The Jesuit Guide To (Almost) Everything - James Martin [132]
In desperation I visited a host of holistic healers: massage therapists, chiropractors, acupuncturists, even a man who would be accurately called a Catholic faith healer, who prayed over me in his office. Nothing worked.
In time, I learned to manage the pain: stretching, exercise and massage, along with setting limits on typing, seemed to work. The pain continued through theology studies and beyond—in fact, I still have it and am limited in my daily writing.
A few years after theology studies, when I was working at America magazine, I started to grow increasingly frustrated about my admittedly minor but nonetheless painful condition. Why would God do this? What was the sense of a writer who couldn’t write? What was the point? One day I confessed my frustration to my spiritual director, named Jeff.
“Is God anywhere in this?” he asked.
“No!” I said. How I had grown to hate that question. I tried to find God in all things, but this seemed baffling. The pain prevented me from typing papers during theology studies and complicated my work as a writer and editor at the magazine. Why would God prevent the work that I was missioned to do? So I glumly admitted to Jeff that I couldn’t find God anywhere in this situation.
“Really?” he said. “Nowhere?”
Then, almost despite myself, I started to recount how the illness had changed me. Since I could only type for a short period of time each day, I told Jeff, I was more grateful for what I was able to write, because I knew that it was only thanks to God’s grace and the gift of health, even if temporary. I was more careful about what I wrote too. Perhaps I was becoming more patient, too, since I couldn’t do everything at once. And I was less likely to get a swelled head, since I couldn’t talk about the grandiose plans I had for future writing. And I was more aware of others with physical limitations and with far graver illnesses. Maybe I was becoming more compassionate.
Jeff smiled. “Anything else?”
“I’m more conscious of how much I rely on God,” I said, “since I can’t do anything on my own. I’m less likely to forget about my poverty of spirit.”
Jeff laughed. “But God isn’t anywhere in this?”
Suddenly I realized where God was. That’s not to say I was happy about my situation or would have chosen it, that I didn’t want it taken away, or even that I completely understood it.
But I did see some signs of God, many of which were part of the traditional Christian perspectives on suffering. That it was okay, and even healthy, for me to lament these things before God, as many of the psalms do. That it was indeed mysterious, something I might never understand, like Job’s questions in the Old Testament, but that I could still be in relationship with God. That I could try (but would sometimes fail) to emulate the patient way that Jesus faced suffering. That Jesus, who had suffered intensely in his life, could be, through my relationship with him, someone who understood my trials, small though they may be. That suffering could open up new ways of experiencing God. Most of all, that God had been with me in this, and small signs of resurrections became apparent only when I accepted Walter Ciszek’s “reality of the situation.”
In vulnerability, in poverty of spirit, in brokenness, we are often able to meet God in new ways—perhaps because our guard is down and we are more open to God’s presence. This is not the “why” of suffering, but it can sometimes be part of the overall experience.
But my suffering is very small. When I was in East Africa, I met refugees whose brothers and sisters had been murdered before their eyes. I knew a woman in Boston who had been confined to a hospital bed for over twenty years. And recently a close friend’s young wife was suddenly diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumor, and, after returning from