A famous tree (suffering part 2)

The Knowledge of Good and Evil was the title of a famous tree. Like that tree, created by God and declared "good", suffering can be used for infinite gain or infinite loss. Suffering is the currency of heaven, redeeming sinners (Isaiah 53) and damning them (Isaiah 51). Suffering has been part of the human condition since the Garden, where God planted the tree of pain. And since the Fall, suffering has been the only way back into the Garden, where Adam once conversed with God. The story of Job is an inside-out Garden, a story of a man forced to eat of the tree and gaining knowledge "too wonderful for me" that led him back into God's presence. The story of Job is a reversal of the Fall, a story in which God beats Satan at his own game. It becomes the archetypal story of victory over suffering and the defeat of death.

Suffering with God

(from the rememberings of a man, who has suffered much)

Many years ago I spent a summer internship in Haiti, in the impoverished, voodoo infested highlands near the capital of Port-au-Prince. One's first impressions of a person or a place are usually the most profound, and I had an impression of deep beauty and deep pain. The very trees that lined the road flamed with red blossoms, six-foot hedges of poinsettia bloomed all year round. Yet the deforested valleys were scarred with white, where tropical storms had created such runoff that the undercut limestone walls were crumbling into the valley floor, making these streams into rubble strewn wastelands as alien as the cratered moon. The slash-and-burn agriculture had created bedrock deserts out of lush rain-forest. Among the mobs of children were those with mottled red hair, characteristic of protein starvation, due not so much to want, as to neglect. The pain of a culture cobbled together out of a thousand African tribes under the slash of the slavemaster's whip, finding in fear a religion that unified their many tongues. I stood one night, under a tropical moon so bright that I could tell red from blue, mourning the death of my host's son, hearing the voodoo drums in the valley, feeling the pain of existence, crying out to God like a woman in labor, wordless tears washing my face--"God, don't you know?" And though I never heard an answer, my pain was lessened, not because the world had become any better, but because God had heard, because my pain was shared. So it was with Job, when God appeared and he finally knew that God had heard his voice. Suffering, spiritual suffering, is solidarity with God.