Scene II
Time: Six months have
passed since Scene I.
Setting: Patient Wife is sitting in the dialysis unit’s waiting room while her
husband completes a dialysis treatment.
Characters:
Patient
Wife Pastor Bubba Kathleen Norris
James Cone Viktor Frankl Dorothee Soelle
Patient
Wife:
Thanks for stopping by to check on Patient. He is doing much better. Dialysis is miserable, but he is making the
best of it.
Pastor
Bubba:
I am sure that God is using him for great things! He just needs to keep a smile on his face and
a song of praise in his heart!
Patient
Wife:
My prayers are for his strength to return and for him to endure each
treatment. This is a miserable place
with so many hurting folks. Suffering abounds here!
Pastor
Bubba:
Well, as long as we pray, God works through us.
Patient
Wife:
Please, just say a prayer for us.
Pastor Bubba says a prayer and
leaves. Seated near Patient Wife are
four persons. They are Victor Frankl,
Kathleen Norris, James Cone and Dorothee Soelle.
Kathleen
Norris:
We noticed that you are alone and thought you might appreciate some company.
Patient
Wife:
Thank you. Did you overhear my conversation with that Pastor? He is a friend of my husband who always seems
to show up and think he has all the answers. I’m not sure there are any good
answers to suffering—especially the suffering in this place.
Kathleen
Norris:
What exactly do you mean by suffering here?
Patient
Wife:
Suffering includes physical pain, but it is more than that. Dialysis is a
dehumanizing process and the suffering it creates is beyond the bodily
affliction. Suffering is even greater when a person thinks he or she is going
to be destroyed.[1]
Viktor
Frankl:
Yes, in my experience, often the physical is not what is most painful. Rather, injustice causes us mental anguish.[2]
Dorothee
Soelle: I find this interesting. Suffering happens when
a person thinks they will be destroyed, but can’t it also be where one finds
strengthening? Isn’t this exactly what
Jesus endured in the garden of Gethsemane?
When a person is conscious of dying and experiencing pain, they can come
to new understandings of their faith.[3] When we can truly face
this pain and uncertainty, we can move beyond fear about what is to come. When
we embrace our suffering, we can be strengthened.[4]
Kathleen
Norris:
Yes, I think that you are on to something here.
It is in watching the suffering of Jesus in Gethsemane that we can learn
how to live in our own suffering. Jesus is a model as he feels abandoned by his
friends and by God. “In that gruesome
and interminable night, waiting revealed itself as a true ally, a bulwark
against fear. And Jesus became the most radically free and dangerous man of
all, the one who embodies hope in the face of death and is afraid of nothing.”[5] Jesus shows us how to face
death.
Viktor
Frankl:
I don’t know about Jesus but I think I understand the psychological principles
here. Even when we are fearful, if we have hope for the future or some purpose
or reason for living, we can hold on. When a person loses hope for the future,
they are doomed.[6]
James
Cone:
I would agree with you both, Soelle and Frankl. Suffering is a part of life
especially for those within oppressed communities. What allows the sufferer to
endure the pain is having an encounter with God’s presence.
Patient
Wife: Well, I believe that my husband is
encountering God in new ways through his suffering. His suffering continues, but it has changed. It
is almost as if he has heard all of your advice about finding meaning and
purpose as well as joining his suffering to Christ’s suffering.
On
a communion Sunday, he heard words spoken by the preacher about how the chalice
was a vessel of grace which held blood. Upon hearing those words, he realized
that the dialysis machine was a vessel of grace which held his blood. Because
of that machine, he was alive. As a
result of that encounter with the Holy Spirit, he began to anoint the machine
with a bit of frankincense essential oil before each dialysis session. He also would anoint himself as he sat down
in his chair for dialysis.
As
the days went by, his nurses and other staff members began to ask what he was
doing. When he explained that he was
blessing and anointing the machine and himself, they began to request a
blessing as well. Then other patients started
to ask for a blessing. Now, when he
enters the room for dialysis, he goes to the chair of each patient and asks
them if they would like to receive a blessing and be anointed. Most do.
He anoints their heads and they often share their prayer concerns for
that day. This has been a transformative
experience for him.
Viktor Frankl: This
is what I was telling you! We can change
our attitude toward life. We have to stop asking why and begin to think about
what life is asking of us. Finding meaning in suffering is about how we can we
adjust our attitude to make meaning
in our life.
Kathleen
Norris:
He is making meaning and he has linked his suffering to Christ’s suffering!
Because of this, his suffering has become a redemptive gift to him and others!
