I

Suffering is not one. It is at least two. Perhaps more. The inability to distinguish between the two sufferings, their unique sources, and, crucially, to differentiate the respective ethical postures appropriate to each, undermines theological reflection and action in the Spirit of Christ across traditions as disparate as Catholic mysticism and liberalism, evangelicalism and the Christian left. Until we discern the differing natures of our wounds we will neither heal nor offer holistic healing.

II

For race scholar John A. Powell, suffering enters life though two distinct modalities: the existential and the social.¹ The first is a paradox contained within humanity’s mortal nature. It is the fear of death, the grief of loss, the angst of one’s continuous search for meaning, identity, and belonging. The latter is a human production. It is a broken response to the former. When the fear of death closes hearts meant for love; when creation is possessed as a finite cache of scarce resources instead of shared as an abundant expression of grace; when meaning, identity, or belonging are predicated on any form of exclusionary or exploitative othering—in each instance, violence, whether it be direct, cultural, or structural, enters the social milieu.

III

Jesus said “Blessed are the poor in spirit,” because the poor in spirit sit in the hope and gratitude of God’s continually poured out grace even amidst the dark night of the soul when that grace is hidden and inaccessible. The poor in spirit do not cling to the things of this world. They do not hoard and so they do not create scarcity. They do not fight for the fragility of their egos and so they do not wound. They do not resist diminishment but empty themselves of self and thus they do not seek power over others. It is through this spirit of non-attachment and kenotic humility arrived at by the gift of faith, deepened through practice, that cycles of violence meet their end. Only in facing death, indeed only in dying, can abundant and free life begin. Theirs is the freedom of those who discover a truer self beneath the churning surface, untouchable, unquenchable, found in mutually giving union with all things, composed of the very love of God.

IV

Social suffering emerges from a people’s choice to resist death by taking life from others. It is the sociocultural effect of existential suffering that goes unembraced by the contemplative self which finds its rest in weakness. Out of resistance comes the inevitable fear and captivity to fear (Heb 2:14-15) that builds empires. It is that fear—and the many children it sires, among whom some are named hate, greed, shame and insecurity—that gives power to the myths and structures of oppression. Such are the walls that build the oppressors’ bondage.

V

Jesus says, “Blessed are the poor,” because he himself was poor, he himself was oppressed, he himself knew what it was to suffer beneath the bloated weight of a colonizing empire. Out of such suffering, Jesus spoke of liberation for the captive, good news for the poor, of the Day of the Lord which is the Jubilee on which all debts are canceled and the land returned to its rightful inhabitants. He told the wealthy not just to become humble but to act out of the freedom from fear found in following Christ. Such spiritual freedom, Jesus understood, held material consequences. It would enable them to return wealth taken from the poor. And in that returning justice might be established and communion could, perhaps, be birthed between those who were once at enmity.

VI

Too many mystics flatten suffering’s dimensions to the existential and in doing so glorify evil. Meister Ekhart exemplifies that pattern of indistinction when he writes, “all suffering comes from our love for what misfortune takes from us.”² In his wise attention to the self’s misguided clutching and wise counsel to “go out from one’s self,” he fails to discern the inequitable aggregations of suffering by some onto others.

VII

Caught in psuedo-gnostic traps, broad strands of the Christian mystic tradition—often those woven in proximity to cosmopolitan centers of empire—fail to encounter or value the material creation in which God is manifesting God’s self. The twenty-first century groans for an integration of the Cloud of Unknowing in which the soul bends toward God with the climate-change swollen clouds flooding ensouled bodies. With too dismissive a theology of creation (creation being only a passing phenomena or veil behind which lies the deeper reality of God’s infinity), they hold too thin an anthropology (in which the soul, heart, and mind obscure the body), and thus largely lack a robust theological sociology (how bodies with hearts, souls, and minds relate to one another in time and place to produce cultures and societies). For other mystics, all creation and all phenomena are collapsed into the being of God in which all suffering is baptized—teachings we find metabolized and metastasized in slaveholder sermons. Behind the opacity of these mistaken metaphysics there exists a suffering unnamed and thus unchallenged: the socially constructed sufferings of race, class, gender, sexuality, and all identities organized into the bottom of colonial-modernity’s hierarchies.

VIII

Likewise, too many committed to social liberation see every suffering as a structural injustice, neglecting its existential roots. In the necessary struggle to build power for social transformation, they forget that personal fragility is a gift that draws us into interdependence. And thus they forgo the wisdom of those who have learned to cultivate that inner place of freedom achieved in the crucible of transforming fear and hatred into unshakable love for the fragility of one’s own humanity and the humanity of one’s neighbor. They forget we are creatures too, who can only bear fruit in some seasons and must lay fallow in others. For them, all things are material and historical, and so the transcendent nature of their own being is lost, ironically reducing them to the same fragmented, economic self-interested individuals against which they seek to struggle.

IX

We find an integration of the existential and social components of suffering in slave narratives and the testimonies of the freed. It is there in the epiphanic declaration of the enslaved woman who said, “De Lord done tell me I’se saved. Now I know de Lord will show me de way, I ain’t gwine to grieve no more. No matter how much you all done beat me and my chillen de Lord will show me de way. And some day we never be slaves.”³ Existential freedom is one with future assurance of social liberation in the eschatological truth of her identity in the Lord, unfolding as an end to grief—a balm in Gilead. Her liberation is at once spiritually present and historically-materially anticipated, radiating from ontological assurance (“I’se saved.”) through legal-structural transformation (“we never be slaves.”). That integration is similarly present in the mysticism of Howard Thurman, whose spiritual-social praxis was described by Womanist ethicist Katie Cannon as consisting of two concentric circles. For Thurman, Cannon describes, “Ethics emerges from mystical consciousness which obligates individuals to transform the social environment.”⁴ Finally, we witness it in the spiritual praxis for liberation offered by Gustavo Gutierrez, who urges us into the kenotic, material mysticism of spiritual poverty as “an expression of love, [which] is solidarity with the poor and is a protest against poverty.”⁵

X

It is in the integration of both existential and social pathways to freedom that we find ourselves practicing the way of the incarnate, Jewish Jesus of Nazareth who was and is and will forever be the Mystical Christ.

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