by K. J. Ramsey
Suffering shatters our illusions of immortality, and it is only in the shattering that we can come to know God and ourselves as we truly are.8 Praying the psalms teaches us how to protest, be shattered, and praise in the midst of pain. Our protests over suffering betray belief in an illusion that we control our lives. Grace converts our protests over the absurdity and injustice of suffering into prayer. Protests become prayer, and prayer can turn into praise. As my friend Chuck DeGroat recently said, “The beauty of lamenting your pain is that your cynicism is refined into grief, your scapegoating is refined into trust, your anxiety is refined into rest.”9
Right in the middle of the Word of God, we find that radical honesty about the true state of our souls creates beautiful remembrance that God relates to us with overflowing love. The psalms show God’s children forming into their collective memory the reality that God hears them. Praying the psalms and allowing their honesty to animate our relationship with God causes this memory to be shaped in our lonely, frightened souls as well. In the fellowship of the psalms, inadequacy becomes the nativity of intimacy.
Learning about our divided minds, their need for wholeness, and the way Scripture gives us an example of being known in our vulnerability has brought us to a critical question: will we experience our pain or spend our lives avoiding it?
Cistercian monk Thomas Merton warns us, “Indeed, the truth that many people never understand, until it is too late, is that the more you try to avoid suffering, the more you suffer, because smaller and more insignificant things begin to torture you in proportion to your fear of being hurt. The one who does most to avoid suffering is, in the end, the one who suffers the most.”10
God continuously invites us to know his presence in our pain, but we often miss his invitation because we are too busy dismissing his messengers.11 When we paint over pain with insistence on truth, we are discarding the substance of our greatest comfort. Emotion is the landscape of experiencing God’s presence, but most of us don’t know how to tread its ground. When we quickly exhort ourselves or others to believe truth, we walk past the trails that lead to our healing.
The only way the descent of suffering becomes beautiful is through learning to listen to and respond to our emotions. Think of emotion as energy in motion. Emotion is the energy that guides and organizes your brain.12 Whether you consider yourself an emotional person or not, emotion fuels your life. Rather than a thing to be bewildered by or ashamed of, emotion is the spark God created to most move you toward himself. Your difficult emotions are not a barrier to joy; they are a conduit to receiving the love of God in your innermost being.
Long before we have the words sadness, fear, or shame to describe the way we feel, our bodies are responding to the world of stimuli around us. Our brains assess the shifts in our environment to determine how to respond according to the level of perceived safety or attraction. Emotion is first and foremost preparing us for action through the way our brains constantly assess and appraise the world around us. Our bodies respond to these rapid-fire appraisals, forming sensations and perceptions that give us awareness of a shift happening within ourselves, shifts that generally are originating from the lower regions of our brains that are not immediately connected to our conscious awareness. We first experience emotion through sensory perceptions and physical behaviors, like the flush of our face, the shaking in our hands, or a heaviness in our chest. We may automatically respond with a sigh, with a groan, by looking down, or by tightening our shoulders. What is perceived by the lower regions of the brain is swiftly reinforced in the body, carrying the flow of emotion through us and into our relationships. As we become conscious of these shifts, and when they persist, we experience an awareness of our feelings—anger, fear, shame, sadness, guilt, joy.
The emotional energy inside each of us can seem obtrusive, threatening, or confusing, and this is largely because we learned to experience and evaluate emotion in our families of origin. Their emotional volatility or even lack of emotional expression impacts the way we experience how safe and good emotions are. But judging or distancing ourselves from emotions will only limit our ability to experience God’s presence in our pain. Emotion guides our lives whether we give it our attention or not. Judging emotion as bad or dismissing its presence in your life only increases its power to control you.
