What I notice about my own reflection on these scriptures, the Franciscan tradition and the writings of Simone Weil, is the paradox of affliction and hope.  Job, Lazarus, Paul writing to the Corinthians, and even Simone Weil, all are able to point to hope – not because they see it or sense it – but because they stayed turned towards God. Job never finds an answer, but he finds God. Martha and Mary do not receive an answer as to why God allows death with such power in the world, but they do discover who suffers with them. Simone Weil deeply enters her own affliction and the sufferings she saw in Europe from the Spanish Civil War to World War II. What she discovered, even as an agnostic Jew, was the love of God centered upon the cross of Jesus. She found hope in the world even as her world collapsed. Continue reading →

There is also a light of promise in all the scriptural texts as well as in the writings of Weil.  All of them seem to say that the experience of affliction is not one that completely heals, yet there is comfort and solace possible in the wounding. The experience of affliction is not vanquished, it will always be there. But there is a deep hope even in the harsh image of a nail whose point is applied at the very center of the soul. It is in the fact that the soul is pierced and nailed to the very center of the cross – our Christian symbol of hope, resurrection and redemption. Continue reading →

In the New Testament where Resurrection stands at the heart of our faith, death is an affront to faith which compels the survivors to ask ‘why.’ The story of Lazarus (John 11) brings Martha, Mary and Jesus back together.  Often Martha’s words in v.21 are taken as an affirmation of her faith in Jesus, but reread the verse and place affliction in her soul – I think it is not misplaced. Mary is weeping and even Jesus is “deeply disturbed in spirit and troubled…giving a sigh that came right from the heart” (vv.33, 38).  All are plunged into a new depth of suffering, an experience of abandonment – Martha: “If you had been here, my brother would not have died” (v.21).  Is this not the same sense of abandonment Jesus experiences on the cross, “My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?” (Matt 27:46). “It is not only the body of Christ, hanging on the wood, that was accursed; it was his whole soul also. In the same way every innocent being in his affliction feels himself accursed.” [Wiel, Waiting for God, 122]  Every grieving heart demands to know why we suffer, why we can be accursed. The inability to explain suffering is the gateway itself into the depth of affliction. The story of Lazarus also asks us to stop and see who shares our affliction – it does not offer us an avenue around or away from death, but asks to see the promise of Resurrection and who stands with us in death and beyond. Continue reading →

Given Weil’s description of affliction, it is appropriate to return to the Book of Job, generally dated between 550-445 BCE. It is broadly understood to be a retelling of the story of the nation of Israel’s history before, during and after the Exile. It therefore possesses a psychological and sociological dimension, as well as the personal. At the core of the story, Job, our scriptural icon of the afflicted one, asks why? In the face of the loss of everything – children, wealth, honor and health (Job 1,2) – Job is initially resilient: “Naked I came forth from my mother’s womb and naked shall I go back again. The Lord gave and the Lord has taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord” (Job 1:21). As the suffering mounts and moves towards despair, Job’s wife counsels him, “Curse God and die” (2:9).  Job does not curse God; he curses himself. His previously stoic response collapses in the face of the depth of the experience. This is no mere suffering, this moves beyond that to what Weil calls affliction. Continue reading →

Outside of Scripture, the Christian tradition speaks of affliction broadly, but perhaps none speaks so clearly in the contemporary era as Simone Weil, the 20th century French philosopher and mystic, who gives the following insightful description of affliction:

“In the realm of suffering, affliction is something apart, specific and irreducible…it takes possession of the soul and marks it… Affliction is an uprooting of life, a more or less attenuated equivalent of death…. Affliction makes God appear to be absent for a time. … What is terrible is that if, in this darkness where there is nothing to love, the soul ceases to love, God’s absence becomes final. … If the soul stops loving it falls, even in this life, into something almost equivalent to hell. That is why those who plunge men into affliction before they are prepared to receive it kill their souls. … Help given to souls is effective only if it goes far enough really to prepare them for affliction. That is no small thing.” (Waiting for God; New York : Harper & Row, 1951 | pp. 117, 120-121).

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Together the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures use “affliction” (θλιβω; דנצ) or related root words, approximately 150 times. In the Hebrew Scriptures דנצ most often describes an external dilemma of being constricted or hemmed in (Dt 28:52), treated with hostility (Is 11:13) or oppressed (Is 19:10).  Many of the uses are contained in Leviticus where the term is applied to those who are somehow rendered impure or unclean – they are thus placed outside the camp, removed from all that they knew and loved. While the use of דנצ is often external, there are personal and internal implications. The expelled are abandoned. Continue reading →