(((Illuminated)))-- Just to let you know...

[Theodora]

...that I'm glad you're "here" and that I appreciated your posts in response to my thread on the "Come unto me" meditation...and others.

Will be thinking more about your question about "spiritual pain," for this is something which represents a significant struggle in my life as well. Will try to check out some of your earlier posts to learn more about your story before I try to post more.

Too "dopey" and tired tonight to do more tonight,but I didn't want to just "disappear."

Trust your questions. Trust the "process." FWIW...I think "God" is "big enough" to handle our anger and "disappointment" (per Yancey's books) etc. and that...perhaps...it is only in coming to be honest in ourselves about where latent anger "at God"---or others---is affecting our lives that we may come to more peace in "letting go"/acceptance of what IS.

???

PERHAPS??!?!

Sigh.....

The ol' head isn't good for too much reflective thinking tonight!

More as able. Hope you have a good night.

Theodora

[Illuminated]

... about your question about "spiritual pain," for this is something which represents a significant struggle in my life as well....I found this article, parts of which are below, at http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2002/149/54.0.html

Much of it has to do with forgiveness. I wasn't sure if I should post it here or not. Maybe it belongs in the thread on forgiveness. I've made the parts that deal with what I think is spiritual pain to appear in blue and my thoughts are in (blue).


Hurt, Hate, and Healing - A 1985 interview with Lewis Smedes - By David Neff

Lewis Smedes transformed my approach to fractured relationships ...in his book Forgive and Forget: Healing the Hurts We Don't Deserve . Smedes, a professor of theology and ethics at Fuller Theological Seminary, writes: "Recall the pain of being wronged, the hurt of being stung, cheated, demeaned. Doesn't the memory of it fuel the fire, reheat the pain again? … You are locked into a torture chamber of your making. Time should have left your pain behind; but you keep it alive to let it flay you over and over.
" … Is this fair to yourself—this wretched justice of not forgiving? … The only way to heal the pain that will not heal itself is to forgive the person who hurt you. (Me? Forgive the Pastor/Leader/Elder?) Forgiving stops the reruns of the pain."

It's Good for You
What spinach does for Popeye's biceps, forgiveness can do for your soul. When Professor Smedes visited Chicago recently, I asked him why he emphasized the personal benefits of forgiveness so much.
Smedes: The end of forgiveness is reconciliation. But you can't always achieve it, because the person who forgives has no control over that. The reasons may be natural—if someone who hurt you dies or moves, you can't be reconciled.
Or you may have to be reconciled to a new kind of relationship. You and your friend may have grown apart because your interests or convictions have changed. Even if you forgive, you may not want to be friends again. Coming back together in the same way is just not always possible.
HIS: But you can achieve personal healing without reconciliation?
Smedes: Yes. It's ego-oriented in a way. If you've been unfairly hurt, whether by some rank titan of evil or by your nice, sweet mother, the question is "Are you going to be chained to that moment in the past? Are you going to go through continuous unfair pain? Or are you going to claim a right that divine grace gives you—to be healed of it, to be free of it?"

