Breathing Underwater

by Richard Rohr

Marriage and parenting is made to order to steal you from your selfishness.

For me, there is a workable and loving way through this. If God is somehow in the suffering, participating as a suffering object too, in full solidarity with the world that He or She created, then I can make some possible and initial sense of God and this creation.

if we are participating in something together, and human suffering has some kind of direction or cosmic meaning, I can forgive such a God for leaving us in what seems like such desperate straits, and maybe I can even find love and trust for such a God.

Only if human suffering is first of all and last of all divine suffering can we begin to connect any dots.

Only if we are joining God, and God is joining us, in something greater than the sum of all its parts, can we find a way through all of this.

that only people who have suffered in some way can save one another—exactly as the Twelve Step Program discovered. Deep communion and dear compassion is formed much more by shared pain than by shared pleasure.

You see, only the survivors know the full terror of the passage, the arms that held them through it all, and the power of the obstacles that were overcome. All they can do is thank God they made it through! For all the rest of us it is mere speculation, salvation theories, and “theology.”

And further, this God wants to love and be loved rather than be served (John 15:15). How wonderful is that?! It turns the history of religion on its head.

Suffering opens the channel through which all of Life flows and by which all creation breathes, and I still do not know why. Yet it is somehow beautiful, even if it is a sad and tragic beauty.

He who learns must suffer. And even in our sleep pain that cannot forget, Falls drop by drop upon the heart, And in our own despair, against our own will, Comes wisdom to us, by the awful grace of God.3