The Suffering I Cannot Explain
Patria Rector — Founder, The Broken & Beautiful
There is a kind of suffering I no longer try to explain with Bible verses and simple phrases. Well, I suppose the one exception might be from Romans 8:22 "All around us we observe a pregnant creation. The difficult times of pain throughout the world are simply birth pangs. But it’s not only around us; it’s within us."
That one still makes complete sense to me.
I don't trust easy answers for the kind of hole the presence of another leaves us with. I don't trust neat theology or the ways we sometimes rush to make meaning out of something because sitting inside the meaninglessness of it feels unbearable.
Some suffering has unanswered questions and untied bows. Maybe it always will.
And strangely, I think there are things about love, and perhaps even about God, that only reveal themselves there—in that damp, dark space of need where there is nothing left to fix.
When There Is No Good Answer
Five years ago, I lost one of my best friends to glioblastoma. You can see her beautiful face in the photo above.
Losing Cherie was a loss that can never be resolved. Simply said, there is no one like her. I am fortunate enough to have her sister just a few miles away.
Ane, Cherie and I linked arms and plowed our way through deconstruction of our childhood religion before deconstruction was a thing. No question was off limits for our hearts and minds that desperately needed to heal from the devastation of realizing that we had been handed an incomplete, and sometimes anti-kind, picture of God and of humanity. In those years, things were extremely black and white: good or bad, right or wrong.
Loss doesn't make things more complex exactly - but it sure as the world exposes what's just philosophy and what you will actually live for.
Cherie is the first of a few people in my life who have died agonizing deaths.
The process was long and drawn out - torture really, for her family and friends. We watched someone we loved endure something we could not stop.
There was no amount of love that could make it go away. There was no amount of prayer that changed the ending we desperately wanted changed.
A few short years before that, another of my dear friends was diagnosed with one of the most serious forms of breast cancer just two weeks after her husband died suddenly from a blood clot.
He was young. She was young.
There are sentences you can write about someone's life that still don't seem possible once they're sitting there on the page. That is one of them.
Thank God she lives. This week, she and I got to guffaw together about the things aging women can finally laugh about, like how everything seems to drop from your neck to your hips at this age. We laughed hard. I am so grateful she is here to get older.
I am grateful for the wrinkles and the dropping and the ridiculousness of bodies that keep changing because she is here to have a body that ages.
And still, hers is a complicated life. Living doesn't erase what happened. There are unanswered questions and residual hurt from that horrific time. Survival didn't tie a bow around any of it.
She is one of my heroes.
She Wanted to Live
Then, on August 12, another dear friend named Kara died.
Cancer had shaken her life five years earlier, and she wanted to live so badly.
She said it over and over.
She wanted to live.
She fought for her life with every breath. Literally.
And she died anyway.
I don't know what to do with that.
I don't know what to do with any of it.
God, I hate cancer.
I hate death.
I hate watching people fight to stay with the people they love and knowing that sometimes all the fighting in the world doesn't change what happens.
There are no answers adequate for these pains and questions.
I've lived long enough now to deeply distrust the impulse to find one.
I've heard the things we say because we don't know what else to say. Everything happens for a reason. God needed another angel. She's in a better place. There is a plan we cannot see.
Maybe some of those words bring comfort to some people. I don't want to take that comfort away from anyone.
But I can't use them to make this okay.
It isn't okay.
Death isn't beautiful because we can find something beautiful afterward. Cancer isn't redeemed because the people left behind become wiser or more compassionate. Grief doesn't become good because eventually we learn how to carry it.
Sometimes something is simply terrible.
A Faith That Doesn't Require an Explanation
Maybe one of the ways I have changed is that I am more willing to let terrible things be terrible.
That doesn't mean I have lost my faith.
In some strange way, it may mean I have more of it.
I don't need God to give me an explanation for every terrible thing in order to believe God is there. In fact, I am increasingly suspicious of a faith that requires me to explain suffering in order to defend God from it.
I don't think God needs me to do that.
What I need is somewhere to put my anguish. Somewhere to put my anger. Somewhere to put the unbearable fact that someone wanted desperately to live and didn't get to.
Somewhere to put the gratitude that another friend did live, knowing there is no equation that explains why one woman is sitting beside me laughing about aging and two others are gone.
There is no fairness in that.
There is only love and loss and gratitude and rage, and the terrible vulnerability of being human enough to become attached to people we cannot keep.
Maybe this is the only kind of suffering I trust anymore: the kind we are willing to leave unfinished.
The kind that doesn't demand that grief teach us something before we are allowed to grieve.
The kind that lets us sit beside a hospital bed, stand at a graveside, laugh until we can't breathe with the friend who survived, or cry for the one who didn't, without forcing any of those moments to explain the others.
I believe something reveals itself there.
I don't know that I can name exactly what it is.
Yet, it's something tangible. I feel it in my bones.
Maybe that's the point.
Because when there is nothing left to solve and no explanation that will make what happened acceptable, we are left with need.
Raw, dark, clear need.
I need you. I miss you. I wanted you to live. I don't understand. God, where are you?
Those may be some of the truest prayers we ever pray.
I don't want to tie a bow around this today.
Kara died three days ago.
Cherie has been gone for nearly five years.
Another friend is alive, and I got to hear her laugh this week.
All of those things are true at the same time.
And today, that is as close to an answer as I want to get.
Dear Reader,
Let's hold both together.
The agony and the joy.
Not because joy makes the agony worthwhile, and not because suffering somehow makes the joy more deserved. We don't need either one to explain the other. Let's simply allow them to belong to the same life.
Let's grieve the people we wanted more time with and laugh loudly with the ones who are still sitting beside us. Let's hate cancer and death and still notice the ridiculous, beautiful privilege of getting older.
Let's ask questions that may never be answered and resist the urge to turn our pain into something tidy enough to understand.
Maybe holding both doesn't make life easier.
Maybe it simply makes today more true, more real, and much, much more precious.
Love,Patria
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