Free at Last
That's good news. We can be free from the pain of past hurts if we refuse to let it control us. Even when reconciliation is impossible, we can be healed by forgiving the person who hurt us.
Here's how it works: Smedes has outlined a four-stage process through whicb most of us pass as we forgive the hurts we don't deserve.
First comes hurt. Someone—perhaps someone you trust, like a friend, a family member, (a pastor or leader) or a teacher—betrays you, makes a cutting remark or treats you unfairly. And if you're at all normal, you'll feel pain.
Second comes hate. The person you formerly trusted becomes the target of your antipathy. You wish them the worst. And why not? The memory of the hurt continues to pain you.
Third comes healing. But healing comes only if you're willing to release yourself from the advantages of pain. Hate, after all, can be energizing. When we've had our flesh singed at the martyr's stake, the sense of our own holiness can fuel our self-esteem for years.
An unrealistic view of our own goodness and our enemy's evil can prevent healing. We must recognize that the person who hurt us is probably not so much a monster as a weak, needy, silly person who doesn't always act rationally—like us. (But how can this be??? This person is a man of God!!) Then, of course, we'll have to let go of hate and its energy. But at the same the, pain will release its grip on us.
Coming together again, the fourth stage and ultimate goal of forgiveness, is not always possible.
.........
Unfair Institutions
Many students are bitter about a school, (church) or other institution that has treated them unfairly. I asked Professor Smedes how someone in that situation should go about forgiving.
Smedes: Institutions are myths, just as corporations are legal myths. (So, the church is a legal myth?) They have a terrible reality, but when you go looking for them, all you can find is a building, a board room, a secretary, or a dean, (pastors, elders, leaders...)
HIS: Let's say a student has completed three years of college and is having difficulty pulling together the money for his fourth year. When he goes to the business office to get cleared for registration, there's a foul-up. He knows the money is coming, but he can't convince the clerk with the cat's-eye glasses. So he misses the fall term of his senior year. He is hurt and angry at the institution. How would you help him deal with that hurt?
Smedes: I would try to get him to make sure he knows who hurt him.
HIS: Not just the faceless university?
Smedes: Yes, he's got to know whether someone did something unnecessary to him, something terribly unfair that could have been avoided.
This person may have to discover the painful lesson that we live in a world that sometimes hurts us, yet nobody needs to be forgiven. He may have to distinguish between things that are appropriate for forgiving and things that are appropriate for saying, "This is the way it is, and I got stung.".
.........
DutyCalls
Healing is helpful, I thought. But Jesus seems to say forgiveness is a duty, not an option.
HIS: Jesus told us that we have to forgive in order to be forgiven by God.
Smedes: I don't think he said, "In order to be forgiven." You have to remember that all talk of forgiving in the Bible is metaphorical.
HIS: Like the Lord's Prayer using the metaphors of debt and trespass?
Smedes: The pictures come mostly out of the commercial world. But I can't believe that Jesus would say, "I'll forgive you as a reward for forgiving someone else."
HIS: You're right, because that would turn forgiveness into buying your admission pass to heaven's gate. But Matthew 18 does say that if we do not forgive our brothers from our hearts, our Father will not show us mercy.
Smedes: That statement of Jesus crystallizes the absolute incongruity of separating being forgiven from forgiving. If you don't forgive, if you practice a lifetime of going for the jugular, it is utterly inconceivable that you have been forgiven.
I've never laid forgiving out as a duty. It just isn't. The law of Christ isn't like that. The law of Christ is always an invitation to freedom. All I can say is "The terrible thing that happened is irreversible. It can't change." Do you want to he tied to that forever? Or do you want to go on from there?"
HIS: But doesn't our experience of God's forgiveness introduce us into a realm of grace where we're expected to act in a new way?
Smedes: Yes. When I'm in a self justifying mood, forgiving is not a seven-story, but a seventy-times-seven-story mountain to climb, because what you've done to me assaults my desperate need to be on top of things.
But when I experience not only the sadness of my own guilt, but the gladness that comes from knowing that my past is irrelevant to God's feelings about me now, two things happen: I lose my desperate need for justice, and I have the freedom to see other people not just as monsters who walloped me, but as needy human beings who tried to cope with their problems by being cruel to me in one particular instance.
.....

Forgiving God
HIS: Let's talk about forgiving God. You recounted in your book the horrible emotional ups and downs of the birth and death of a baby you had desperately wanted. It was going to make it, the doctors said. Then it wasn't going to make it. So you went through a lot. And you had to forgive God.
If I believe in God's sovereignty, goodness and wisdom, why should I forgive God?
Smedes: I have a very conservative evangelical friend who teaches philosophy of religion at Notre Dame. He says, That's absurd. God never needs to be forgiven.
I say, Right. By definition God is good. Being God is never having to say you're sorry. But in experience, it sometimes seems as though he could be doing a lot better than he is.
.....
HIS: So when we "forgive" God, we do it for ourselves. Not because God needs to be forgiven. But because it reconciles us and brings the relationship together again.
....
It's Not Fair
......
One ingredient in the answer to the question "Is forgiving fair?" is being fair to yourself. That takes away the burden of deciding when someone deserves to be forgiven. The answer is simple: No one ever deserves to be forgiven. (even a pastor/leader/man of God)...If I hurt you unfairly or unnecessarily, it's the height of folly for me to say, "I deserve to be forgiven."
In ordinary moral bookkeeping, there is no way to factor in forgiveness. You can factor in getting even. You can factor in revenge. That's what we all do. "An eye for an eye" makes perfectly good moral bookkeeping sense. But it makes terrible practical sense. You never do get even.

