We suffer in myriad ways: God offers myriad balms

[The Great Open Dance]

To alleviate suffering, we must recognize that different wounds require different balms. My beloved wife, Abby Henrich, is a pastor. Over two decades of ministry, she has supported, counselled, prayed with, and prayed for numerous parishioners with numerous challenges. Almost all these challenges were different in some way. Parishioners have struggled to recover from childhood trauma, sexual abuse, substance abuse disorders, and mental illness. Parishioners have gone through divorce, unemployment, and unexpected bereavement. Some have had trouble conceiving children, suffered miscarriages, and developed postpartum depression. Others have died after long, painful battles with cancer. Youth have come out as LGBTQ+ and worried about the reaction of their peers. Our entire community has struggled with the vexing grief of suicide.

Each difficulty and each individual require a different pastoral response. People with addictions need strength, divorcees need hope, abuse survivors need healing, youth need love, the unemployed need advice, and the terminally ill need courage. There is no one-size-fits-all response to suffering, no if-then algorithm that prescribes the perfect response to every situation, no single balm that heals every wound. Human problems are manifold, and our responses to them must be manifold as well, if we wish to heal.

Pastors (as well as parishioners themselves, because they are also involved in healing) must be flexible, wise, and present. Jesus was a pastor who healed in manifold ways. He healed spiritually, revealing the perfect love of God for all and the infinite value of each. He healed socially, erasing the artificial boundaries that segregationists had manufactured. He healed ethically, demanding the practice of love in a world riven by hate. He healed physically, curing people of disease. He even turned water into wine at a wedding, to make sure the dancing wouldn’t stop.

YHWH, Abba, God as Architect, designs and sustains a world that privileges dynamic growth over static ease, because the greatest gift we can receive is that of an enlarging soul. God recognizes the inevitable injury that will befall us as our souls confront the challenges that enlarge them. Jesus, God as Sojourner, enters creation to ratify the divine decision, validate our struggle, and reveal the fullness of life available within the trials of life. Sophia, God as Wisdom, continues the multiform healing ministry of Jesus, through our activity, inspiring humankind toward the love, justice, and wholeness that characterize the Reign of Love. The Trinity acts for us, but the Trinity also acts with us, and we become who we are by acting with the Trinity, by becoming Trinitarian.

Faith fulfills our Trinitarian nature. Faith is an existential possibility, an option for living, the experiential more for which we have hungered and for which there is satisfaction. To savor this abundance is to savor God. Alas, the abundance is always obscured. Loneliness, conflict, anxiety, bereavement, anger, self-hatred, other-hatred, regret, guilt, shame, addiction, poverty, illness, depression, and meaninglessness all dull our senses to spiritual beauty.

The range of human suffering is as broad as human brokenness itself. Jesus is a physician (Mark 2:17), and every physician knows that different diseases require different treatments. There is no panacea, physical or spiritual. For this reason, the love of Abba, Jesus, and Sophia is as diverse as human needs and takes as many forms as there are human difficulties. Any interpretation of their cooperative work must recognize the many healings that they offer and not reduce that multiplicity to one limited story. Theology’s approach to human suffering must be pluralistic, utilizing a variety of approaches to heal a variety of ills. Thus, in this and later essays, we will not discuss the one way that the Trinity heals; we will discuss the many ways that the Trinity heals.

Trinitarian healing is no opiate. Recognizing the challenges of life, Trinitarian faith seeks to heal the pain, not dull the pain. It offers transformation, not symptom relief. And, like the healing of a this-worldly physician, spiritual healing happens here and now, not in some lofty metaphysical realm or far-flung future.

The Trinity heals by offering us full personhood. The triune God is the source of all personality, the esteemer of each and every person, and the quickening ground of interpersonal relationships. God makes true personhood possible. But if true personhood is possible, and if we are created for fullness of life, then this state begs the question: How true am I as a person? How closely do I follow the grain of the divinely sustained universe? How much do I cut across that grain, rendering my own journey—and that of those around me—more difficult?

Our standard is Christ. Jesus reveals the abundant life available to us as embodied souls, as expanses of feeling resident within material bodies. Jesus jars us out of our existential slumber into new life pervaded by possibility. Faith trusts that this new life is possible because faith trusts that God has not created us absolutely different from God, but has created us in God’s own image, to participate in the life of God.

Indeed, we are so like God that one of us, Jesus, can be called the Child of God. Jesus is the picture of divine life, the earthly manifestation of the Trinitarian relationality that lies within, beneath, and beyond the fabric of the universe. He exemplifies humanity as a perfect expression of openness and vulnerability. He is communion itself; in Jesus we see love perfectly expressed through human activity. We experience him as fully human and fully divine, and we sense our own invitation to become fully human, which is to become love. (adapted from Jon Paul Sydnor, The Great Open Dance: A Progressive Christian Theology, pages 181-182)

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For further reading, please see:

Baker-Fletcher, Karen. Dancing with God: The Trinity from a Womanist Perspective. Saint Louis: Chalice Press, 2006.

Boff, Leonardo. Trinity and Society. Translated by Paul Burns. 1988. Reprint, Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2005.

Coleman, Monica A. Making a Way Out of No Way: A Womanist Theology. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2008.