In this season of Eastertide, we are reading from 1Peter. And as the readings there are starting to talk about the manner in which a follower being formed in the likeness of Jesus faces suffering, it seemed appropriate to revisit certain authors who perpetually challenge me: Howard Thurman, James Cone, James Baldwin, Countee Cullen, and W.E.B. Du Bois — to name but a few.
In his 1963 book The Fire Next Time, James Baldwin offers some thoughts on suffering that I have been sitting with for a few days now. For those less familiar with Baldwin’s story, he rejected the Christianity of his youth, but not the spiritual dimension that he found constant in the black experience…… nor (as you will see) something quite “Christian” about his approach to suffering. He writes:
“This past, the Negro’s past, … this endless struggle to achieve and reveal and confirm a human identity, … yet contains, for all its horror, something very beautiful. I do not mean to be sentimental about suffering — …but people who cannot suffer can never grow up, can never discover who they are…”
Even in prose, Baldwin is a poet. And it feels a crime to dissect such lyrics, but such seems the only way to express how this statement has gotten its teeth into me of late.
Beginning at the end, Baldwin expresses that “people who cannot suffer can never grow up, can never discover who they are.” This is an astonishing statement, and one he is very deliberate in making. First of all, Baldwin has not said “people who do not suffer” but people who cannot suffer”; the difference between the two is stark, and Baldwin’s choice of words directs us to an inward quality rather than an outward experience.
A direction connection is made between maturity and those who “can suffer,” as opposed to an immaturity among those who “cannot suffer.” But Baldwin does not leave it at that — that immaturity also means that those who “cannot suffer” “can never discover who they are — they never learn their own identity and reality.
This tragic and stunted kind of life stands to further contrast with those who “can suffer,” and it is this contrast that leads Baldwin to reach for the word “beautiful.” It is not in the least that suffering itself is “beautiful,” but it is indeed “beautiful” to see persons “grow up” and “discover who they are” — and as Baldwin expresses, this cannot happen if they “cannot suffer.”
Do these thoughts and convictions challenge you as they do me? What do you think about the connection between the ability to suffer and the ability to mature? Or the distinction between those who “can suffer” and those who “do suffer”? Or the way Baldwin teases “beauty” out of suffering in a decidedly non-sentimental way?
How do you make sense of suffering? Do you use a different rationale for the suffering “of the world” and the suffering that you have experienced? If so, why? Does suffering have a role in your faith identity?
To quote James C. Cone: “Before the spectacle of this cross we are called to more than contemplation and adoration” (in The Cross and the Lynching Tree). How does the cross call to you?
Remember, we’re all in this together.
Pastor Michael