Emotions are reflections of something central to the heart of God, the One who allows himself to be impacted by us. God feels grief,13 joy,14 compassion,15 pity,16 love,17 and hate.18 God is far more comfortable with emotion than we are. To find our way to joy and hope in suffering, we must follow his example instead of the minimizing, dismissive norms of our culture.19
Shame will always try to minimize or magnify our emotions in suffering, but God invites us to pay appropriate attention to them as a lens through which we can see him. First Corinthians 6:19 tells us our bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit. Our bodies are the place where God has chosen to dwell. As we become more aware of the thousands of shifts happening in our bodies every day, we become more capable of treating our bodies as the place of worship God calls them. When witnessed with awareness, our painful and pleasant emotions and sensations can become the place we realize God resides in us. Practicing mindful awareness of our emotions can change our brain structure, rewiring neural pathways that used to lead us into despair into pathways of peace.20 Turning toward our painful emotions with nonjudgmental awareness can be the very act that over time transforms us by renewing our minds.
We can turn toward the pain of suffering because God has turned toward us. “Our brokenness is often so frightening to face,” Henri Nouwen reminds us, “because we live it under the curse. Living our brokenness under the curse means that we experience our pain as a confirmation of our negative feelings about ourselves.”21 We don’t have to live in a cycle of negative reinforcement, fearing our suffering, avoiding its presence, and then feeling detached from God’s love if suffering doesn’t cease. “We have the mind of Christ.”22 Because God has turned toward us in Christ, we can turn toward our pain. And when we do, our minds are renewed to be like his.
Maybe turning toward pain is a form of repentance, metanoia. Maybe suffering, with its steady flood of pain and sorrow to turn toward, makes you and me more ready to be whole.
Leaning toward pain is not a lesson that, once learned, gets left behind like the third grade and its schoolbooks. My small story, like yours, is nested in a larger narrative, a narrative in process, where the powers of darkness still sway and startle my mind and heart even though the end of the story has been written.23 I know pain and sadness and weakness are an invitation to be held, but my body still lives in the shadows where pain is an enemy to kill or deny or ignore. A decade into days full of pain, and I still push back against its presence. I still resist the place where I know God will meet me.
Pain, shame, and sadness remain places of tension in the landscape of my life, gravel-strewn quarries whose jagged cliffs and depths appear fearsome, where mining feels like cruel self-robbery, and also where the light of love catches the edges of what looked blunt, scattering belovedness as through a prism. When I kneel toward the small, scattered stones of sorrow or shame or grief, ordinary time lived in the boundaries of sixty-second minutes is penetrated by the Love that transcends time.
But sixty-second minutes have long synchronized my soul to the rhythm of scarcity, and when reminders of weakness swiftly come, I’m apt to avoid the quarry. I skirt its edges. I turn my back to the glinting, sharp objects below, looking instead at the mountain of accomplishment I’d rather conquer. The tasks I’d like to finish. The dishes that need to be done. The emails to return. The people to speak with. But the mountain of all I wish I could do or achieve is only another face of fear disconnecting me from me. All the tasks are hills in the ascension of my kingdom, and my kingdom is a crumbling, insatiable lie. The flush of my face, the knot in my chest, and the embarrassment of falling tears are each an echo calling me home to acknowledge, remember, and hope
instead for a kingdom that lasts.
I am a perpetual third grader with a master’s degree in avoidance, in a body held in tension between her coming redemption and a pile of rocky emotions and sensations that frighten, compel, isolate, and integrate. I know leaning toward pain will turn these stones into instruments that play redemption’s song, but I turn away from what I know to maintain my illusory dominion over my small kingdom of ease. Why do I resist pain when I know grace is near?
The ancient, unfolding story tells me God is patient and grace is relentless, and though my heart plucks out a tune of self-sufficiency, the stones of pain are teaching me to sing a stronger song. This is not a lesson to master but a tension in which to thrive.
I most resist the grace of God not through believing he isn’t good but in ignoring or avoiding the messengers of my soul through which he seeks my attention. My inner sensations, perceptions, and emotions are the cacophony of sound the world tells me to dismiss but God invites me to hear.
