It’s Easter Monday in Canada

I returned to work from our Holy Week trek only to learn that a coworker’s child had committed suicide. I had spent last week reveling in the joyful love of family while someone else found life to be desperately hopeless. For those who have tired of my theological ramblings, I suppose there was the hope that post-Easter musings might turn a different direction. But there is no escaping the life-changing consciousness of the something that is everything or the life-destroying lack of that awareness. Is there anything more real than pain? As John Lennon put it, “God is a concept by which we measure our pain.” A poorly developed theology may lead one to believe that the presence of God absents pain. The shortcoming of this worldview is when it follows that where pain is present, God is absent. Not long ago, Bill Moyers interviewed Karen Armstrong on the subject of compassion as the universal Truth which threads its way through “all major religious, spiritual and ethical traditions.” Literally meaning “to suffer with” may have been what led the great process thinker, Alfred North Whitehead, to refer to God as our “suffering companion.” God is in the pain as well as the joy, and we will all be the better for it to remember this.