Dorothee Soelle
At the end of the last post on ‘Anxiety and God’, was the suggestion that God was with us in our distress. The theologian Dorothee Soelle in her book ‘Suffering’ includes a reflection on the upsetting and difficult story taken from the Auschwitz survivor Elie Wiesel’s book ‘Night’; a story that could be sadly transposed to many contemporary places of suffering – Gaza, Sudan, and where any child is in anguish and hurting.
The account is of the hanging of some of the camp inhabitants – including a small boy who takes time to die in great pain. The rest of the inhabitants of the camp are assembled to watch:
‘“Where is God? Where is he?” A man behind me asked … I heard the man cry again, “Where is God now?” and I heard a voice within me answer, “here he is – he is hanging here on this gallows …”
Soelle writes that this is an assertion about God, where God is no executioner and no almighty spectator to what is going on – which would amount to the same thing. God is not the mighty tyrant:
‘Between the sufferer and the one who causes the suffering, between the victim and the executioner, God, whatever people make of the word, is on the side of the sufferer, God is on the side of the victim, he is hanged.’
And for the boy, Soelle wonders how what assertions can be made without cynicism. Rather than the traditional phrases used about a child’s death: ‘he is now with God, has been raised and is in heaven’ – phrases that she defines as ‘clerical cynicism with a high apathy content.’ Instead, she wonders how language can still hold onto the affirmation given in classical theology, and yet also become a message of liberation leading to attempts to relieve and prevent further suffering as best we can.
Soelle suggests we return to the Roman centurion by the cross: “Truly this was God’s son.” As indeed are all who also metaphorically or literally hang on the gallows. All are God’s children. For Jesus’ suffering cannot be distinguished from that of other people – as though Jesus alone awaited God’s help – in that way ‘every scream is a scream for God’ and every experience of extreme suffering evokes the feeling of being forsaken by God. All deep suffering that is experienced as a threat to life touches our relationship with God, the very ground that our existence depends on is being shaken. Yet Jesus moved beyond this sense of destruction to the experience of assent, where the ‘cup of suffering becomes the cup of strengthening’:
‘If there were no one who said, “I die, but I shall live”, no one who said “I and the Father are one” then there would be no hope for those who suffer mute and devoid of hoping. All suffering would then be senseless, destructive pain that could not be worked on, all grief would be “worldly grief” and would lead to death. But we know of people who have lived differently, suffered differently. There is a history of resurrections which has vicarious significance.’
Soelle writes that a person’s resurrection is no personal privilege for themselves alone – even if the person is called Jesus of Nazareth, but rather that contains within itself hope for all and for everything. Whilst it is undoubtedly true that analytic insight and study can lead to understanding, it is spiritual and religious beliefs that offer this sense of hope.