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 →

In listening to the story and pleading of Elias Syriani’s children, it was hard not to be overwhelmed with compassion for them and their cause.  A part of me was in the present, attentive to their stories.  A part of me was already experiencing fear for what awaited them knowing that their cry for mercy would fall on deaf ears. There was little hope for a stay of execution.  Were the children prepared for the new suffering that awaited them?  Would the recent joy of reconciliation and memories of reunion with their father be enough to sustain them through the sorrow that would come? Continue reading →

There is a certain rhythm in each day in our lives. Weekdays, Saturdays, Sundays, vacation days and all the other categories of days. Each has its own rhythm. No matter what your state and role in life, your time is rarely your own. There are demands upon you time and attention that are unrelenting, recurring, and unavoidable – even as they are welcomed and cherished.. It can be a rhythm that sets the current and flow upon which you navigate the day like an Olympic kayaker on rapids of the slalom course. It can be a tyrant that can drive you to want to strike back at Time. On the afternoon of February 15, 1894, a French anarchist, Martial Bourdin, carried a homemade bomb in what was thought to be an attempt to blow up the Greenwich Royal Observatory which just 10 years earlier had been established as the global time standard — Greenwich Mean Time. Was it a symbolic revolutionary act to disrupt the tyranny of time? In any case, he wasn’t the only one to attack clocks during this period: In Paris, rebels simultaneously destroyed public clocks across the city, and in Bombay, protestors shattered the famous Crawford Market clock with gunfire. Continue reading →