Suffering like an artist (Part II)

In the first part of this blog series, I talked about how intellectual or rational responses to the problem of pain, even if they’re good responses, are ultimately unsatisfying because we are more than just intellectual creatures. That’s not to imply that there is a satisfying alternative. But what other resources should our faith give us to push through suffering?

As I write, I’m fixated on the song, Silence, by Matisyahu. To feel the full gravity, you really have to listen to it, but I’ll provide some pertinent lines for the time-challenged.

True to the Hebrew tradition of candid, unedited prayer, the singer lifts up words that are at once indicting of himself and of God. Authenticity before the Holy One is valued over religious propriety. Closed, intellectual answers to the problem of suffering are neither offered, nor are they pursued.

 If it should turn out that he was really just praying at the ceiling, this effort to “shine a warmth into eternity” is doomed to fail in a world where “all is vanity” (Eccl. 1:2) and a universe where the cold, chaotic laws of thermodynamics are unrelenting. He risks the prayer anyways. It’s on God to prove that it was not in vain.

This is not a rational way of dealing with pain. But what cancer patient or grieving mother could give two damns about what’s rational?

To stubbornly “shine warmth” into a universe that tends toward cold is not a levelheaded action prompted by a calm assessment of possible outcomes. It is an act of defiance against chaos. It’s a mortal cry that if there does not exist a bridge between a future where “we’ll dance like flames” and a present where “I’m just a candle trying to stay lit in this windy night,” then I will insist on building such a bridge. I will begin to build even if my own love is the only cabling and my faith the only anchorage. I will leave it up to God whether hope should prove a worthy deck to get us across.

He is pitting love against entropy to see who wins. I don’t have to offer a defense for you, God. If you are God, prove it.  “[I] bring my heart to an invisible king with a hope one day you might answer me, so I pray, ‘Don’t you abandon me.’”

The song offers no explanation for the “problem of pain,” because, in fact, the song is not about suffering. The song is his suffering. It is his suffering not talked about at a distance but completely felt with music as the medium that allows him to access it fully.

Explanations, on the other hand, are like opiates for the soul. We dab the topical anesthetic, Explainitall, onto our hearts and escape into our heads in hopes that the pain will have gone away by the time our chest comes to. But it’s a deceptive solution. We’re numbed to the pain, but its root cause hasn’t been dealt with at all.

The art method is very much opposite that of philosophy. An artist assumes that if pain is going to happen, then we can’t get out of it but only through it.

This is hard to understand in our therapeutic culture where rosy praise songs and happy-ending apologetics are written by Christians who seem to want to act as veritable publicists for God, and we might be confused by the biblical faithful who are typically the ones lamenting the loudest; but avoidance of pain is a sign of unfaith. Faith is what gives us the courage to drink that foul cup without a chaser.  

Nevertheless, an honest artist is hard pressed to lay all responsibility for suffering in the lap of God and leave it at that. Can one ever honestly level such a charge at God without simultaneously indicting oneself?

“Your silence kills me…”

Matisyahu says. True enough. But he knows himself well enough to know,

“…I wouldn't have it any other way.”

Do I actually want to know what God thinks about things? Do I actually want God to offer an evaluation of my own silence toward the poor and oppressed? toward my own apathy in the face of injustice? toward my own negligence of the orphan and the stranger? Do I actually want to allow God that level of intrusiveness upon my own aims and motives?

No. If I’m truly honest with myself, all things being equal, I wouldn’t have it any other way.

There is, of course, a heavy price to pay for this silence. Not just for us. For God. What does a parent do, when she can’t bear the sight of her child’s suffering nor can she coerce the child’s affairs enough to avoid it? That parent dies.

More on that in Part III of this blog.