And not getting even leaves you the victim—with an unfair burden of a painful memory.

[Theodora]

I've marked the site so I can get back to this...I hope! In just scanning this briefly, it looks like this article really would be helpful to look at in some depth...if/when I can. (I trust you understand something of my limitations of the moment!)

I just did a sort of "cross-reference" to this on Voyager's thread re forgiveness at
http://www.christianrecovery.com/vb/showthread.php?t=4225 Obviously, this article sort of touches both ways re what we're calling "spiritual pain" here and the question of forgiving others.

I also had posted a separate reference to a sermon this a.m. which I thought might "resonate" with you a bit, if you happened to look at this. That is at http://www.christianrecovery.com/vb/showthread.php?t=4240 re the sermon "Is God Indifferent?"

Specifically, here's a bit of that post which I thought might be pertinent here--


From the excerpt quoted from this sermon--

She didn't want to question God or be angry with God. But her husband's words only made her feel more abandoned and bewildered. On top of it all, she felt guilty for being angry with God. And suppose God had sent her this affliction, how could she ask God to cure her. If it was God's will that she be sick, would she be going against God's will if she tried to get well?

To believe in a loving God does not mean that you believe God causes bad things to happen to you or to anyone else. In too much of the loose talk about God, people don't think through their assumptions and implications

(The complete text of the sermon is presently available on-line at http://www.firstplymouth.org/sermons/index.html#Sunday_April_30,_2006)

My comment in that thread--i.e. http://www.christianrecovery.com/vb/showthread.php?t=4240

I'm really not well enough myself to deal with some of the implications I see in this situation, but though I don't have "answers" for this kind of dilemma, for me it's important to believe that we DON'T need to "fake" our true thoughts/feelings when we come to God in prayer. (Logically--we couldn't do this anyway!--but I think there's always a kind of hidden "tape" playing that "nice people"/"good Christians" don't feel these negative feelings or have these questions.) I have been validated in my own faith journey by various authors who do give "permission" to struggle with these basic questions of the faith. I've come to believe that that is a HEALTHY thing to do and, though uncomfortable for us, that coming through these "valleys" can eventually bring us back to solace and more acceptance of who we "are" and "WHERE" we are in the present.

As always---"more as able." I've been up relatively early and need to go get a nap. Sorry for the confusion in posting!

Theodora

P.S. THANKS for all your work in editing/commenting in the text with the high-lighted blue color. Good way to do that!--and I do appreciate that effort too!

--


I found this article, parts of which are below, at http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2002/149/54.0.html

Much of it has to do with forgiveness. I wasn't sure if I should post it here or not. Maybe it belongs in the thread on forgiveness. I've made the parts that deal with what I think is spiritual pain to appear in blue and my thoughts are in (blue).


Hurt, Hate, and Healing - A 1985 interview with Lewis Smedes - By David Neff

Lewis Smedes transformed my approach to fractured relationships ...in his book Forgive and Forget: Healing the Hurts We Don't Deserve . Smedes, a professor of theology and ethics at Fuller Theological Seminary, writes: "Recall the pain of being wronged, the hurt of being stung, cheated, demeaned. Doesn't the memory of it fuel the fire, reheat the pain again? … You are locked into a torture chamber of your making. Time should have left your pain behind; but you keep it alive to let it flay you over and over.
" … Is this fair to yourself—this wretched justice of not forgiving? … The only way to heal the pain that will not heal itself is to forgive the person who hurt you. (Me? Forgive the Pastor/Leader/Elder?) Forgiving stops the reruns of the pain." (snip)


And not getting even leaves you the victim—with an unfair burden of a painful memory.