Was thinking on the drive home about this suffering thing. Had what might be an insight.
This is forming, thinking out loud, so if you throw brickbats at it, all you'll do is hurt my tender, insecure feelings.
But try this out for size.
When Christianity was starting out, it was, of course, very small. It wanted to attract converts. So it had to frame a theology to attract people away from other religions (or none) to Christianity. (Aside; that's one reason they didn't emphasize the poverty part; that isn't so appealing). Christ didn't leave a lot of clear theology, so most of it had to be developed.
They went with the miracle worker bit, of course, and the fulfillment of the prohpets, and the resurrection. All good stuff.
But also they went for the Loving God bit. Now this was fairly new. Gods up 'till then were pretty generally vengeful, pretty righteous dudes. Yaweh was not a kind, loving God. The Egyptian Gods were pretty brutal things. Ditto the Hindu Gods. The Greek Gods weren't know for loving kindness; more often they came down and screwed up human lives for sport. None of these Gods had the concept of caring for each person, many manions in the house, not a sparrow shall fall, all that bit.
So they had a loving, caring God. But they also had suffering. Lots of it. And no painkillers. No aspirin, no codine, no morphine, none of that. You got injured, you hurt. Your back went out, you hurt. Etc. No options.
Now, how to reconcile the fact that people hurt and suffer with this all powerful, loving God who looks after everybody as his own child? Why doesn't he just take away the hurt?
Uh oh. Disconnect. What to do?
Well, you come up with the Redemptive Power of Suffering doctrine. God is giving you suffering as a gift so you can show how much you love and accept him, so you can truly understand and share the suffering of Christ so you can more fully share in his love when you die. Suffering not as a bad thing but as a good thing. Saves the day.
This would whole concept would have made perfect sense until the invention of pain killers. Which is fairly recent -- only maybe the last 200 years or so, which is nothing compared to the 1,800 years of Christian theology which preceded it.
But Catholic doctrine, especially, just doesn't change that fast. Once you have a key doctrine, you can't just say oops, now that we've discovered painkillers this key theological doctrine can be tossed aside. Doesn't make theology look very good, does it? Doesn't inspire confidence in the Church.
Now, the policies I quoted before do emphasize that Catholic hospitals are to use pain medication. But you don't want to totally abandon the concept of redemptive suffering either. So you have them both. And you get a MT who is fairly old scool Catholic, who inherited the redemptive suffering doctrine and embraced it, it makes a lot of sense.
Okay. This is all thinking out loud. But it made sense driving home on our crowded freeway (well, I did see two or three cars on my drive home, and the widened parts of our road so there's wide enough shoulder for bikes, which isn't true on most of our roads, so it sort of is the mainland equivalent of a freeway. And it's free, too!)
So there's an idea.
Okay, put on your cleats and kick the cr@p out of the poor guy! |
