Misery Loves

For every expression of Christianity that gives the impression believers ought to be bouncily cheerful at al times and anything else implies you don't Know Jesus at all, there are others stressing the idea that the way of Christ is not a primrose path, nor even a steep and rugged pathway, but a trail of broken glass. For some time the Northumbria Community's Celtic Daily Prayer has formed part of my morning devotions after I was given it by a parishioner, and this month the reflections are taken from Gene Edwards's 1982 book The Inward Journey, an imaginative exploration of the relationship of suffering to transformation within the Christian experience. I have no idea whether the extracts in Celtic Daily Prayer are very representative of what is apparently a book structured around a Pilgrim's Progress-type story, but I moved from responding rather positively to its intention to provide a guide for 'the new Christian' which is not 'inane, useless, traditional, cranial, old, shallow, irrelevant, or carrying within its covers the curse of scholarship' to really gibbing at the constant emphasis on misery.

Each time that sovereign hand of God has fallen on [a new Christian] and he (or she) has truly entered into the fellowship of Christ's sufferings, he is always surprised how hard, how unbearable, is the cross. For better or worse at the beginning they did not have the good sense to run out the door.

There is much good sense in what I can read here of this text, maybe enough to seek out a copy for myself. The way of transformation into what God wants us to be surely always involves the surrendering of delusions and illusions, what I describe to the tolerant people of Swanvale Halt church with tedious regularity as the 'white martyrdom' of ordinary Christian experience, as opposed to the 'red martyrdom' of blood which most of us will never come very near. Yet the point of it is not the suffering, but the transformation it brings. When Gene Edwards advises those who bear any sort of authority in the Church to approach their trials with the thought 'to suffer for the Church, to suffer in her place, this is why I was made a minister', there seem to me to be several perils. Certainly St Paul talks about believers rejoicing at being found worthy of participating in the sufferings of Christ, and 'making up whatever is lacking' in them, but that suffering has any kind of value only in so far as it is joined with Christ's - it is, absolutely emphatically, not a ministry in its own right. The Book of Acts describes God telling Ananias how much Paul must 'suffer in my name', but this is something that will befall Paul as a result of the special responsibility he is given, not a reflection of the general condition of all Christian souls or even all those in ministerial roles. 'I could handle all your problems easily' goes on Gene Edwards, 'but I got all the ones I couldn't handle. So did you'. This sounds neat, but what does it mean to be unable to handle something? Is is the point where you break down and stop functioning, or end up in hospital? Or just where you say to God 'I feel out of my depth, please help'? I say that virtually daily.

This may sound ungenerous, but I wonder whether an emphasis on suffering in the Christian life may sometimes come from an awkward awareness that in contrast to many other fellow-humans we aren't suffering very much at all. And I'm not sure the awareness should, in fact, be all that awkward. The Gospel reading on Sunday was from John 10, concluding with Jesus's statement that he, the Good Shepherd, has come so that the sheep 'may have life, and have it abundantly'. Of course, the path of true and abundant life passes inevitably through the shadow of the Cross and we have our own crosses to take up, but it is the life which is the point and the destination, not the shadow, or the rocks.