for God so loved the world

(The cross I made of holly wood that hangs above our door)

A Crucified God is the dramatic symbol of the one suffering that God fully enters into with us—much more than just for us, as we were mostly trained to think.

— Richard Rohr

2020 was painful for me in ways that have virtually nothing to do with the pandemic.

I have Oral Lichen Planus. Its causes are not well understood, and my impression from my research is that there’s actually some disagreement in the medical community regarding how to categorize it. The general thinking appears to be that in its most severe form, it’s a chronic autoimmune disease that causes the immune system to attack the mucus membranes in the mouth. Sometimes the symptoms are relatively mild. When the disease reaches an “erosive” expression, extremely painful lesions can form on a combination of the cheeks, tongue, and gums.

For some reason, my T-cells have decided that my mouth is an enemy and must be destroyed.

(One could argue that it isn’t completely wrong about that.)

In any case, I’ve had this condition for a while. It may be triggered by stress, by changes in my already effed-up hormones (I also have Poly-Cystic Ovary Syndrome), or by some mix of both. It flared up for the first time in the spring of 2017, eventually subsided into remission for reasons that remain mysterious, and then this past year it flared again, this time spreading from my tongue to my cheeks. The flare was severe; talking became painful and eating solid food nearly impossible. Even drinking was intensely uncomfortable. The pain was worse when something was in my mouth—even only fluids—but it was present regardless, and at its worst it was constant. My weight began to drop at a troubling rate; in roughly a week and a half I lost ten pounds. I wasn’t counting carefully but I’m fairly sure that for a short while there, my daily caloric intake was hovering around starvation level.

I should say that the diagnosis is relatively recent, coming only in the fall. It’s presumptive; it hasn’t been confirmed by a biopsy. For a long time we had no clear idea what it was, and the confusion only made the pain worse. Suffering is bad enough; suffering without knowing the cause is a special kind of torture.

It’s interesting to me that it hit me not long after my return to the mystical, nature-centered Christianity of my childhood. I don’t know that I’d say I was being prepared to endure it, but I do believe it made enduring the pain easier in the sense that I wasn’t mentally or emotionally crushed by it. The depression I experienced was minimal. Mostly it was physically exhausting (I suspect it had a lot to do with not eating much).

But there was one particular night when the pain was so bad I was afraid I might not be able to sleep, and sleep was the only time when I wasn’t in pain. I didn’t know what to do; it wasn’t depression so much as a dense kind of helplessness. I found myself outside sitting at the small stone altar in my honeysuckle grove, thinking I can’t do this by myself, it’s too much. I’m not asking you to miraculously take it away, but please just be with me in it. Let me give it to you, and help me carry it while I have to.

And I felt as though I wasn’t alone.

~

Why Jesus?

Why hold onto that? Why not ditch the whole Christianity thing, stop trying to make things harder and more complicated for myself and just dive fully into Paganism? Why try to braid these traditions that many people from both sides perceive as fundamentally at odds?

The answers to those questions are varied and multifaceted, and I don’t feel prepared to articulate all of them; I’m honestly still working a lot of it out, and I wouldn’t be surprised if my thoughts there continue to evolve. One answer I will offer is that I don’t want to, and another thing I’ll say is that I don’t feel like I need to.

But I’ll also say that there’s Jesus.

The Incarnation is a fabulously weird story, verging on incoherent—slipping into the mystical, contemplative realm of something we aren’t really capable of fully comprehending. But I don’t feel like I need to comprehend its workings so much as what the story means for my understanding of God, which is that God wanted to become a human being.

God wanted to experience what it was like to be a human. Not for a few days but the whole thing, from birth to death, with all its lows and highs, all its terror and its triumph, all its despair and its joy. Jesus experiences more than his share of pain even before being tortured and humiliated and executed as an enemy of the state: he goes through periods of loneliness and poverty and rejection, through anger and frustration and depression, through grief and loss, and even through doubt and fear and reluctance regarding what he saw as the culmination of his mission. Jesus wasn’t a superhero; in Gethsemane he expresses the wrenching desire to not go through with it after all—before placing his whole being into the ordeal, with dignity and compassion and an amazing commitment to nonviolence.

Jesus didn’t want to suffer, and he didn’t want to die. Yet the fabulously weird heart of the Incarnation story is that God voluntarily chose to experience precisely those things.

As the Lutheran catechism I was confirmed with repeatedly asks: What does this mean?

~

The history of Christianity is in significant part a fierce and frequently violent argument regarding what this all actually meant. Why it happened. What it was for. The current mainstream position is that Jesus died as some form of divine atonement for all of our sinful nature. I think that’s a more complicated notion than it’s often presented as, and I’m still not sure what I think about it, but I do know that I reject the doctrine of Original Sin—which is, after all, a later theological addition and not even original to the Gospels, nor shared by most early Christians. I reject the notion that humans and the world are somehow Fallen, that they are in any way bad or, God literally help us, depraved.

I reject it because in the Incarnation story, God entered the world and became a human being. And in the Genesis poem, God says that the world is Good. It’s all Good. It’s all blessed. I don’t find compelling the idea that God degraded God’s self as some form of great big favor to everyone, that incarnating into a divine creation would somehow be a kind of degradation at all (not least because as a Druid I’m a panentheist and believe that God is already incarnated in every part of the universe).

God is the Creator. God wanted to intimately and immediately experience the creation. God must have thought it was Good. God must think it’s Good now.

~

The Incarnation story is weird. It’s also difficult, and in many ways the Crucifixion part is the weirdest and most difficult part, which makes all the arguing somewhat understandable even if not remotely something to kill anyone over.

In the Gospels, Jesus’s followers sure as hell don’t understand what it means. What they know is that everything has gone wrong, they’ve lost their friend and teacher in the worst possible way, and now they have every reason to fear for their own lives. They’re stricken with guilt, as well—Why didn’t we do something? Well, what could we have done? Who can stand against Rome and the state? Who can deny power like that? Shit, Jesus tried to, and look what happened to him.

They don’t understand it. And I confess that I don’t fully understand it now. I don’t think I ever will, although I think it’s worth trying to understand—again, not the mechanism so much as the meaning.

But one thing I do know is that means something important to me to worship a transcendent God who also knows in the most intimate possible sense what it’s like to be human, and who knows what it’s like to suffer loneliness and loss and unimaginable pain. It means that when I sit in my own pain and I ask for company there, I already have it.

My God is beyond comprehension but my God is not removed from or above this experience. My God feels it too.

~

What is the meaning of the Crucifixion? I don’t know. What I know is that in that my understanding of that story, Jesus is God and therefore God suffers, and does so by choice, in order to participate in the fullness of human existence. For me, at this point, I look at the cross and I don’t see some substitutionary sacrificial salvation so much as sympathy.

Sympathy—feeling with.

My God suffers so that I don’t have to carry my suffering all on my own.

~

A few months ago I started rinsing with dexamethasone, and now my mouth is better. It’s not totally recovered, however, and once I’ve been jabbed both times I’ll probably seek the advice of a specialist and engage in more aggressive approaches if that seems wise.

In the past couple of weeks it’s started to get worse again. That’s happened before, so I’m not too concerned, but that doesn’t make it hurt less. Eating isn’t fun. Talking is awkward. Even merely sitting here and writing is uncomfortable at times.

I don’t want to say oh isn’t it perfect that it coincides with Holy Week but clearly it’s causing me to think along certain lines I might not otherwise, and I don’t think that’s a bad thing.

I have faith that it’s going to get better. (More on that tomorrow.) But for now, I can handle it. I’m okay.

In the most complete and divine sense, I’m not alone.