From Success to Suffering
A People of Repair: Part Ten
by Gregory Thompson

This is the tenth article in a series of articles called A People of Repair; a series devoted to an urgent question currently facing every American Christian who seeks to live faithfully in this world: What do we do when we realize that the forms of Christianity we inherited are either insufficient for—or opposed to—the Christian mission to which we are called?  As I have wrestled with this question over the past 20 years, I have come to believe that the church in America, if it is to truly be a people of repair, must deliberately undergo a number of shifts in both the substance and the structure of its life. 

From Success to the Suffering: A Shift in Expectation

I don’t think I understood it at the time, but in retrospect, I see that part of the reason that I embraced the Christian faith is that I saw it as a reprieve; perhaps, even, as an escape. As I learned about the life of Christ and the life of his people, I sensed a path opening up, a warmly lit passageway that promised to lead me out from the torment of my inner life, the pain of my family life, and the utter confusion of my cultural and political life. I saw the possibility of a life outside of the gravitational pull of chaos, a life that had not only meaning but a trajectory. And so, with the newfound experience of hope in my heart, I began to follow. 

As I did, my life began to change in important ways. I began to develop a moral purpose, intellectual commitments, personal habits, and a meaningful community. I was, in most respects of which I was aware, not only changing, but growing—improving. My hope, it seemed, was well-placed. 

This is not to say that everything in my life began to improve. Nor is it to say that I attained the ideal vision of a life that I had imagined when I started out. Internally, I still struggled with the weight of virtually all of the same habits of mind and body that I had borne all of my life—self-absorption, envy, laziness, deceitfulness, a heedless desperation for connection, and soft-spot for hedonism of virtually every kind. Not only this, since coming to faith I had added others to the list—pride, hypocrisy, and judgmentalism not least among them. Externally, much of my life remained the same as well. I still lived in a broken family and a chaotic home. I still found myself subject to the abuse and shame that I had known for my entire life. I still found a pattern of confusingly destructive relationships. I still found, in short, a life marked by the old familiar sufferings. This time, however, even as I bore these things, I did so in the conviction—indeed, the expectation—that one day, if I understood enough, worked enough, and grew enough, that these various forms of suffering would fade into a life of success.  

To be fair, I don’t think anyone ever told me this. I think most of my expectation was born of longing, of an almost desperate desire to inhabit a different life, a life like the ones I imagined other people living. Even so, this expectation of moving from suffering to success was, with varying degrees of subtlety, reinforced by the messages I received about the shape and trajectory of a “Christian life.” From these I learned that if I read the Bible and studied theology, then the pain of my questions would fade away. I learned that if I kept my eyes to myself and practiced chastity that the turmoil of my sexuality would soothe. I learned that if I devoted myself to community that my broken relationships would heal and my loneliness would go away. I learned that if I followed God’s mission and submitted my “gifts” to his work in the world, that my vocation would emerge and my impact would be great. I learned that if I was a “godly” husband and father that my marriage would be edenic and my children exemplary. I learned, in other words, that if I followed God, I would have the life that I longed for. And for the better part of two decades, I clung to some form of this belief. There were, of course, sufferings along the way. But I endured those with the belief that they were temporary—even anomalous—and that, in time, the fog would lift and I would find my way to the shores for which I searched. 

Over time, however, I slowly began to realize that I was wrong. It was, to my surprise, my experience as a pastor that impressed this realization upon me. Day after day, for nearly 20 years, I stepped into the pain of other people’s lives. I buried their children. I mediated their fights. I stored their secrets. I witnessed their betrayals. I contended with their addictions. I prayed for their disintegrating bodies. I watched the silent tears run down their faces. When I walked into rooms where they gathered—sanctuaries, classrooms, parties—I saw, even through smiles and song, the terrible suffering that clung to their lives. And for years I walked through my days in a state of what can only be called dismay. Why was there so much suffering? Why were these people—people who loved God and loved neighbor—so perpetually wandering through the valley of the shadow? Why was there so much suffering and so little success? 

