The Royal Road - Thomas a Kempis

I have been thinking a lot about suffering lately.  I have been telling the story of Kitty's illness and all that she and her family are going through to many of my friends and coworkers, and it has prompted some spiritual questions.  On two different occasions, the CEO of our organization asked me how I could believe in a God who would allow such pain, injustice - some might say evil - to occur.  I didn't have a well thought out response to the "theodicy question" handy at my finger tips...I ended up blabbing about how pain and injustice only make redemption possible, and how I don't think God wills us to get cancer at age 25, but he wills us to depend on him as we struggle through it.  I was definitely too chicken to talk about sin or Satan, and even more importantly, I somehow forgot to mention Jesus.

Having a religion where the deity chooses a path of suffering and death is pretty darn unique, and I can't believe I failed to point this out to my boss.  There is no pain we can experience, no hardship we can endure, that our God himself has not experienced.  And as a Kempis points out, these trials are basically the whole point of our faith - the vehicle of sanctification: "There is no escaping the cross" (39).  As the quote at the beginning of the chapter states, "If we do not bear the cross of the Master, we will have to bear the cross of the world" (36).  It's going to be hard either way!  But if we choose to go with Jesus - if we choose the "narrow" way and drink his cup of suffering - we also get to share in his redemption, in the glory to come.

I admit I was slightly put off by the statement that "he wishes you to learn to bear trial without consolation" (39)...it sort of sounds like God abandons us to the evils of the world for the sake of character-building.  But in contrast to my boss' view that God wants or passively allows evil, I think all of the suffering we experience can be traced back to a combination of consequences for sin and the preservation of free will.  God wants us to freely choose, and a lot of the time, we freely choose to ignore or deny him.  If he was constantly meddling in the world, fixing everything we'd messed up, we would lose the power of agency, and our choices for good would lose much of their meaning.  All this junk in our lives just teaches us dependence, and points us back to grace:

"We also rejoice in our sufferings, because we know that suffering produces perseverance; perseverance, character; and character, hope. And hope does not disappoint us, because God has poured out his love into our hearts by the Holy Spirit, whom he has given us." (Romans 5:3-5)

So back to Kitty...I don't think I'm at the point yet of rejoicing in this suffering.  I've cried, and I've yelled, and I've thrown things, and I've had plenty of migraines.  But I haven't blamed God, and I haven't given up on him.  Somehow - and I guess this is the Holy Spirit - I know that we are carrying this cross together, that he is drinking this cup with me.  I have an unexplained hope.  It's not a happy hope, but the sort of hope a Kempis is referring to when he says that "as your love for God increases, so will the pain of your exile" (40).  The more we know of heaven, the more we long for it, and the paler everything else becomes in comparison.  But somehow just knowing that hope is there makes all that we endure along the "royal road" a bit more bearable.