Perhaps all Christians in general, but certainly Catholics in particular, hear a lot about acceptance of God's will. I am reminded of one woman's story of her conversation with a Protestant minister as she labored under the influence of RU-486 to deliver her child that had died in the womb (found courtesy of Entropy's blog). The story highlights how she, backed by Catholic theology, was much more willing than the Protestant minister to attribute specific redemptive cause to the situation in which she found herself. The story speaks of courage, intelligence, and faith, and shows a certain feistiness as well. She accepts God's will without necessarily liking it, as her analogy shows: God's making me into a sword and I just happen to be at the 'beat the hell out of it stage'. That's okay, because at the end, He will cool me off and polish me up and I will be sparkly and shiny and I will be a sword. But that's not necessarily common in the "accepting God's will" stories we here. My impression is that mostly it's a pretty passive process, and that the truly serene don't question overmuch. At least, that's what we're supposed to think.
Then, there's the issue of "joining one's suffering to the cross"--that is, allowing ourselves to participate in Jesus's sacrifice, remembering his sacrifice and accepting our own more willingly, sometimes even cheerfully. Admittedly, I am in the earlier stages of understanding this. Taken together, these concepts allow us, perhaps, to avoid the rejection of God that so may experience in difficult times, teaching us, instead, that God's love is still with us in difficult times. Through acceptance of redemptive suffering and through remembering Christ's sacrifice in (or by way of) our own pain, we are perhaps drawn down the path towards sainthood. But is everyone called to this kind of acceptance? And if so, why is it so contrary to human nature? Is the human will one of those things, like certain aspects of human sexuality, that must be controlled and contained, even overcome, on the path to holiness?
I admit that these ideas a problematic to me because the"calm acceptance" model rather induces me to expect the worst--as my pregnancy anxieties have no doubt revealed. I am inclined to worry anyway, but somehow along my Catholic journey, I have adopted an idea that runs something like, "If suffering is redemptive, and if so many around me are suffering, and if I'm supposed to join my sufferings to the cross, and welcome them as an occasion for growth in faith, then why the heck should I be spared? Shouldn't it be my turn?" (not in the sense that I want bad things to happen, but because I dread the possibility). My life hasn't been easy, but it hasn't been catastrophically bad, either. When I was pregnant for my son, a good friend who had also been pregnant at the same time in worse circumstances (but miscarried, presumably), died about 2 weeks before I delivered of tragically preventable circumstances. But losing a friend, while terrible, is not the same as what her family experienced. Why them? I hesitate to ask, "Why not me?" but that does seem the natural line of questioning. Were they more "worthy" of the suffering, or more able to deal with it? Or is it simply that I have not had mine yet, and if so, when should I expect it?
Well, clearly, it is counterproductive to go through life expecting it--even fearing it. I really like the line in the novena that I have been praying since Sunday night (thanks to Sarah of Just Another Day of Catholic Pondering!) that says, I am so attached to the things of this world that instead of longing for Heaven I am filled with dread at the thought of death, and clearly it is perfect for me that this is a novena to Our Lady of Hope. So appropriate in so many ways!! But what about that "longing for Heaven"? How much rejection of the world is too much? Can't I rest assured in the knowledge that what I do here for my family and others is valuable, and that God will surely allow me to continue to accomplish those tasks? Or is that arrogant on my part? Is it simply a matter of resignation? "Trust in God" clearly takes many shapes, and sometimes can resemble futility (if we trust that God will send us tragic events and circumstances, no matter what, for His own good reasons) or vanity (if we believe that God will not send us tragic circumstances, because we're too darned important).
So as some part of my brain was pondering this this morning, thinking about my recent anxieties, I thought of one of my favorite poems and one of the most moving poems in the English language. Hmmm. . . Not very Catholic, I thought, but why not? Not everyone is called to be a martyr. At the same time, we believe that God's power and omnipotence can anticipate our defiance, non-acceptance, whatever--and turn it to his purpose. But I wonder, there is much discussion of "Catholic friendly" literature on blogs & such. . . What do we do with this? The poem is about grief, but the tone is attractively and tragically heroic. Is it wrong, somehow, to admire a poem of such angry defiance?:
Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Incidently, if you have Flash, you can hear the author read the poem here. At least, I think so. Apparently, I don't have flash. But hearing Dylan Thomas read it is incomparable.
3 comments:
I love Dylan Thomas! (Incidentally, I thought that poem was about his father's encroaching blindness?). I think the defiance Thomas writes about is a recognition of the time wasted and the things undone - and how that fits into forbearance under suffering I'm not sure, except to note that accepting suffering by denying it the power to depress us or drive us to despair is as much a kind of defiance against the snares of Satan and the imperfections of this life as it is a pious resignation.
