The most well recognised icon of the Christian tradition is also an icon of intense suffering. But Christians do not major on that aspect of the cross. They major on what the death of Jesus on a cross bought them. The suffering represented by the icon is largely overlooked and often not a popular topic.
Could it be that suffering as a tool for transformation has been largely ignored as a subject in the Christian tradition? It is as if the Christian tradition tends to major on the positive, the victorious, the "afterlife" and downplay suffering as a very real aspect of living this life. I think it has some connection with the doctrine of "life after death". Christians tend to live for the life after this life, for the "Second Coming"of Christ and tend to major on ways to escape the suffering of this world and to obtain fire insurance for the life after this one. Suffering is not a tool but a burden and God is a giant cosmic servant employed to reduce pain and suffering.
The effect this has on the way Christians live is obvious. We tend to minimise this life and this earth and everyone who is not a Christian to a means that will be justified by the end.
Buddhism, that does not have that perspective, major on suffering and how the correct approach to suffering can transform the way we live this life. For them, suffering is a tool, for Christians, suffering is something that must be avoided at all cost and that should actually not be part of our life-experience. Something we are entitled to escape based on our relationship with a loving Father.
Christians employ various instruments like prayer, service to God, evangelism and sacrifice to obtain favour with God and through that escape suffering. Buddhists do not have an external being to appeal to, so they have to transform suffering itself into a tool to reach perfection.
In the light of those thoughts, the questions below that I have received from Tracey can become guiding lights in a healthy discussion. Let's see what we can do with them
1. Do you think all human suffering leads us to the same outcome?
2. Does suffering ultimately cause growth and is growth suffering. I see suffering as such a negative process if I don’t see it in the light of growth.
3. If everything is in love, through love, can suffering be a form of love?
4. Does suffering depend on my mindset, is it connected to my ego and or my attachment to an expected outcome?
Thank you Joe, the concept of the spheres is helpful. The following quotes helps me to see deeper: "Human disassociation from God makes the human-sphere intrinsically dysfunctional. It is broken. As a broken sphere, it exploits, ravages, oppresses and disappoints. The sphere then lacks the transcendence and immanence that is true to it. What then governs it is power, covetousness and darkness, not Light and Life. ... We go into all of the 'cosmos' and order it through talking, doing and reconnecting it to the rule of God. This is called the great commission, ..."
I want to offer another cosmological approach that may offer some more answers. I may be wrong but I still see in your approach, the very subtle seed of dualism. Because there are spheres, it is easier to separate them in our minds and the separation then becomes experiential. What if the spheres are constructs of our reasoning, our cerebral attempts to describe and understand the Indescribable, strengthened by Plato and other philosophers? Is it possible that the spheres are constructs of a cosmology that denies the ontological oneness of all things? This kind of reasoning is represented by Plato's, "I think therefore I am".
I want to turn that on its head (forgive my presumption!) to "I am, therefore I think". That approach will have its inception in being, instead of reasoning.
What then is the reason for being? What is the reason for existence?
Once that is established, I can start reasoning about the outflow of being, like pain and suffering for example. From that perspective, I find a reason for the existence of pain and suffering in being and not in judgment and penal consequences. That approach answers a whole lot of questions that arise from "original sin", the "justice of God", God's omniscience, prevenient grace, the existence of hell and heaven, "eternal damnation" and especially from Calvin's "predestination" theory. These cerebral concepts have been the source of much division and blood-shed in our tradition.
In this primarily Perennial Wisdom approach, the spheres you describe are one because everything, every one and every moment exists only in the Creator (our name for the Ground of all Being is God, so let's use the name with the caveat that it is an Anglo-Saxon word that can never describe anything). It exists only in God for it is ontologically one with God-self. In my language, God used the only matter that existed before God created sequence and time - God-self. in other words, starting with sequence, he/she created within God's own being. Which means that all things carry in themselves the God-seed. A massive Oak tree is still in being an Oak although it is radically different from the Oak seed it grew from.
You once wrote to me, "The incarnated Life-Seed of the Holy Spirit imputing the life of Jesus in us is clearly the root of the Christian existence. Without this, nothing. The contemplative spiritual life, if it is to have any effect, aims to nurture this donor Life-Seed within."
