15 Sunflowers, Suffering, and Grace

15 Sunflowers ~ Vincent van Gogh, 1888

“Those who have eyes to see will recognize that all light comes from the same sun.”             

Vincent van Gogh, Letters to Theo

Recently, I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about suffering. What it is; what it isn’t. Usually, in the same line of thought, I end up thinking about grace. How it shows up; what it looks like when I am able to see it.

In a prosperous country with food plentiful and relative safety inhabiting our cities, words such as suffering and grace rarely, if ever, are uttered in public or polite social conversation.

 Suffering is either viewed as an archaic term in a technological age, ignored as irrelevant to one’s own personal life, or misunderstood as something belonging to other, less flourishing regions of the world.

And grace, well grace is an even more obsolete expression…a word erroneously relegated to those days where simple people sought simple answers in a chaotic universe.

Begging the pardon of my sophisticated friends: I think so many of us are walking around in unidentified suffering that we are blinded to the moments of pure grace in our lives.  The result: depression, addiction, unrelieved sadness.

Because we do not recognize or are unwilling to admit that this “just being human” opens us to the experience of unearned suffering, we also become desensitized to the similar occasions of pure grace that even more frequently come to us in ways undeserved.

Denying, minimizing, or dismissing what has happened to cause suffering in our lives, or refusing to consciously acknowledge the pain, grief and sorrow caused by that suffering—"we cannot see the light that comes from the same sun," as Van Gogh wrote to his brother, Theo.

Van Gogh was a person who knew about unmerited suffering. ¹ So too, did another Dutchman, Henri Nouwen, one of the great spiritual authors of the 20^th century.² Both also knew about the transformative power of grace in their lives.

What is this grace, you ask? Despite all the mastication of it by theologians and philosophers, it is simply this: love. Loving actions, loving thoughts, loving presence. Grace.

Grace showing up as a text message encouraging one’s day; Grace revealing itself as a neighbor clearing your driveway of snow; Grace infusing one’s body and refreshing one’s mind after a ski with friends.  A sunrise; a poem; a painting of sunflowers. Grace.

Yes, we ALL suffer. Yes, we ALL experience grace. They walk hand in hand with this being human. My hope for your 2012 is to be blessed with awareness of both in order to know the depth of love bestowed by the Creator of the Universe.
                                                                  Peace Be In All,   Jane Haubrich Casperson MA, CSD

^1. Lust for Life: The Classic Biographical Novel of Vincent Van Gogh, Irving Stone. The Penguin Group.

^2. Henri Nouwen: Following the Movements of the Spirit, Henri J. M. Nouwen with Michael J. Christensen and Rebecca J. Laird. Harper One.