Jesus says, “Come to me, all of you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest.”24 Jesus acknowledges your burden. He doesn’t shame it, doesn’t label it, and doesn’t proclaim it a barrier to being a faithful Christian. With outstretched hand, he invites you to rest. But first you must acknowledge what he already sees with his open, kind eyes. To receive the rest Jesus offers, you must first acknowledge your weariness and your burden.
Shame powerfully works to block us from acknowledging our weariness by questioning its validity, labeling it as too much, spiritualizing it as bad, pointing out how everyone else seems to be fine, and turning our eyes toward all the shiny things we should be expending energy on to produce and control and sustain. It’s almost like shame wants us to be God . . .
Dismissal of pain will only block you from the love you were made for. Your wounds need tending, not ignoring. As Henri Nouwen encourages, “It is important that you dare to stay with your pain and allow it to be there.”25 The place of your weariness is the place Jesus stretches out his hand to enter the good reality of a story where he is God and you are not. God is not inviting you to cognitively understand why you have experienced loss. He is inviting you to feel and know his care for you as your Father. Choose to try believing that pain is something God wants you to pay attention to.26
Just as the example of the psalmists demonstrates, God invites us to acknowledge the true state of our souls. Turning toward our pain and crying out to ask God to turn toward it as well creates a space of grace where the echoes of redemptive history become personal and present sounds of comfort. In dependence, we learn how to trust. In trust, we learn to keep trusting. God’s kindness toward his people throughout all history becomes structured in our emotional memory when we relate to him from our places of pain.
Gently turning toward the thing you most fear, knowing God has already turned toward it with love and acceptance, will be the continuous reversal that defrauds suffering of its power to disrupt, diminish, and defeat you.
NOTES
1 An overreliance on any one aspect of humanness in Christian practice and Christian community will lead to fragmented lives and broken hearts. A church that relies heavily on heightened emotion is just as disintegrated and dangerous as a church that is overly intellectual.
2 Curt Thompson, Anatomy of the Soul: Surprising Connections between Neuroscience and Spiritual Practices That Can Transform Your Life and Relationships (Carol Stream, IL: Tyndale, 2010), xvii, 33–37. This section draws from Thompson’s summaries of the left and right sides of the brain.
3 Ibid., 37.
4 Kathleen Norris, The Cloister Walk (New York: Penguin, 1997), 94.
5 Ibid., 96.
6 Eugene H. Peterson, Answering God: The Psalms as Tools for Prayer (New York: HarperOne, 1991), 39.
7 Ibid., 36–40.
8 Henri J. M. Nouwen, Reaching Out: The Three Movements of the Spiritual Life (New York: Doubleday, 1986), 131.
9 Chuck shared this on Twitter recently and gave me his permission to quote it here. https://twitter.com/chuckdegroat/status/997308089585078272.
10 Thomas Merton, The Seven Storey Mountain (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1999), 91.
11 Thompson, Anatomy of the Soul, 95.
12 Ibid., 90. The following section draws from the work of Thompson in describing the nature of emotion, particularly chapter 6 of Anatomy of the Soul (pp. 89–108).
13 Gen. 6:6; Ps. 78:40.
14 Isa. 62:5; Zeph. 3:17; Jer. 32:41.
15 Deut. 32:36; Ps. 135:14.
16 Judg. 2:18.
17 Jer. 31:3; John 3:16.
18 Pss. 5:5; 11:5; Prov. 6:16. This is just a sampling of God’s emotions in Scripture, rather than an exhaustive list. To consider the emotions of God further, see Stephen Voorwinde, Jesus’ Emotions in the Gospels (London: T&T Clark, 2011).
19 Thompson, Anatomy of the Soul, 90.
20 Lisa L. Baldini et al., “The Clinician as Neuroarchitect: The Importance of Mindfulness and Presence in Clinical Practice,” Clinical Social Work Journal 42, no. 3 (2014): 221.