I can agree wholeheartedly and I did at the time, but if you really read the preceding paragraph, you will see that I am now expanding the "incarnated Life-Seed" to being the foundation of all life, all created matter, and every moment; and not only the "root of the Christian existence".
This view is the foundation of Franciscan spirituality and I think Bonaventure expressed it sublimely: “The magnitude of things . . . clearly manifests . . . the wisdom and goodness of the triune God, who by power, presence and essence exists uncircumscribed in all things. God is within all things but not enclosed; outside all things, but not excluded; above all things, but not aloof; below all things, but not debased."
The theological differentiation between Pan-entheism, and Pantheism is very important here and Bonaventure draws a clear line between "all things are God" and "God is in all things". This is where being becomes the initial and foundational departure point for all reasoning, without playing around in the murky waters of worshipping monkeys and cows - "I am, therefore I think".
I think my mind was made up when I read this from Richard Rohr: "Bonaventure spoke of God as one “whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere.” Therefore the origin, magnitude, multitude, beauty, fullness, activity, and order of all created things are the very “footprints” and “fingerprints” (vestigia) of God. Now that is quite a lovely and very safe universe to live in. Welcome home!"
I came home to a very safe and lovely universe as the foundation for my own reasoning and then only extrapolated it to my thinking on original sin, the justice of God, God's omniscience, prevenient grace, the existence of hell and heaven, eternal damnation, predestination, eschatology, the "Great Tribulation", the "Rapture", the "Marriage Feast of the Lamb", the "Second Coming of Jesus" and restorative versus punitive justice.
You beautifully concluded at the time (a couple of years ago): "Presumably, contemplation is the experiential mystical experience of a person simply touching the divine. The Life-Seed flourishes best in that specific ecosystem. The ecosystem that is the love quadrangle relationship of the triune, plus one. If that one-us can touch and maintain this touch with the Tri-Divine, the Life-Seed is energised with Life."
Now, if you find any value in my ramblings, just expand that sublime statement to all things, all people, and every moment and let's see how that influences our discussion on suffering.
We also suffer beyond our inward and existential life, our practical life is fraught. These are some initial thoughts of practical engagement, and its struggles.
Let us assume for a moment that there are two primary spheres: God-made sphere, human-made sphere.
The God-made sphere includes everything you've probably already imagined:
The invisible world of non-corporeal angels and creatures.
The intangible world of virtues and valuables.
The physical creation of organic and inorganic things
The various relationships and relational order assigned to govern all of the above.
The human sphere includes, among possible others, our humanly created stuff and all the relationships and relational orders we come up to govern this:
Philosophical systems: Politics, economics, theology, culture and other worldview stimuli.
Practical systems: Government, investment, banking, trade, health, planning, education, agriculture, and other means of delivery.
Practical products (informed by the systems of philosophy and delivered via practical systems, utilising the God-sphere): Cities, buildings, cars, vehicles, bank accounts, insurance, ploughs, wheat, bread, etc.
How are we to engage?
The God-sphere ultimately makes most sense once we are 'born from above'; it is spiritually discerned and experientially encountered, as we see God as God is through faith.
But it is mysterious, too big for just our mental reason and logic, and requires a lot of healthy, inspired, holy imagination and trust-based engagement.
Where does it fail: The degree to which we remain visually impaired, failing to see and attribute God's presence and authorship, we fall into ignorance that leads to idolatry. Idolatry is the biggest issue.
When people utilise the God-sphere, but without God, they miss the endowment, context and value of what they use, which immediately results in perversion or corruption.
Human disassociation from God makes the human-sphere intrinsically dysfunctional. It is broken. As a broken sphere, it exploits, ravages, oppresses and disappoints. The sphere then lacks the transcendence and immanence that is true to it. What then governs it is power, covetousness and darkness, not Light and Life. This fuels lust, fear and obfuscation. We become defensive and worn-out. What is born from eternity becomes only temporal, a single-use commodity to be used and discarded.
God calls some to work in the God-Sphere, to teach, preach, prophecy, study, examine, paint and muse over. The primary objective is to entice humans to look beyond the veil and discover - simultaneous spiritual-natural enlightenment.
If this enlightenment process becomes overly spiritual, it becomes religion. If, on the other hand, it becomes excessively naturalistic, it becomes idolatrous and occultic.
