God's abiding concern for the flesh

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In the sermons on the martyrs which Augustine preached at the very end of his life, we are left in no doubt as to what the donum perseverantiae, the gift of perseverence unto death, meant to him. They are extraordinary as evocations of the strength of the love of life, and of the intimate grip of the human flesh from which the soul is torn so unwillingly:

They really loved this life; yet they weighed it up. They thought of how much they should love the things eternal if they were capable of such deep love for things that pass away.

. . . [Augustine's] account of the miracles at the shrine of Saint Stephen, in the last book of the City of God, were far from being a capitulation to the "silly stories" current among the "common herd." For Augustine they were surreal rather than "silly." They betray the effort by which Augustine, a man formed in the most austerely immaterialistic current of Neo-Platonic thought available to an educated man of his age, had come to think the unthinkable concept of a future integration of flesh and spirit. The recorded miracles of healing at the shrines show God's power and his abiding concern for the flesh. . . . Miracles that had once struck Augustine, the contemplative, as of little significance, as so many lights dimmed by the sun of God's harmonious order, now take on a warmth and a glow of their own, as Augustine pays more heed to the instinctive fears of yearnings of the once-neglected body:

I know you want to keep on living. You do not want to die. And you want to pass from this life to another in such a way that you will not rise again as a dead man, but fully alive and transformed. This is what you desire. This is the deepest human feeling; mysteriously, the soul itself wishes and instinctively desires it.

-Peter Brown (The Cult of the Saints)

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The Psalms thus become a voice for the dying in which all are engaged, partly because the world is a place of death and is passing away, partly because God gives new life, but only in the pain of death. It is because God is at work even in the pain of such death that the Psalmist dares enter God's presence with these realities. They have to do with God.

- Walter Brueggemann (Praying the Psalms)

Teaching History, Confronting Suffering (Part 2 of 2)

Read Part 1 here.

Sometimes God tells you why you’re suffering or have suffered. He parts the clouds and speaks. That’s certainly possible, and I believe that it happens.

I believe, too, that God’s grace can work itself out in suffering and violence. Flannery O’Connor, more than anyone or anything else, has expanded my sense of how God’s grace operates amidst evil. In certain ways her stories have operated as a kind of commentary on Biblical violence for me, causing me to reconsider what God is up to in stories I have known since earliest childhood. In fact, there are some times when I want to say to her, “No, Flannery, God cannot work in this. This is too much.” I won’t get into it because it’s frankly too difficult to discuss, but there’s a moment at the end of one of her stories where the devil rapes a boy, and God ends up using that as a means of grace. I am deeply uncomfortable with that. But then I am equally uncomfortable saying, “No, God cannot come into this situation. It’s too gritty and nasty for him.” We serve a God, after all, who has entered into human wickedness and fully experienced its consequences.

Although I firmly believe that God works through suffering and evil, and I know that he sometimes condescends to reveal why we suffer, I remain skeptical of attempts to piece out concrete and digestible explanations for suffering. I am hesitant to do it with my own suffering, and I absolutely refuse to do it with the suffering of others. O’Connor can do it in a story with fictional characters, where she is essentially assuming the omniscience of God, but I would feel an impulse to slap anyone who decided to do the same with an abuse victim. The prophets can do so because God has divinely revealed his will to them, but I am very skeptical when people try to explain God’s prophetic purpose in, say, the First World War.

The whole life of the good Christian is a holy longing. . . . That is our life, to be trained by longing.

St. Augustine

We are essentially and ultimately desiring animals, which is simply to say that we are essentially and ultimately lovers. To be human is to love, and it is what we love that defines who we are. Our (ultimate) love is constitutive of our identity. . . . we are talking about ultimate loves--that to which we are fundamentally oriented, what ultimately governs our vision of the good life, what shapes and molds our being-in-the-world--in other words, what we desire above all else, the ultimate desire that shapes and positions and makes sense of all our penultimate desires and actions.

James K.A. Smith

Enter the deep places of our life and claim us for your purposes.

We would be more free than we are,

more bold than we dare,

more obedient than we choose

We wait for the gift of your large gift of life

that will wrench us away from death

to the miracle of Easter joy.

Walter Brueggemann

To you, O LORD, I call;

my rock, be not deaf to me,

lest, if you be silent to me,

I become like those who go down to the pit. 

David

"We are able to ponder our ashness with some confidence, only because our every Wednesday of ashes anticipates your Easter victory over that dry, flaky taste of death." -Walter Brueggemann.