The same hinged thumbs and toes,
the same valved heart
that- pierced-died, withered, paused, and then
regathered out of enduring Might
new strength to enclose.
Let us not mock God with metaphor,
analogy, sidestepping, transcendence;
making of the event a parable, a sign painted in the
faded credulity of earlier ages:
let us walk through the door.
The stone is rolled back, not papier-mache,
not a stone in a story,
but the vast rock of materiality that in the slow
grinding of time will eclipse for each of us
the wide light of day.
And if we will have an angel at the tomb,
make it a real angel,
weighty with Max Planck's quanta, vivid with hair,
opaque in the dawn light, robed in real linen
spun on a definite loom.
Let us now seek to make it less monstrous,
for our own convenience, our own sense of beauty,
lest, awakened in one unthinkable hour, we are
embarrassed by the miracle,
and crushed by remonstrance.
Because she has been blessed with a true gift for communicating and an art for utilizing language; and because what she has to say is well worth listening to and made both Jared and me teary; and because she is godmother to those feet and one of our dear, dear friends; and because we love her: We invite you to listen to Molly Sabourin's most recent podcast.
"April is the cruellest month," T.S. Eliot commences his work, "The Wasteland," and throughout the duration of the last several weeks, I have oft repeated this line but with a protest and a query, "Should not January receive this portrayal, Mr. Eliot?" I have long since forsaken any attempts to conjure up feelings of gaiety with the launch of a new year. While in theory I laud the practice of resolutions and a chance for a fresh start, in practice, I tend to feel a little melancholy, a little restless, a little detached.
Upon reflection, I understand that my tendency to experience a lackluster spirit around this time is partially due to the reality that many of my loved ones encountered death in this month and that despite the years, loss continues to permeate my being as memories abound. Moreover, within the last twenty-five days, many of those close to me have endured losses of their own - a mother, a brother, a grandmother, a daughter, a sister, an unborn child - and I mourn with them. And then of course, there is Haiti and her people. With so much suffering and tragedy, the temptation to acquiesce to feelings of despondency and sink into lethargy is real. Yet, we must stand vigilant and wage war against these venomous seeds lest they take root and destroy our very selves. After all, despite the death, there is always the resurrection.
Last Saturday evening, as my husband grocery shopped, my eldest son created new Lego ships in the living room, my youngest son slept, and I cleaned the basement, Natalie Merchant's "Life is Sweet," popped up on Pandora. Merchant's vocals never fail to elicit some form of emotion within me, and as I stopped wiping the layers of dust off our furniture and listened to the words of this song, I scooped my middle son, who was quietly sitting on the couch gobbling down a bowl full of goldfish crackers, into my arms and just sat with him, confessing all for which I have to be grateful.