But, only a few people can be engaged in this full-time, maybe nobody should? And these days, the religious and the natural are split, lacking a cohesive single integrated understanding. Science sees itself as the sole arbiter of the natural, and the religious denounce the natural as destined for destruction.
The rest of us are called to the human-sphere. This means we are called by God to enter into the human-sphere and to interact with it. We go into all of the 'cosmos' and order it through talking, doing and reconnecting it to the rule of God. This is called the great commission, but in fact is the great omission. For two-thousand years we seemed to have neglected the human-sphere, driven out by the enlightenment, split off by Plato, if our foregoers had not already retreated to their monasteries long ago.
Right now, in 2022, we find it in terrible condition. The master of the house went away, and the wicked servants partied neglectfully. These fields are hardly tended, the pasture is overgrazed, desertifying, the soil is dead, and the rivers dry. People fly-tipped all sorts of junk everywhere, the fences are down, and the flock is scattered. What a mission, what a mess.
Our lament is this:
· May the Master take out and beat the wicked servants soon – judgement is the Lords and He will repay (this helps us not usurp God in this)
· May the Lord of the field send more workers! (Then we immediately offer ourselves)
· May the Lord return. (Now to this desolation, soon in fullness)
As soon as we engage the human-sphere we find that we fight the following:
Ourselves: We are a problem as far as we are carnally minded, egoistic, and living out of the false 'self'. We are a work in progress and still faulty in the doing. We cultivate our souls, and we do it with trustworthy others.
Others: The people around us are similar to ourselves and sometimes less or more messed up - an unreliable bunch. We need to look beyond what we see in others, find what God sees, and call that out of them through words and deeds.
Culture: Sometimes, long after people are no longer around, the culture of what those people left behind lingers influentially, mainly as a barrier.
Constructs: People and cultures give birth to constructs (companies, clubs, charities, churches, etc.) The problem with constructs is that they are not human and have zero humanity. The construct is utterly immune to incarnation and therefore cannot and does not exhibit the fruit of the Spirit (love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, mercy, self-control) or creativity or beauty. God does not live in buildings made by human hands and stone. It is a soulless thing and an instrument of oppression. If the brand or company is bigger than the employees, then its customers will be exploited and oppressed. Constructs always transcend and usurp people in the end. We swapped the family, the household, and the body motif for the construct, which was never going to work.
Dark spirits: Demons make nests out of our brokenness, others open to them, culture and constructs. These then rule and destroy through these nests by taking occupation, causing division and darkness. This occupation sows weeds and poison. (Personally, I do not believe that humans have a spirit. We are a living soul-body. But we are a temple. God's Spirit can live in us or some other pretender. Whichever then is joined to energise and govern our living soul-body.)
Mystery: God's ways are not our ways, His thoughts are not our thoughts, and His plans do not need our endorsement. God sees time and events with ultimate intelligence. He plans and executes His effective rule and plan with levels of complexity that we simply cannot fathom. By close relationship with God, we can see dimly, as through a veil.
How do we progress and become fruitful then?
We play, and we obey. God loves us to be creative, explore and originate to a point that He then calls on us to listen, learn from all that play and then obey. Playing is God’s pedagogy, but obedience is His Kingdom.
We acknowledge that God is simply more intelligent, better, more informed, brighter, etc., than a human is different from a microbe.
We stop trying to be in control. God never gives us any power or authority, but says all power and authority is His, we go forth in that realisation.
We become yielded in our creativity - less wildfire, more creativity from a submitted soul.
We stop trying to know it all - we learn that children the Father lead ask not where they go; love need not know.
We become governed. Spiritual exercises of fasting, if we are greedy, giving when we are covetous, service when we are controlling, prayer if we are dislocated, the bible if we are dry and stupid, silence if we monopolise, sleep if we are too busy, Shabbat when we are empty, yielded when we rush out, etc. God’s gym is full of equipment, knock yourself out, get fit or you won’t make the race.
We love. We love God, Who loves us, so that we can love ourselves, so that we can love our families, so that we can love our neighbours, so that we can love even our enemies.
Love favours us engaging broken people, cast out their demons, heal them, and introduce them to God. This starts by at least praying, then being exemplary, manifesting God's power, and then only talking. We ask for love to be perfected in us, individually and corporately.
We build a fresh wineskin. The construct is always demonic.
We tend to the fields and prepare the house for the Owner.
