This is part of a read-along hosted by myself and MrsDarwin of DarwinCatholic.
The main page is here.
MrsDarwin's biographical sketch of the author, Robert Hugh Benson, is here.
My introductory post is here.
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For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but one who has similarly been tested in every way, yet without sin. — Hebrews 4:15
Let's stipulate for a moment that the frequent rephrasing of the above quote is an accurate one: He is like us in all things but sin.
Let's consider, too, some observations about suffering humans: especially those whose suffering, like the crucified Christ's, comes at the hands of other humans.
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One thing we know is that hurt people hurt people. An abused child often, but not always, grows up to struggle with abusive impulses, teaches others the same lessons they were taught long ago; a child bullied by stronger children sometimes turns and finds a weaker victim; a person neglected as a child sometimes fearfully holds back needed support; a person whose trust was broken badly once refuses to trust again. That sort of sin is mitigated by the obscurity and darkness generated by the sins they endured in nature, as well as by the shadows passed down in human nature itself. In one sense none of us "know what we do," and that includes people who quite deliberately do terrible things in what would seem to be full knowledge; that universal bentness of our humanity is a sort of supernatural ignorance. But also certain abuses appear to have a partial cause from older ones, so that a person's psychology can be darkened as well as their spirit. And of course a human culture may itself pass down twisted notions of right and wrong, which we ought to be able to see through, but do not challenge.
When this is us, when we are hurt people who hurt people: we are people who "know not what they do," in a sense, but who are not sinless, for Christ prayed "Father, forgive them."
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Another thing we know is that hurt people ask difficult questions. Hurt people want answers, and they look for them, and demand them. Hurt people seek to make sense out of what seems to them senseless. They come to God, or to God's representatives on earth (whether actual or self-styled) and say: How come God has made it so that this can happen? I do not understand. Can you make it make sense? And they ask it, sometimes, in ways that are shocking or impolite or subversive, or disturbingly cutting and precise. What's worse, sometimes none of the answers satisfy them. And sometimes there are no good answers at all.
Perhaps some of the time the hurt people's questioning is entangled with acting out, with hurting people, with sinning, in a way that makes us humans confuse them together, and judge the questioner imperfectly. We do not see into hearts, after all. But God sees. And God made it clear by example that the questioning is not the sin. For He himself asked the terrible question, the one we still cannot entirely make sense of, the one that we do not have a single satisfactory answer to (however many theories we deploy).
My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?
He didn't simply point to an asker-of-this-question and say "Father, forgive him this asking of the terrible question." No, he asked it himself. He was suffering, and he asked that question that so many suffering people have asked. He was like us, suffering, and he was without sin, and he suggested—out loud!—the absence of God, the reasonlessness of the world, the terror and darkness of a void.
When we meet people who are asking that same question, when we find ourselves asking it too, we must remember that "He was like us in all things but sin." When people suffer, they need to make sense of it. When Christ suffered, he asked the question.
There are many ways to ask the question and to seek the answer. It is possible to seek the answer through sin. It is possible to first ask the question in all wounded sincerity, and then begin to seek, and for some of that seeking to be, well,a kind of wounded trying of all sorts of nature to see where it breaks.
About such apparent sins, we must beg forgiveness, for ourselves and ("Father, forgive them") for others. But we must never, never condemn the question of the sufferer, for Christ, suffering abuse, uttered the question Himself.
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Benson points out that many sufferers manage instead to avoid the question. It's only when we expect God to be there; when we want him to be there; that we really, truly, and honestly would ask for the God who seems not to be there. One of the reasons that the question is incomprehensible and even intolerable to us is that we "find our consolation in so much that is not God."
If physical comforts are wanting to us, we find refuge in mental comfort; if mental comforts are wanting, we lean upon our friends. Or, more usually, when the higher pleasures are withdrawn, we find relief, with scarcely an effort, in lower. When religion fails us, we console ourselves with the arts; when love or ambition disappoint us, we plunge into physical pleasures; when the body refuses to respond, we take refuge in out indomitable pride; and when that in turn crumbles to nothing, we look to suicide and hell as a more tolerable environment. There seems no depth to which we will not go, in our passionate determination to make ourselves tolerable to ourselves.
I would like to point out, too, that many of the God-substitutes that Benson lists here are undoubtedly good things: the arts, friends, and the like. Later in the same section Benson contrasts "religion" with "religiosity...a sort of professionalism"—I think that this implies that the outward actions of liturgy, the performance of piety, the reiteration of moral principles in argument and in theory, can itself be a refuge to which we flee from the terrible question whenever it rears up in our heart and threatens to enter our consciousness. Nothing but God can be God Himself.
There is certainly a risk that some of us who flee in more respectable directions... to our work or to the arts or to scholarship, for example... will look down our noses at those who flee to what Benson calls "lower" pleasures. But flight it still is. And we should recognize it even under its respectable form.
For Benson's point is that our model, Christ, our perfect example of man and God perfectly united, is able to ask, and is willing to ask. The one who asks the terrible question is one who seeks truth instead of false consolation. We mustn't be shocked by it, we mustn't try to quiet the askers.
Above all we mustn't spout a series of answers that by their nature will ever be incomplete, and then require the asker to be satisfied or face rejection.
For "the true happiness of man consists in this gradual approach to the Beatific Vision." The terrible question, which arises almost everywhere there is suffering, has no satisfactory answers in any merely human language, and never will; it is only answered by the secure Presence and Vision at the end of all things.
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More reflections, on this as well as on the next Word, by Cat here.
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