I’ve been reading another biography of Martin Luther. The Reformation intrigues me, despite how sad and unsettling its history is.
The author, who isn’t writing from a religious point of view, minces no words: “I believe that Luther represents a catastrophe in the history of Western civilization.” Along with the Bolshevik and French Revolutions, the results of Luther’s Reformation are seen by the author as being cataclysmic.
This is not to say Luther alone was responsible for the chaos. An enormous cast of characters played out this drama, which resulted in bloodshed for many.
Corruption and arrogance among some in the church, a Europe in which free speech and dissent were suppressed, the alliances of various principalities — all of this played into the drama that became the violent and bloody divisions within Christianity.
This author’s take on Luther focuses on Luther’s lifelong obsession with death. He was born into a continent beset by the Plague — in the century before Luther’s birth, half of Europe was wiped out by the flea-borne pestilence.
After a couple of chapters, I felt that old sense of sad remorse fill me. I had to turn to God and ask simply, “Why?”
Why do people suffer so greatly? Why do the wrong people end up in leadership positions? Why can’t the answers be clearer, Lord, so that we don’t become embroiled in century after century of war and hatred? Why can’t there be a natural evolution of ideas, rather than the earth-shaking collision of the old and the new, the right and the wrong-headed? And why do the poor often suffer the most from ideological battles?
As if in response, my Daily Meditation from Franciscan Father Richard Rohr’s Center for Action and Contemplation arrived, dealing, appropriately, with suffering — more to the point, the mystery of suffering.
Father Rohr was talking about Job. He said Job differs from his biblical advisors. His advisors, like me sometimes, want clarity and order from the universe. “They (Job’s advisors) want to be able to predict what God will do … (but) Job wants to see God. They want to preserve a world of correct and coherent ideas. Job wants to preserve his relationship with God … his friends preserve their theologies. Job preserves his relationship. Job is the suffering-man-who-should-not-be-suffering and prefigures Jesus, the dying-man-who-should-not-be-dying.”
Father Rohr reminds me that no matter how many histories I read, the answers won’t appear in a clear and ordered fashion. History is a story of chaos, and faith isn’t found in textbooks. Faith is found in relationship, and if we want answers that make a lot of sense in this world, we’re in conflict, as St. Paul says, with a faith that preaches a crucified God.
My second response appeared when Sojourners magazine arrived in the mail. Sojourners is an ecumenical journal, dedicated to the biblical call to justice, life and peace. Flipping through Sojourners’ pages, I felt community, the invitation to relationship with God and others that centers me in faith.
It’s not that suffering wasn’t there on every page: here’s the catastrophe in the Gulf, the story about the sex trafficking of kids, a review of Jesuit Father Greg Boyle’s book (“Tattoos on the Heart”) about his work with gang members.
Suffering, to the Christian, indeed to all of us, is inescapable. The key for the Christian is what to do with that suffering, and in the end, as Job and countless other faithful people have realized, the first thing we have to do is accept it as part of a mystery to which only God holds the key.
