Richard Rohr has learned from alcoholics and the Twelve Steps that it’s when we hit rock bottom that we realize how our suffering and God’s suffering are connected:
Only those who have tried to breathe under water know how important breathing really is—and will never take it for granted again. They are the ones who do not take shipwreck or drowning lightly, the ones who can name “healing” correctly, the ones who know what they have been saved from, and the only ones who develop the patience and humility to ask the right questions of God and of themselves.
It seems only the survivors know the full terror of the passage, the arms that held them through it all, and the power of the obstacles that were overcome. All they can do is thank God they made it through! For the rest of us, it is mere speculation, salvation theories, and “theology.”
Those who have passed over to healing and sobriety eventually find a much bigger world of endurance, meaning, hope, self-esteem, deeper and true desire, and, most especially, a bottomless pool of love, both within and without. The Eastern fathers of the church called this transformation theosis, or the process of the divinization of the human person. This deep transformation is not achieved by magic, miracles, or priestcraft, but by a “vital spiritual experience” that is available to all human beings. It leads to an emotional sobriety, an immense freedom, a natural compassion, and a sense of divine union that is the deepest and most universal meaning of that much-used word salvation. Only those who have passed over know the real meaning of that word—and that it is not just a word at all.
It is at precisely this point that the suffering God and a suffering soul can meet. It is at this point that human suffering makes spiritual sense, not to the rational mind, the logical mind, or even the “just and fair” mind, but to the logic of the soul, which I would state in this way:
Suffering people can love and trust a suffering God.
Only a suffering God can “save” suffering people.
Jesus is, more than anything else, the God of all who suffer—more than any god that can be encompassed in a single religion. Jesus is in competition with no world religion, but only in nonstop competition with death, suffering, and the tragic sense of life itself. That is the only battle that he wants to win. He wins by including it all inside of his body, “groaning in one great act of giving birth … waiting until our bodies are fully set free” (Romans 8:22–23).
The suffering creatures of this world have a divine Being who does not judge or condemn them, or in any way stand aloof from their plight, but instead, a Being who hangs with them and flows through them, and even toward them in their despair.
Reference:
Adapted from Richard Rohr, Breathing under Water: Spirituality and the Twelve Steps (Cincinnati, OH: Franciscan Media, 2011, 2021), 116–119.
Image credit and inspiration: Jenna Keiper, barbed (detail), 2021, photo, Albuquerque. Click here to enlarge image. Even in the midst of twisted barbs, green life survives and thrives.
Story from Our Community:
I was brought up in a traditional Catholic family, and I struggle now to retain that connection. I struggle to trust in a clerical and dogmatic system that exhibits hypocrisy and has embedded a lot of shame and guilt inside me. CAC has helped me to trust in my inner authority and see God everywhere and in everyone. Paradoxically, this has resulted not in a loss of faith but in a deepening of it.
—Kevin G.
