Palm Sunday – 2 April 2023
In the mid 1990s, Arthur W. Frank published a landmark and fascinating study on people’s response to illness, entitled, The Wounded Storyteller. As a professor of sociology at the University of Calgary, Frank considered the various ways we respond to our illness, particularly the illnesses that are chronic in their character. He identified a number of responses that we make to our experience of such illness ranging from denial through to resignation – none of which were especially helpful in learning how to live in the fullest way in the face of our illness. What he suggested as the most redemptive or transformative pathway was what he termed as being the wounded storyteller: arriving at a position of acceptance in our illness that could allow it to become something shared with others. As we learn to tell the narrative of our illness in a way that includes others, joins with others, allows possibility for others, then we discover the seeds of a new sense of courage and meaning in what we experience.
We do not choose our suffering. In many ways, for reasons unknown to us, our suffering chooses us. But we can choose what attitude we bring to our suffering. And this can make all the difference.
Suffering chooses us. And in its election of us, we can either be passive or we can be active. We can allow the situation to overwhelm us and render us as victims. Or we can engage the situation and determine that to which it is calling us. We can reorient our passivity into passion. There is an intrinsic link between the words. They both come from the root word in Latin meaning suffering. In each there is suffering. But they are very different in their outcome. A passive life is one paralyzed. A passionate life is one with possibility.
Do we live with passivity or with passion?
On this Passion Sunday we reflect on the suffering of Jesus. Day by day this week we will be led into the drama of his suffering, the consequence of his passionate love. The suffering Christ stands almost as the epitome of human suffering. He mirrors suffering humanity. And yet at the height of his suffering, on the Cross he is surrounded, by two very different attitudes to suffering, exemplified by the two figures who are crucified with him. I think they represent the two very different responses we can make to our own experience of suffering.
The first figure cannot reconcile suffering with his understanding of God. If God exists how can there be suffering? Suffering is a negation of God. If God were truly good there would be no suffering in the world. “Are you not the Messiah? Save yourself and us.” In other words, deliver us, free us, defend us from this suffering. It is the attitude we hear on so many different occasions. It is the attitude that profoundly struggles with the reality of suffering, and which regards suffering as the antithesis of the life to which we aspire – controlled, clean, contained. The premise is that suffering and a life fully lived cannot go together.
The second figure – interestingly the one whom legend suggests as the revolutionary, the one who fought for a different life, a better future – represents quite a different attitude. Rather than defending himself against suffering, he seems to enter it. He accepts the reality of his suffering, is not afraid of it. He reflects on it. But more than this, he sees in his suffering the possibility of companionship with the Other who suffers alongside him. “Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom.” And for him, this openness in the midst of his vulnerability transforms him: “Truly, I tell you, today you will be with me in Paradise.”
The extraordinary drama of the crucifixion of Jesus is the most remarkable journey into the paradox of suffering. None of us want to suffer; all of us are committed to alleviating suffering. But suffering is an unavoidable experience in life. It is a constituent element of our identity as creatures – limited, finite, mortal – all of which is being brought home so starkly in this current pandemic.
At the heart of life is the struggle to answer the question about suffering. Through our own encounter with the Crucified and Risen Christ, as Christians we have answered the question in a very precise way. Suffering love is the one answer to anxiety suffered. A love that holds another, bears another, carries another, journeys with another – this is what ultimately transforms the experience of suffering from one of passivity to passion.
In other words, in the suffering we experience there is a possibility – the possibility of recognizing at an even deeper level than before our need of one another. It teaches us that isolation is not our future, that we cannot live fully apart from each other. We can become wounded storytellers – people who are allow our wounds to become a source of new meaning.
This is the possibility experienced by the second figure suffering with Jesus on Calvary. May it be ours also. For then our own Calvary will become our Easter.