James
Cone:
I would agree when we endure suffering, it can become transformed into an event
of redemption.[7]
Patient
Wife:
Yes, what he is doing is also relieving the suffering of the other patients. It
may not be changing their physical circumstances, but their mental anguish may
be somewhat relieved. Many of them are
likely to stay on dialysis all of their lives.
They are old and often come into the dialysis center on stretchers,
unable to even walk.
James
Cone: This sounds like suffering can be endured and transformed into an event of redemption for
them almost as a community. It is within
the community which suffers that meaning can be created and the experience can
best be understood. As they suffering
together, their shared experience creates meaning.
Patient Wife: It definitely
seems that my husband has been creating some meaning out of the suffering that
he and the other patients endure together. In so many medical settings, patients
are just numbers to those who offer treatment. So often their dignity is not
respected.
Viktor Frankl: And yet, people have the choice of how they
will respond to the indignities that they endure. People have a choice in their
actions and attitudes. People “can preserve a vestige of spiritual freedom, of
independence of mind, even in in such terrible conditions of psychic and
physical stress.”[8]
James Cone: Yes, for those
who suffer, the question of whether they remain faithful despite the suffering
can be the greatest challenge to their spirits.
Viktor Frankl: “When a man
finds that it is his destiny to suffer, he will have to accept his suffering as
his task; his single and unique task…. His unique opportunity lies in the way
in which he bears his burden.”[9]
Dorothee Solle: When we
embrace suffering—not just our own but when we willingly join ourselves to the
suffering of others—we move from suffering to dying to self and finally to a
receptiveness to God.[10]
In this way we are attaining the image of Christ. We can only to this when we remain
with the oppressed and the disadvantaged.[11]
James Cone: Yes, it is within
community of the oppressed that we can best understand suffering. The community
creates meaning and interprets the experience.
Viktor Frankl: I do not believe
that the community is essential for the individual to find meaning. Individuals can find meaning in suffering on
their own. In fact, the meaning of suffering for each person is different.
Patient Wife: Many of the dialysis
patients may have feel that no one sees their pain and suffering. I can’t tell you how many times in the
hospital I have heard patients yelling from their rooms for a nurse. Rather than use the call button, they
vocalize their need. They yell sometimes
because it seems that is the only way that someone will respond. By visiting each patient and asking if they
would like a blessing and/or praying with them, my husband is offering them
dignity and being Christ’s representative.
James Cone: Suffering is
transcended through giving each person their dignity. It is when the sufferer
knows that God sees their suffering that they can bear the suffering itself.
But this is about an encounter with God. Knowing that God sees our suffering is important!
Patient Wife: I hear what
you are saying. By visiting each patient
and listening to their needs, my husband is seeing their suffering and perhaps
they are experiencing God’s presence.
James Cone: The answer is
not in an assent to the belief that God sees, but an actual experience of God
seeing the sufferer.
Patient Wife: Is it truly
necessary for God to be the one seeing the sufferer? There are arguments for an “emphatic witness”
who offers recognition of our suffering and because of that the sufferer can
gain meaning and pain can be lessened.[12]
James Cone: Perhaps your husband’s presence might bring a
sense of God’s presence, but it is the encounter with God that is important. “An encounter with God is the ultimate answer
to the question of faith….”[13]
In this, God is with the victim. God identifies with the victim and suffers
with the victim.
Dorothee Soelle: Yes!
Because God is either with the victim or God is the executor of injustice! If
God is love, then surely God is not the Executioner. God is with the victim. Suffering can
become meaningful when we are standing with those who are oppressed.[14]
Patient
Wife: As we have talked through this, I am not
convinced that suffering needs to be seen by another person in order for it to
be healed. If the suffering one believes that God sees their suffering and
continues to love and care for them, they may find relief from their suffering.
(Just then, the door opens and Patient
comes out from the dialysis unit.) It is time for me
to go. Once again, this has been an enlightening conversation. Even still,
there is much that remains to be discussed. I hope that we will meet again.
[1] Eric J. Cassel, “The Nature of
Suffering and the Goals of Medicine,” New
England Journal of Medicine 306, no. 11 (March 1982), 640.
[2] Frankl, 23-24.
[3] Soelle, 82.
[4] Ibid., 86.
[5] Norris, 222.
[7] James H. Cone, The
Spirituals & the Blues: an Interpretation (Mary Knoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1991), 56.
[8] Frankl, 65.
[9] Ibid., 77-78.
[10] Soelle, 97.
[11] Ibid., 132.
[12] Pamela Cooper-White, “Suffering,”
in The Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Practical
Theology, ed. Bonnie J. Miller-McLemore, (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), 30.
[13] Cone, 56.
