Some questions have the most
perplexing answers as to be hardly answerable.
There are some questions to which
there are many answers (some right, some wrong) and there are other questions
that seem to have no expressible answer.
How to suffer well?
Surely if we are to ‘suffer’ it
will be a matter of despising the experience, no? This is one possible
deduction.
Another explanation may be that
one person’s suffering is for another a completely different experience. That’s
the angle I’d like to attend to, here.
Resilience is the mastery of situations
perplexing. They are what they are – horrid and reviled – but there is a peace
that transcends the understanding that this is actually a bout of suffering.
Faith is the answer to the
question, “How?” Hope is the answer to the question, “Why?” Now is the answer
to the question, “When?” Hope is, again, the answer to the question, “What?”
And hope is the answer to the
question of “Just how would I suffer well?”
If we have no hope we will suffer
poorly. But if we have hope we suffer better than most people would believe
possible.
***
As we suffer, when we suffer, we,
therefore, go on committed to hope.
We find it in the paradoxical,
this answer to our question – what we most need (hope) we are most likely to
struggle with. Grief is the temporal absence of hope.
So, if we suffer we might as well
suffer less by suffering well.
As we draw deeper into the
fissures of the Divine in our relying on God, we tap into hope by the
inspirational things we read, by the positive truth-lovers we associate with
socially, and by the good thoughts we choose.
As we refocus, every moment if
necessary, we anchor ourselves to the reef of hope.
Against the tide of fascist
indignity, we claw our way, with gritty fingernails, back to that place called
hope.
We make hope the obsession. It
helps, ultimately. It’s only by faith that we fight for our sanity these ways –
to implore God of the gift of hope; enough to get through.
Hope is the grace of sufficiency
enough to survive the hollow moment.
With hope we have everything
else.
For hope we ought to fight.
Give everything for it.
Pray for the insight of hope for
when it’s needed.
There will come a time.
Hope is emergent when we enter
suffering with some sort of unworldly joy.
© 2015 S. J. Wickham.
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