Suffering and post-modern consciousness: The imaginative appropriation of tradition in contemporary culture

Anglican Theological Review, Summer 1998 by Levy, Sandra M

SANDRA M. LEVY*

Suffering is a topic of wide interest these days. Horrendous suffering, pain, loss, or destruction follows from some sinful acts (e.g., drowning two helpless little sons in a lake) or natural disasters (e.g., a sudden spring blizzard wiping out the lives of Mt. Everest climbers; a brain tumor in a young mother).l The subject has spawned a plethora of both scholarly and popular books.2

Why this spate of books at this time? From the days of Job, humans have anguished over innocent, undeserved suffering. But why the current upsurge of interest? Perhaps one reason (and only related to suffering as a function of "undeserved" disease) is the availability of technology allowing the suspension of humans in living death by equipment and experimental "treatments." But more profoundly, perhaps western humans are less equipped today than ever before to make sense out of their own suffering owing to the erosion of religious consciousness in our post-modern era.

In a recent article,3 I grappled "vertically" with the question of theodicy, or the problem of horrendous suffering juxtaposed with the concept of a loving God. That is, I considered the transcendent Being of God in relation to the suffering human, expressed and experienced symbolically in Coleridge's "Rime of the Ancient Mariner." In Coleridge's telms, such symbolic vision is both descending God, reaching down and manifesting to the human perceiver, and is ascending man, the participatory s;yInbol maker, reaching upward to God, in "the joy of the symbolic act."4 Although I will return below to aesthetic expression as a human response to the chaos of suffering, I will not in this paper consider further the "vertical," transcendent dimension. Rather, I will address the anthropological side of the coin-the "horizontal" dimension of humans in community in the face of evil.

However, in contrast with previous work on this topic,5 I will not be primarily concerned with clinical, therapeutic, or pastoral aims. Rather, I will consider the sense-making response out of a base of postmodern consciousness. That is, I will consider the dilemma of the quest for meaning in the face of horrendous suffering in contemporary men and women, who seemingly have no firm ground of meaning upon which to stand.

After an initial review of the post-modern response to suffering reflected in recent literature, I will consider the human capacity to create meaning in the face of personal chaos. Finally, I will discuss the possibility for re-creation of an overall Horizon of meaning through the faculty of relig;ious imagination, with the weaving of stories through conversation and the preached Word. Post-rrwderi Response to Suffering

"Post-modern" is a term currently aired in scholarly circles. Although there is no one definition of "post-modern," as a philosophical arena, writers such as Derrida, Barthes, and Foucault are representative of this line of epistemological thought. In broad generalities, such writers refute the possibility of objective knowledge. Basically, their work represents a reaction against the possibility of knowledge generated by disengaged reason, as well as a reaction against the possibility of knowledge arising out of epiphanic disclosure. Since all knowledge is perspectival, with no way out of the historical circle, humanity is finally celebrated as infinitely free of any absolute ground of meaning.

But the question has to be raised whether this post-modern consc*ousness is widespread. To what extent does the proverbial man-inthe-street share in this skepticism regarding the modern project of Truth ("the ideology of a totalizing identity or Sufficient Reason which seeks to unify the limitless plurality of meanings that make up our language and our world"6)? After all, this is also a time when there seems to be a worldwide rise in religious fundamentalism-Christian, Jewish, Hindu, and Muslim alike. I do not have an answer to this question. But perhaps in part, at least in the WVestern world, the upsurge in religious fundamentalism, as well as various forms of "spiritualism," (for example, the current angelology craze) has been in reaction to the erosi(on of religious consciousness in our post-modern, contemporary situation.

A clue, of course, to our culture's mentality in this regard can be found in popular fictional and non-fictional literature. In the former category, John Updike's writings are perhaps exemplary. In his most recent novel, In the Beauty of the Lilies,7 Updike describes the general decline of a family over several generations, starting wdth the loss of religious fuith in the family's founder, an ordained Presbyterian minister; who becomes an encyclopedia salesman. But the banality of lives described in this work was also portrayed in the "Rabbit" series previon sly written by Updike. In general, whether describing the car salesman, Harny Angstrom in Rabbit at Rest,s or Clarence Wilmot, the demitted preacher and his offspring in his latest novel, Updike paints an inner life, empty and devoid of much meaning. Although his characters seem to have some wistful sense of lack in their lives, some sense that something basic has escaped their grasp, they remain essentially caught in a void.