I. Suffering is not one. It is at least two, perhaps more. The inability to distinguish between the two sufferings, their unique sources, and to differentiate the respective ethical postures appropriate to each is a shortcoming across a swath of theological reflection running through mysticism to pop-evangelicalism to liberal ethics. Until we hold both, we will not heal nor can we offer holistic healing.
II. For race scholar john a. powell, suffering enters life in two primary ways: the existential and the social.1 The first is a paradox contained within human nature. It is the fruit of mortality. It is the fear of death, the grief of loss, the angst of one’s continuous search for meaning, identity, and belonging. The latter is of human making. It is a broken response to the former. When the fear of death closes hearts meant for love; when creation is possessed as a finite cache of scarce resources instead of shared as an abundant expression of grace; when meaning, identity or belonging are predicated on any form of exclusionary or exploitative othering—in each instance, violence, whether it be direct or cultural or structural, enters the social milieu.
III. Jesus said “blessed are the poor in spirit” because the poor in spirit sit in the hope and gratitude of God’s continually poured out grace even amidst the dark night of the soul when that grace is hidden and inaccessible. The poor in spirit do not cling to the things of this world. They do not hoard and so they do not create scarcity. They do not fight for the fragility of their egos and so they do not wound. They do not resist diminishment but empty themselves of self and thus they do not seek power over others. It is through this spirit of nonattachment and kenotic humility arrived at by the gift of faith, deepened through practice, that cycles of violence meet their end. Only in facing death, indeed only in dying, can abundant and free life begin. Theirs is the freedom of those who discover a truer self beneath the churning surface, untouchable, unquenchable, found in mutually giving union with all things, composed of the very love of God.
IV. Social suffering emerges from the collective effect of existential suffering not compassionately embraced by the contemplative self which finds its rest in weakness. Social suffering is an effort to resist death—to resist instead of embrace the gifts offered by the existential pain common to us as humans. Out of resistance comes the inevitable fear and captivity to fear (Heb 2:14-15) that builds empires. It is that fear—and the many children it sires, among whom some are named hate, greed, shame and insecurity—that gives power to the myths and structures of oppression. Such are the walls that build the oppressors’ bondage. Jesus says “blessed are the poor” because he himself was poor, he himself was oppressed, he himself knew what it was to suffer beneath the bloated weight of a colonizing empire. Out of such suffering, Jesus spoke of liberation for the captive, good news for the poor, of the Day of the Lord which is the Jubilee on which all debts are canceled and the land is returned to its rightful inhabitants. He told the wealthy, not just to become humble, but to act out the freedom found in following Christ by returning the wealth they took from the poor so that justice might be established and communion could, perhaps, be birthed between those who were once at enmity.
V. Too many mystics flatten suffering. Caught in gnostic traps, they fail to encounter or value the material creation in which God is manifesting God’s self. With too dismissive a theology of creation (creation being only a passing phenomena or veil behind which lies the deeper reality of God’s infinity), they holds too thin an anthropology (the soul, heart and mind obscure and disregard the body), and thus largely lack a theological sociology (how bodies with hearts, souls and minds relate to one another in time and place to produce cultures and societies). For other mystics, all creation and all phenomena are collapsed into the being of God within which all suffering is baptized—teachings we find metabolized and metastasized in slaveholder sermons. It has remained unrecognizable for many mystics—particularly those in the cannon who are white and male—that behind the opacity of mistaken metaphysics there exists a suffering unknown to them, the socially constructed sufferings of race, class, gender, sexuality, and all identities organized into the bottom of hierarchies where modern society aggregates forms misery that need never have been.
VI. Too many committed to social liberation see every suffering as a structural injustice. In the necessary struggle to build power for social transformation, they forget that personal fragility is a gift that draws us into interdependence. And thus they pass by the wisdom of those who have learned to cultivate that inner place of freedom achieved through the crucible of passing through fear and hate into unshakable love for the fragility of one’s own humanity and the humanity of one’s neighbor. They forget we are creatures too, who can only bear fruit in some seasons and must lay fallow in others. For them all things are material and historical, and so the transcendent nature of their own being is lost, ironically reducing them to the same fragmented, economic self-interested individual against which they seek to struggle.
VII. We find an integration in slave narratives and the testimonies of the freed. It is there in the epiphanic declaration of the enslaved woman who said, “De Lord done tell me I’se saved. Now I know de Lord will show me de way, I ain’t gwine to grieve no more. No matter how much you all done beat me and my chillen de Lord will show me de way. And some day we never be slaves.”2 Existential freedom is one with future assurance of social liberation in the eschatological truth of her identity in the Lord, unfolding as an end to grief—a balm in Gilead. It is present in the mysticism of Howard Thurman, whose spiritual-social praxis was described by Womanist ethicist Katie Cannon as consisting of two concentric circles. For Thurman, Cannon describes, “Ethics emerges from mystical consciousness which obligates individuals to transform the social environment.”3 We find this spiritual praxis for liberation in Gustavo Gutierrez, who urges us into the kenotic, material mysticism of spiritual poverty as “an expression of love, [which] is solidarity with the poor and is a protest against poverty.”4
VIII. It is in the integration of both pathways to freedom that we find ourselves practicing the way of Jesus of Nazareth who was and is and will forever be the Mystical Christ.
john a. powell, Racing to Justice: Transforming Our Conceptions of Self and Other to Build an Inclusive Society (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2012), 197-201. I’m indebted to Dr. powell’s work for offering us this framework.
M. Shawn Copeland, Knowing Christ Crucified: The Witness of African American Religious Experience. (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2018), 24.
Katie Cannon, Black Womanist Ethics (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 1988), 20.
Gustavo Gutierrez, A Theology of Liberation, 15th Anniversary Ed. (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1988), 172.