Following the Omagh bombing in August 1998, John Swinton went to church – and with no reference having been made to the previous day’s atrocity during worship, came away thinking
‘our church had no capacity for dealing with sadness…because we had not consistently practised the art of recognising, accepting and expressing sadness, we had not developed the capacity to deal with tragedy. In the wake of the tragedy of Omagh, our failure to publicly and communally acknowledge such a major act of evil within our liturgical space demonstrated our implicit tendency towards denial and avoidance. Evil was not resisted by our community, it was simply sidelined…’ (pages 92-3)
This is a disturbing story of how some expresssions of Christian faith and pastoral response do not deal well with suffering, whether outrageous violence or its victims’ suffering. Inability to cope pastorally is not unrelated to a theology that is uneasy with human anguish and divine suffering … itself strange for a faith in the One who was a man of sorrows and acquainted with the grief of the cross, albeit followed by the resurrection. So Swinton devotes a long chapter to lament as a way of asking the question ‘Why me Lord..Why me?’ – questions which if asked have potentially destabilising vibrations which reach to the inner core of our faith, and the kind of God we say we believe in.
By way of a persuasive interpretation of Munch’s masterpiece The Scream, Swinton explores the silent scream of the suffering, and moves on to the silence of Jesus on the cross and the voicelessness of pain. There is in the deepest suffering a resistance to language, a loss of confidence in the normalising of events that articulating them brings. That means that many forms of pain are unsharable. This whole section, pages 95-101 is a rich and rewarding reflection by a theologically and medically informed writer seeking appropriate pastoral response. One of the most helpful and crucial insights he considers is that the silent suffering of Jesus places God unreservedly alongside those who suffer or are victims of evil.
Jesus’ silence in the presence of evil acknowledges the full numbing horror of suffering and legitimises every sufferer’s experience. Jesus’ sense of alienation from God, which paradoxically was a mark of his experience on the cross, echoes the sense of alienation and disconnection that many people people go through when they experience evil and suffering. The silence of jesus is a statement that God not only empathises with suffering ‘from a distance’, but also experiences it in all of its horror. (page 100)
Not the kind of God some might want. Perhaps we prefer a God who intervenes, reaches into history and sorts things. But the cross is God’s intervention, where suffering is borne in order to be redeemed, and where evil and suffering are experienced as that which ‘wrings with pain the heart of God’. Swinton’s point is – only if we acknowledge the reality of evil and suffering, and the reality of its being borne upon the heart of God, will we than take evil and suffering seriosuly enough to resist them in that place where all questions are askable, the place of worship; and using biblical forms of prayer, the prayers of lament.
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