Earlier this year I found myself in trouble for, of all things, looking at someone. If this had been the wild, wild, west, I’m sure I would have found myself in a dual at dawn. As it was, I had to sit down and explain, somewhat embarrassingly, that I have horrible vision and I was only staring at the person because I thought I knew them, but couldn’t quite see them.
All of which goes to show that there is very little we can do in life to avoid conflict.
There was a time just a year ago that one of my goals in church was to be invisible, to hide behind pillars, to melt into the pew, to slip out after Communion, to leave the guest register empty.
I found myself wanting the opposite of that, though, when I joined Hope. I had too much joy to contain. I could have tried to hide, but I think my glow would have given me away.
Despite all that, I still find myself sometimes longing to be invisible. I think if I ever go to another church I won’t say a word, I won’t even make eye contact and then maybe that way I’ll avoid being hurt.
Because the truth is when we open ourselves up to joy, we also open ourselves up to pain. Those who are joy-filled are most vulnerable because in their joy they have let all their defenses down.
It’s why during Evening Prayer, I almost always choose the collect with the line “shield your joyous.”
Suffering is hard.
It is especially hard when it comes in a place in which you have only known joy.
It makes me doubt. It makes me want to run. It makes me wonder how the world can be so cruel.
We may not know why we suffer, Timothy Keller writes in King’s Cross, but we know this: “It can’t be that God doesn’t love you; it can’t be that he has no plans for you. It can’t be that he has abandoned you. Jesus was abandoned, and paid for our sings, so that God the Father would never abandon you.”
Keller goes on to write that the words that sustained him through his darkest times were a reflection of this he found in Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings:
“Sam saw a white star twinkle for a while. The beauty of it smote his heart, as he looked up out of the forsaken land, and hope returned to him. For like a shaft, clear and cold, the thought pierced him that in the end the Shadow was only a small and passing thing: there was light and high beauty forever beyond its reach.”
Suffering passes and the light, the joy of salvation, the light of God’s love is forever beyond the reach of the darkness.
To close ourselves off from pain means also to close ourselves off from joy.
Pain will come and the only way to make it through is to remember that darkness never reaches God’s holy light.
