The Bridge

This Christian life thing is tough.  Not for the faint of heart, this commitment to loving neighbors as we love ourselves, to loving God with heart, soul, and mind.  It's an incredible challenge trying to find one's way through the thicket of needs, desires, relationships, complications, demands, obligations, and all the detritus that makes up the human predicament.*  And the question arises immediately, "find one's way where, exactly?"  Where the heck do I think I'm supposed to be going anyway?

At the moment I'm in the midst of writing my way out of a conundrum, figuring out how to map the three qualities of Love, Suffering, and Joy onto the human experience of God as Trinity.  And, as is so often the case, it's complicated.  The essence is this: God is Love, and God's love is the impetus for creation.  The goal of human life is Joy (more on that in other blog posts).  We are here to experience Joy - that is God's intention for us.  But standing between us and our goal is our suffering.  How do we bridge that distance?  How do we move through the conditions of the human predicament that appear to separate us from the joy we are meant to experience?

That's where Christ comes in.  He enters the world as Love Incarnate, and what happens when pure unconditional love becomes enfleshed?  Suffering happens.  Jesus in his human form endured many forms of suffering, from the disappointment of being misunderstood by his closest family and friends to extreme physical torture and a painful and protracted death.  When love comes into the world, hard things happen, and the One who Loves perfectly suffers incalculably.  

And that makes sense, at least to me.  To love means to be willing to suffer, and that willingness is empty if no suffering actually takes place.  But how is his suffering redemptive?  What makes his suffering in any way useful to the rest of us?  If his suffering somehow paid off my debt to God, it didn't work - I'm still going through the all-too-human stuff that plagues us all.  How does Christ's suffering "work?"

Here's my best thought for the moment. We are meant to move through our experience of suffering, and Christ is both the bridge and the companion who walks us across.  We are able to move through our suffering only and precisely because Christ is the promise that our suffering is not permanent, that we come from Love and are meant for Joy, and that he has indeed gone ahead of us to prepare that place of Joy that has our name on it. The human predicament feels overwhelming at times, but is at root impermanent, a passing phenomenon.  The thing that caused us to suffer yesterday may not even exist today, or perhaps tomorrow.  If we allow Christ to lead us over the bridge of suffering, we will find a much better life on the other side.

*Acknowledging Ram Dass, Be Love Now, for that phrase, "human predicament."