One morning, when I was in the throes of these questions, I walked down the hall to the office of a fellow pastor and friend and said, “I don’t think I have the theological and spiritual resources for navigating all of this suffering. I need a new way of being a Christian.” He looked at me for a moment, and then, in a voice of quiet conviction, said “we need to go to the monasteries.” I didn’t know what he meant. And I certainly didn’t know where any monasteries were. But I somehow sensed that another path had opened up before me. 

Over the next few months, he and I began to make our way together into the contemplative and mystical corridors of the Christian faith. We read of Augustine’s clamor of the heart. We read of Anthony’s solitude. We read of Benedict’s silence, Julian’s sickness, John of the Cross’s darkness. We read of Teresa’s journey, Ignatius’s rigor, Bernard’s longing. We read of Bonhoeffer’s doubt, of King’s depression, of Mother Teresa’s abandonment, of Romero’s blood. We read RS Thomas’ restlessness and Christian Wiman’s fear. We read, we talked, we prayed, and—together—we transformed. 

The heart of that transformation, for me, was the slow but irrevocable embrace of two convictions. The first is that human life, for all of its undeniable beauty, is inescapably bound to suffering. Suffering that is deep, pervasive, life-altering, and perpetual. This should have been obvious to me, but I confess that it took me a long time to emotionally embrace this truth. After all, I had come into the Christian faith in the hopes of escaping that kind of suffering. And I had spent years trying to convince myself that if I could just think, speak, work, and pray hard enough, that I would eventually find the way out. Because of this, the recognition that suffering was not merely an occasional, but an inescapable dimension of my life, that life with Jesus led not away from pain, but into its heart, was a bewildering and heart-breaking discovery. 

The second conviction, however, is that it is here—in this place of suffering—that Christ is most truly to be found. That this is where he dwells. That the living Christ inhabits not only the praises, but—perhaps more fully—the pain of his people. This is the reason that Anthony found sweetness in the desert, Julian found laughter in illness, John found consolation in the shadow, Bonhoeffer found joy in prison, that Romero found meaning in the face of senseless violence, and that countless Christians have learned to “consider it all joy” when they face the pain of life in this world. Why? Because it is here, in our pain, that the living Christ is most fully and beautifully to be found.

It is impossible for me to overstate the degree to which these convictions transformed my life of faith. This transformation freed me to see the life of faith not as an escape from suffering, but as a movement into its heart. And to see this movement not as a nihilistic death march, but as a slow, sacred, descent into the darkness where Christ dwells in kindness and love. This enabled me to enter into the sufferings of others, no longer in a posture of either dismayed enmeshment or detached clinicalism, but out of a deep empathy with their darkness and deep hope that Christ would reveal himself in it. And, in ways that I could not have imagined, this transformation enabled me to taste the sweetness of Christ in the bitterness of my own sufferings as well. Thanks be to God.

Over time, these convictions also transformed my vision of what the church is—and must deliberately be—in our own time. It is not difficult to discern that a great deal of what passes as Christianity in America today is, in its own way, obsessed with the avoidance of suffering and the attainment of success. Pastors, absurdly clad in designer clothing, peddle visions of personal wellness and sexual bliss. Politicians, robed in the sanctimony of religious indignation, raise millions of dollars by bloviating endlessly about their own victimization and the coming persecution of the American church. Millions of Christians, bewitched by these apocalyptic revelries, devote endless time, money, and dissociative moral energy toward avoiding these sorrows and attaining these glories. All the while, the suffering among us quietly drift into shame and despair, or into communities more equipped for sharing the paths of sorrow.

In contrast to this, I believe that the church in our time must, with deep deliberateness, renounce its fetishized fantasies of success, and turn to the ordinary and deeply holy work of dwelling in the shadows of suffering, walking there with its neighbors, and bearing witness—through word, song, and table—to the reality of Christ hidden in those shadows, sweetening them with his light. This, I believe, is what our neighbors actually long for. A church that, equipped with a realism about life in the world and a rapture of self-forgetfulness, can walk in the shadows suffering and yet do so with the sure hope that it is here, particularly here, that the joys of Christ may be found. By God’s kindness, there are women and men throughout history and in every community that can show us the way. Our task—our urgent task—is to follow them.