We form a new culture based on God with us that honours and depends on God.
We prophesy against the constructs, culture and lies as far as it is oppressive and exploitative.
We declare the defeat of all fake powers that assume what is only the Lords.
We work in this lamentable condition of the fields (let's assume for now that the house is the church, the fields the market), and no doubt, it requires much pioneering work, sweat, struggle and toil. We must work with weapons in our hands, listening to a constant stream of reviling from without and impatient doubting from within.
We require discipline to keep firmly to our graft into Jesus and the Spirit of God that entered us to turn us into a holy temple.
Work and the workplace are simply how we live and influence from the God-sphere into the human-sphere and make it on earth as it is in heaven.
What are the main channels that feed the dislocated self?
One: 'There is no me when there's no other.'
We know the hypothetical no man is an island saying. Imagine a human that was born, the last human on earth. Raised by machines, this person has never encountered any other person of its species and kind. Imagine you are that person. Who would you think you are? What will be your self-image?
The African philosophy of ubuntu states that no human is born a person. The human becomes a person only in a community. The interaction matures the personhood; how the human 'see' this surrounding community, how it learns how this community 'see' them. Out of this sight evolves a person.
What is a community? Maybe community is one of the most defiled words in our vocabulary. Be that so, but let us define community as our neighbour: those near and dear to us; those near but not yet dear to us; and those unfortunately near to us but not dear at all.
We learn from all our interactions with these much about ourselves. The mirror of the other signals us daily. The problem is that the person of the other distorts this mirror's lens. We get an impure image. The question is, how much distortion and how critical is that distortion? Even the minutest error introduces a flaw that can become a significant personality distortion over many years.
We feel this most with our family of origin. Primarily, our parents loved us. But imperfectly. These imperfections may rise as a mountain in our 'self'. The wounds caused by this imperfect love scar deeply.
How many of us need years of loving therapy or counsel to unpick this? What we learn is that it was false. The 'self' formed out of this falsehood is false.
Two: We learn about ourselves from our successes and failures.
Imagine all six-foot-two inches of me put on a tutu and ballet shoes at the tender age of 55, with my current post-covid pot belly. What lies ahead is the understanding that I will not be any good at ballet. No matter how willfully, determinedly and obsessively I try. I am too tall, too fat and too old. I hear someone say: "You'll never know till you try it, dude!" while they dream of the YouTube hits they will get when the flawed attempts go viral.
Many of us think we are God's gift because we succeeded. Others that we are rubbish because we failed. Most of us develop weird schizoid inner contradictions. We are a mess of fail-success feedback loops that gets distilled down from all the circumstances and conditions to a self-narrative that says you are the stuff or you are crap. We proceed with hubris where we previously succeeded and reluctantly where we once failed.
What has success and failure got to do with any of it? Famously, Thomas Edison failed and failed and failed until he did not fail. Similarly, we see high-flying successes plundering into spectacular ignominy.
Three: We learn by situations, circumstances and environmental factors.
Someone born into a wealthy, affluent society may believe they are entitled to be heard, respected and considered. Someone of much greater ability, intellect or personal quality may think that themselves inferior because of a modest upbringing, because of attending a back-water school, or any other image of modesty imprinted on themself.
Success or validation from a widely resourced society cannot compare to modest success in a dysfunctional and unresourced society lacking in all the institutions. Environment signifies. Imagine if we form a sense of 'self' at either of these extremes ends of this spectrum? What a dangerous folly.
What reflections of self will a person gain from living through and surviving a war, false imprisonment, bankruptcy due to an economic downturn, failure to summit Everist because of a bad case of Nepali food poisoning? Or of years inside of an abusive marriage. Or a preacher telling you that God needs martyrs - and you look the part?
Imagine growing up in a society that discounts and discriminates against you because of gender, skin colour, the way you like to have sex, your age, your red hair, sprouting a big nose or your tendency to gain weight faster?
Four: 'I think, therefore I am.'
What about internal self-generation? The 'self' formed by our logic is the promise held forth by philosophers, professors, and theologians of literature and art. There is constantly an entire world of self-help, self-improvement and associated means to victories. What knowledge-driven thinking helps with and has a legitimate role is in helping us to interpret the world around us. What it is not so good at is interpreting us. Our thinking is biased. We are not great at forming an unbiased 'self' view.
