We need to go deeper afflictions6/21/2023 ![]() Where is God when you’re on the bathroom floor? In her words… I hope you’ll find her words as cleansing to the soul as I did: I have two gifts for you from her: a video and an article. This week, help came via a precious living saint who calls herself Nightbirde. If you look lower. Or if we give up our rationalizing and open ourselves to Mystery. Hope, perhaps? Or trust? A glimpse that sustains? NIGHTBIRDE: “LOOK LOWER” Waiting there, who knows for how long, those with open and upturned hands may receive a gift. The Cross represents the radical empathy of God, which is the highest form of love. Then, from Christ’s wounds flows healing love such that even while our suffering continues, by faith, we can authentically confess, “God is good.” How? Because he bears our afflictions with us. In him, the contraries of goodness and affliction intersect, including yours, and they pass through his heart. ![]() ![]() … she saw God’s infinite goodness in the crucified One, and she saw all the afflictions of the human race weighing down on that One, crushing him. She saw perfect Love hanging there, his open arms spread, spanning the distance. And from there, she looked up and found herself at the foot of the Cross. It drove him mad.īut Weil counsels us to go lower. All Nietzsche saw in that abyss was darkness. and that these two contraries grab us like pincers and arrest us and even throw us down … but where? Into an abyss. But does this mean we can no longer see or say that God is good? Weil saw a great gulf or infinite distance separating divine goodness and human affliction …. “It is what it is” isn’t a shrug of the shoulder but acceptance of reality. Rather, she says, we need to let the contradiction stand. Tragically, we typically try to harmonize them with rationalizations and, like Job’s friends, end up calling what is evil “good” or what is good “evil.” PINCERS: SIMONE WEILĪccording to Simone Weil, the French philosopher-mystic, among the greatest of human dilemmas is our wrestle to hold together the goodness of God and the affliction of humanity. When religious rituals, spiritual practices, or affirming deconstruction makes breathing no easier, where do we go? Where is God? “When you can’t see him, look lower” (Nightbirde). Those who experience chronic physical, emotional, or spiritual pain know the temptation of despair and may feel like they’re drowning in it. How do we experience God in the midst of affliction? Where is the light during the “dark night of the soul?” Where do we stand (or kneel) as we wait for a dawn that seems so slow to come, if it ever will?
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