Wow, that was a long sentence. I hope it makes sense!
Anyway, here's a poem that captures some of the struggle against despair...not much quiet resignation here, but it is so real. One of my favorites.
Carrion Comfort by GM Hopkins
NOT, I’ll not, carrion comfort, Despair, not feast on thee;
Not untwist—slack they may be—these last strands of man
In me ór, most weary, cry I can no more. I can;
Can something, hope, wish day come, not choose not to be.
But ah, but O thou terrible, why wouldst thou rude on me 5
Thy wring-world right foot rock? lay a lionlimb against me? scan
With darksome devouring eyes my bruisèd bones? and fan,
O in turns of tempest, me heaped there; me frantic to avoid thee and flee?
Why? That my chaff might fly; my grain lie, sheer and clear.
Nay in all that toil, that coil, since (seems) I kissed the rod, 10
Hand rather, my heart lo! lapped strength, stole joy, would laugh, chéer.
Cheer whom though? the hero whose heaven-handling flung me, fóot tród
Me? or me that fought him? O which one? is it each one? That night, that year
Of now done darkness I wretch lay wrestling with (my God!) my God.
I reread my post and realized that it probably doesn't further the discussion much. :-) I guess the core of my response would be to observe that it is not usually 'quiet resignation' that the saints experience so much as a mighty struggle to bear up under suffering despite all the temptations to fall into self-pity and despair. I know, picture-card saints usually look pretty resigned. But Therese of Lisieux suffered and doubted and struggled to overcome, as did so many others. In that way, 'quiet resignation' is a 'heroic defiance' - a refusal to let the evils and suffering of this world distract us from His love and our goal.
I love that Dylan Thomas poem and don't see it as alien to a Catholic understanding of acceptance of suffering as God's will for us. (I also love the Hopkins poem, Kate.)
The thing is anger is an emotional state and acceptance is an act of the will. The two aren't necessarily incompatible. My question is whether "rage" involves a willful embrace of anger.
I think the swordmaking analogy is a good one. And certainly more in line with my own experiences of suffering. I don't think that we have to like suffering, merely to try to accept it as it is happening and ask God to redeem it. That's a hard thing to do when you're in agony; but I've done it. It's not necessary to feel like you are at peace with the pain in order to accept it as God's will.
I keep thinking about the agony in the garden. Christ didn't exactly "go gentle into that good night." He sweat blood. And he wept at the death of Lazarus, even though he knew he would raise him from the dead. Death is not natural, it is part of the brokenness of the world and is meant to be defied. Christ died to end death's power. So in that sense the poem could be read as a resistance of death and as very Christological. But to resist what comes after death... that's a different matter. It is also Catholic belief that death is not the end. It has been conquered.
I'm thinking also of the Easter vigil. We light the fire in the darkness and carry it into the church. It's a kind of defiance of night, of darkness, of death.
But to get back to your earlier point. I don't think of acceptance of God's will as being particularly passive. Like Kate said, those saints who have suffered the dark night of the soul do not seem to have accepted it passively. I'm not sure about "rage" that almost seems a little too strong; but I don't want to wholly reject it either. Certainly fierce grief, agony, an internal struggle: you those in the writings of St Therese who on her death bed asked: why doesn't God talk to me anymore, doesn't he love me?
After all Mother Teresa's letters have led some to conclude that she doubted the existence of God. Clearly she didn't; but his absence certainly was not something she passively accepted either.
I think perhaps there's room for both Thomas' rage and St. Francis' thank you for Sister Bodily Death. Catholicism at it's best embraces all sorts of paradoxes. I think the context and intent of the rage are key.
The problem with anxiety, though, as you describe it, is that it is living in the future rather than the now. Yes, we are called to accept the suffering that comes to us but only as it appears. We are to accept everything in the now as somehow, mysteriously, God's will. But we shouldn't worry about suffering that may or may not happen in the future.
Right now your task is to be a mother, to care for your children and ease their anxiety and your own as much as you can. To be pregnant and to care for your unborn child necessarily means that you embrace the possibility of loss and the probability of future pain. But hope means that you trust that God will give you the strength to face each eventuality as it happens. And you trust that should anything happen to you (God forbid!) he will care for your family and give them the strength to face that as well
but you don't have to like the idea of pain or of death. In fact I think it is perfectly ok to be angry when they come. Just not so much to be angry and upset when they haven't come yet. Does that distinction makes sense?
It seems to me both the futility and the vanity are errors to extremes and the proper path is the middle ground between them. We accept that God's plan is mysterious and unknowable. We know, however, there is a plan and that we do have free will, and are not pawns in some giant chess game, even if all we can do is change the way we respond to events as they happen, to grit our teeth and ask God to redeem the moment even while we rage at it.
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