Other channels may also feed an intrinsically erroneous 'self' emergence. These four channels are not a definitive list.
All of these channels can become helpful too. But how to handle that isn't easy. I find it beneficial to use all of the above as a secondary source, a confirmation rather than a primary source. Mary reacted in a telling way to things happening around the growing boy Jesus. She treasured all these things in her heart. But there is a count it all dung moment too.
Let go of the four channels' feed to the incarnated presence of God's Spirit as signalled in Ephesians 2:10 and Psalm 139 for a much greater truth. We discover our soul's character as the character of God's Spirit emerges to shine through our soul-body. It will come out differently from any other person in a delightful manner.
Much of our pain and, if it is chronic, suffering comes from the 'self' created from the feed of the four channels.
Thank you for this very well researched and thought provoking article. I loved your cosmological approach to answer the question of suffering. I am personally not in agreement with your view (at present), but open to be swayed. I thought in stead of just espousing my view, it will serve the purpose of the forum better if I ask some clarifying questions as my first response. You may even sway me.
I quote, and pray that I am not quoting out of context: "Hardship simply amplifies the constant whisper of the pain of separation and makes it scream or even shout loudly. Suffering makes the God-breath's separation from God amplify the primordial 'My God why have you forsaken me" residue in us.....
There is a total cure for suffering; it is a God-engaged/ abiding/ grafted/ connected/ life, never disrupted or disturbed union with God ....
Also, this does not make suffering, or the causes of suffering cease. It disarms the effect of such suffering internally. Suffering becomes bearable, forgivable and tolerable. Not nice, not fun, not cool - survivable and eventually we can pass through victoriously, even though victory seldom feels triumphant, mostly just feelings of relief."
I understand that you connect my tendency to suffer with my deepest desire for reconnection with the God whose Breath I am. Kind of like an asthma sufferer's deepest desire for an unimpeded breath of clear air. I agree with that and I agree with your statement that there is a total cure for suffering - "a never disrupted or disturbed union with God".
1. I presume that your place of departure is that the union was disrupted by the original sin and that mankind lost the breath until we could breath it in again when we are "born again"?
2. Richard Rohr's statement rings in my ears: "Pain is the rental we pay to live this life but suffering is optional." It says that the hard edges and sharp corners of this very difficult and complex life is par for the course but that we do not have to suffer. I see here a clear difference between pain and suffering.
I do not get that so clearly from your exposition. Why is pain the rental we have to pay to live this life? Why is it so damn difficult at times? I get it that the pain is a stimulus to seek re-connection with the God of the breath. But was it planned that we lost the connection first so that we can be stimulated by the result of our lostness to seek re-connection?
I agree with you that the answer to the question of suffering is probably hidden in our cosmology and I therefore need more clarification on your view of our origins and God's plan.
I am very aware that we are each describing only the part of the elephant we can feel. I confess to my own short sightedness ... blindness.
I happen to say the Shema with the Hebrews at least once a day these days to remind me that I am trying to describe the Indescribable:
"Hear oh Israel, the Ineffable is God, the Ineffable is One".
Thank you Stephan and Tracy for getting this Forum started.
Advance warning, I think that I've fallen a bit for a specific version of thinking at the moment. This is that we have two conflicting 'centres' from which we can choose to live our lives from.
The first is from the Genesis account of God making our species. This is from cribbed from the BibleRef commentary, which communicates something stunning:
"God's creation is described using the term bā'rā, which implies "creation" in the sense of "coming into being," or of "something from nothing."
But here, in Genesis 2:7, the creation of the first human being uses the Hebrew word for "formed:" yi'ser. This describes the actions of an artist, a sculptor, or a potter.
This term is specific in that it always refers to work done on some existing substance. In this case, God is forming human life from the ground itself. That Hebrew word is ā'pār, which refers to dirt, powder, debris, or ash.
Following the storyline of this verse, after being "formed," man was merely a lump of well-formed dirt.
It's what God did next that made us alive: He breathed into the man's nose the breath of life. Literally, God breathed life into the lump, transforming it into a living being, or "creature," or "soul."
All of life originated with God, but human life began with the personal breath of God. Without God, we simply would not live.
The name Adam is directly from the Hebrew ā'dām, which literally means "man." This name reflects the dust from which we were formed: the Hebrew word for ground is 'adamah'."