21 Henri J. M. Nouwen, Life of the Beloved (New York: Crossroad, 1992), 96.
22 1 Cor. 2:16.
23 I first came across the phrase “nested narrative” in a journal article: Jason Walch, “Nested Narratives: Interpersonal Neurobiology and Christian Formation,” Christian Education Journal 12, no. 1 (2015): 151–61.
24 Matt. 11:28.
25 Henri J. M. Nouwen, The Inner Voice of Love: A Journey through Anguish to Freedom (New York: Image, 1999), 47.
26 This sentence originally appeared in K. J. Ramsey, “The Painful Part of Wholeness,” Catalyst Leader (October 17, 2018), https://catalystleader.com/read/the-painful-part-of-wholeness.
CHAPTER 5
THE CLOUD
Suffering Is Transformational Space
God is not absent. He is everywhere in the world we are too dispirited to love. . . . All too often the task to which we are called is . . . letting grace wake love from our intense, self-enclosed sleep.
—CHRISTIAN WIMAN, MY BRIGHT ABYSS
May my mind come alive today
To the invisible geography
That invites me to new frontiers,
To break the dead shell of yesterdays,
To risk being disturbed and changed.
—JOHN O’DONAHUE, TO BLESS THE SPACE BETWEEN US
One weekend this February we drove to Chattanooga, Tennessee, to visit some of our dearest friends. Their house sits at the base of Lookout Mountain, where on a clear day you can see the outline of limestone cliffs and homes high above. Farther down their road you can see Covenant College, where we all met, with Carter Hall’s spire and the chapel’s largeness stark against the sky, like pinnacles of hope.
Most of the weekend, the mountain was a rising mass of brown and green trees veiled in a gray, dense cloud with no top in sight. One day Ryan and I drove to our alma mater to visit with a former professor, winding our way into the cloud, into the place where mist obscures a gorgeous view, sometimes so impenetrably you can’t see farther than five to ten feet.
Every winter Lookout Mountain lives in a cloud. At first it’s almost dreamlike. But the initial magic of mist quickly fades into the sadness of a sunless sky, an obscurity that feels like it could stretch on forever. Our friend worked in student life for more than a decade at the college and shared that each winter, rates of depression and anxiety soar among students.
It’s hard to exist in a cloud for very long.
Suffering brings us again and again to opaque places of confusion and frustration. We experience both long seasons of darkness and sudden storms of lightning-like fear. We repeatedly find ourselves in the foggy incomprehensibility of circumstances that make it difficult to sense God’s presence. Our eyes see a mountain with no peak, an ascent with no trail, a fierce landscape no one wants to occupy.
But it is in the cloud that we are transformed.
In the last chapter, we considered how leaning to
ward our pain can be the place where we find our greatest comfort. We discussed God’s startlingly beautiful affirmation of our emotions as a good, necessary part of our humanness reflecting his own heart. Perhaps you have become slightly more persuaded that emotions are a good and even beautiful part of who you are and how you can know and be known by God. But knowing emotions are good and experiencing them as such when suffering takes us again and again to the place of our weary weakness are two different things. It is difficult to keep turning toward the place we fear when we have to go there so frequently.
Our present discomfort has to be united with God’s past faithfulness to create future hope, but we struggle to allow our current distress to be touched by God’s faithfulness shown to us in Christ. We all have sustained critical wounds that keep us stuck, expecting God to be absent, indifferent, or tyrannical and expecting ourselves to be stronger and more sufficient than we are. We defend ourselves against turning toward the place of our pain, because it triggers our primal fears of being disconnected from love, security, and belonging. We can’t gently turn toward the place where God will meet and heal us if we don’t let ourselves acknowledge we are there in the first place. In this chapter, we’ll explore how to notice and inhabit the clouded, confusing place of suffering. Toward the end, we’ll walk through a short exercise connecting what you learned in the previous chapter with a practical way to acknowledge and name your emotions.