So, when God made a bloke, called 'Topsoil', God made us from creation's debris, from the planet itself he artistically sculpted us, then into this inanimate clay God-breathed 'the breath of life' and the debris sculpture became animated, referred to as a 'living soul'.
The life comes out of God's own being. I presume God does not need to breathe in and out to stay alive, so clearly, God exuding or expelling substances from His own being, so to say, is something other than human breath.
These are the only two ingredients, debris and God exudate. That makes us.
I assume that this substance that came from God is like some sort of a homing pigeon, a GPS, a homing device, that continually sighs and yearns to return back from where it originated from.
Therefore, this predominant characteristic, this 'breath of life' merged with the debris-puppet to form a living soul (body+breath combination). So this soul-body is one thing; an animated body.
So, we can say goodbye to Plato. No dualism (body and soul), even trialisms ('logos', 'thymos' and 'eros'), only oneness. Plato goes on to describe, in his parable of the 'Ship of Fools', how the captain of a boat is drugged and the control of the ship is given over to incompetent, mutineers.
The living soul of the Bible is in stark contrast with the fabled 'self' Plato describes as a boat, with a 'true self', captain. But jumping to Freud's odd restatement of Plato (Id, Ego and Super Ego), is full of a fractious crew of sub-egos or lesser selves. All these crew members constantly shout out directions and opinions into the ears of the hard-of-hearing and somewhat klutzy captain. This is the situation that the alternative centre we sometimes choose to live from is: bobbing along life's waves, in a cacophony of contradictions, on the verge of mutiny and out of control. May as well drink up all the grog and eat all the food, tomorrow we die.
In contrast, living from the centre of the living soul, this breath-of-life that originated from God is desperate to reconnect with God. Living from this centre, we end up as described in Psalm 42:1-2: "As the deer pants for the water brooks, So pants my soul for You, O God. My soul thirsts for God, for the living God. When shall I come and appear before God?" The living soul's primary hope is to appear right before God.
The separation from God is a form of groaning and suffering separation anxiety. Maybe all our human suffering comes right back to this simple, single angst.
When our bodies hurt through sickness, assault, or even horrendous violations such as rape, we suffer because we are vulnerable since we are 'exposed' no longer nestled deep inside of God. This exposure is felt through the flesh as pain.
We suffer mental anguish, rejection, unrequited love, disappointment, slander and other reflected assaults of the projected reflection distortions flung at us by others.
We feel naked and poor, the soul-body needs clothing - the shekinah of God's radiance clothed the naked ancestor in the story. It was a noble and rich, multi-coloured coat. Once we fell out of communion with God, we suffered cold and nakedness.
Suffering is a state of reality. But in this world of struggle, there is a solution (and that is possibly the sole purpose of devils, destruction, pain and disappointments), following the instinctive urges of the soul, to return back to God.
Later on, Jesus says to Nicodemus that he must be born a second time and that this second birth is when the Spirit of God incarnates the soul-body. But this is never us, only Him. It is a foreign lodger in our soul-body, making this soul-body a temple of God.
I do not think that humans are born with a spirit. I do not think there even is such a thing as a human spirit. I think there is only One Spirit that is of any worth, God! Lots of lessor disembodied, invisible creatures, some noble, some gross exist. This is why Jesus did so many demon deliverances -because people's soul-body-temple picked up 'squatters', spirits that are not benign, frequently observable, and mostly deceptively parasitical.
But, if we open the door and let Jesus (actually the Spirit of Jesus) in, we are incarnated with a true temple resident who will never leave us, forsake us or let us go. Unless we drastically decide to evict Him.
With this intimate proximity of God-in-us, we can yield our soul-body away from the fake fictional mental fabrication called the 'self' to the incarnated Truth. And so suffering is our friend to remind us that even if we are happy, everything is going swell, we are in fact pining, yearning, struggling and suffering - until 'in God, our soul comes to rest'.
This is what in all our various posts and blogs and thoughts, we always come back to 'letting go' which is a clumsy way of saying turn away, turn-towards and surrender to God's embrace.
Hardship is a forceful reminder of unconscious reality.
Hardship simply amplifies the constant whisper of the pain of separation and makes it scream or even shout loudly. Suffering makes the God-breath's separation from God amplify the primordial 'My God why have you forsaken me" residue in us.
There is a total cure for suffering; it is a God-engaged/ abiding/ grafted/ connected/ life, never disrupted or disturbed union with God.
But, we are not great at it and it requires lots and lots of struggle and failure and effort.
Also, this does not make suffering, or the causes of suffering cease. It disarms the effect of such suffering internally. Suffering becomes bearable, forgivable and tolerable. Not nice, not fun, not cool - survivable and eventually we can pass through victoriously, even though victory seldom feels triumphant, mostly just feelings of relief.
But, hey, take notice! What a magnificent truth! We are wonderfully made and God likes to live in clay pots. We are gifted with the 'living-breath' that made us a 'living-soul-body', and we are then incarnated by a Magnificent Spirit.
There is a lesser centre that came about from a snake lying from a tree branch. It is a version of us that is false, a lie. It is an identity severed and independent from God. Promised as a 'freedom day', a liberation, graduation, it launches out untethered from anything like God. This seems so mature, so grown-up and so sophisticated. I too am like God, and God does not need a God.
The Bible calls it the flesh, but in our times it is called 'self'. Self-actualisation (being complete without God), self-help (redemption DYI), true self (God independent identity), etc...
This is the greater counterfeit, but it is dualistic. Self splits away from our body; it is disembodied: a 'self-awareness' that is distinct and fractured from our body because it is not from God. Our soul-body is from and by God. He is jealous of it. He will not allow that to be merged with the fake consciousness called self-consciousness or self. Therefore the illusioned self splits from the body. Pain and suffering then become a body thing.
God will not incarnate into that 'self' creature either. It is a creature made by us or a concoction we fabricated together with others. So when we are going on in life and feel weak, it is because we are living out of a lie.
Suffering then becomes an offence, an affront to our own godhood. It is shameful, weak, horrible, and embarrassing because it contradicts our own elevation, our separate, self-created awareness, not from God. It proves each time that it is not God. As far as a centre to live out of, it is simply a false trail. When we ask God to bless this journey on the false trail, we sub-ordinate God as the servant to the greatness of the self we made. God will not do that. So, we become frustrated, petulant and hurt.
This lack of satisfaction serves to make us turn our back away from the 'self', and re-engage in facing our true essential God-fashioned, God-breathed, God-incarnated being. This being has no identity apart from God. God-is-its-God and its life-force.
The fruit from this union is the Spirit's character. This character flows from our innermost holy-hole which is the temple-space occupied by a Spirit, a Holy Spirit of God. It flows from us but is not of us.
How many times have you wanted or sensed that there must be or is a flow? We feel the need for this instinctively.
What else is this desired flow, but a flow of the Temple Resident through our embodied-soul being? Suffering always is too much for us. It makes us need God. It helps us to return.
And it completes what is lacking in the sufferings of Jesus to bring into force the Kingdom-of-God, where the worst that can be thrown at God is defeated.
If we are a God-temple, if the incarnation is real, then we will go through filth, hurt, failure, disappointment, and pain - just like Jesus did, because are we not His body?
There is simply no other way to house God on this planet's battlefield. Do the bankers want Jesus-centred finance? Are politicians scrambling to serve under King God? Hostility is rooted here. Sadly, the world of pain is the creation of many self-centred individuals and groups. The human systems, made by us, are the primary forces of oppression and exploitation.
I think that some level of escatology is actually good. What is hope, but not a future-orientated expectation? Do we anticipate a terrible emptiness? Do we imagine that all is grim and exploitation and oppression manage to destroy all things? Then what is there to hope for?
Because we expect some sort of future eternity, we become resilient through the hope of it all. Through the thought that if I don't get it all done, and if I believe that all I did or do flows out of the Temple core, and therefore I am part of a much higher concert (a concert based on eternity in motion), then I endure in expectation and hope that it carries on - in spite of my departure or end. Hope in such escatology is important to contextualise our life in space-time as part of something, therefore meaningful.
Such eschatology is critical. Since the original God-breathed part does not come from anything temporary - it comes from eternalness. Therefore, my deepest awareness and longing is still for that eternalness. Not that we should be disappointed at the eschatological outlook presented in the Bible, although we are hardly competent (in my view) to make any decent sense of it. Why make sense of it? Enjoy the feeling of it; dream and imagine it.