Having a faith conversation with old and new friends is as easy as setting the table.
FAITH FEEDS GUIDE SUFFERING
Introduction to FAITH FEEDS 3
Conversation Starters 6
• Don’t Miss the Second Half by Richard Rohr, O.F.M. 7 Conversation Starters 9
• The Antidote is Love by Patrick Downes 10 Conversation Starters 12
• The Last New Person by Mary Lee Freeman 13 Conversation Starters 15
Gathering Prayer 16
The FAITH FEEDS program is designed for individuals who are hungry for opportunities to talk about their faith with others who share it. Participants gather over coffee or a potluck lunch or dinner, and a host facilitates conversation using resources from the C21 Center.
The FAITH FEEDS guide offers easy, step-by-step instructions for planning, as well as materials to guide the conversation. It’s as simple as deciding to host the gathering wherever your community is found and spreading the word.
All selected articles have been taken from material produced by the C21 Center.
The C21 Center Presents
FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS
Who should host a FAITH FEEDS?
Anyone who has a heart for facilitating conversations about faith is perfect to host a FAITH FEEDS.
Where do I host a FAITH FEEDS?
You can host a FAITH FEEDS in-person or virtually through video conference software. FAITH FEEDS conversations are meant for small groups of 10–12 people.
What is the host’s commitment?
The host is responsible for coordinating meeting times, sending out materials and video conference links, and facilitating conversation during the FAITH FEEDS.
What is the guest’s commitment?
Guests are asked to read the articles that will be discussed and be open to faith-filled conversation.
Still have more questions?
No problem! Email church21@bc.edu and we’ll help you get set up.
READY TO GET STARTED?
STEP ONE
Decide to host a FAITH FEEDS. Coordinate a date, time, location, and guest list. An hour is enough time to allocate for the virtual or in-person gathering.
STEP TWO
Interested participants are asked to RSVP directly to you, the host. Once you have your list of attendees, confirm with everyone via email. That would be the appropriate time to ask in-person guests to commit to bringing a potluck dish or drink to the gathering. For virtual FAITH FEEDS, send out your video conference link.
STEP THREE
Review the selected articles from your FAITH FEEDS guide and the questions that will serve as a starter for your FAITH FEEDS discussion. Hosts should send their guests a link to the guide, which can be found on bc.edu/FAITHFEEDS.
STEP FOUR
Send out a confirmation email a week before the FAITH FEEDS gathering. Hosts should arrive early for in-person or virtual set up. Begin with the Gathering Prayer found on the last page of this guide. Hosts can open the discussion by using the suggested questions. The conversation should grow organically from there. Enjoy this gathering of new friends, knowing the Lord is with YOU!
STEP FIVE
Make plans for another FAITH FEEDS. We would love to hear about your FAITH FEEDS experience. You can find contact information on the last page of this guide.
CONVERSATION STARTERS
“There is no better wood for feeding the fire of God’s love than the wood of the Cross.”
—St. Ignatius of Loyola
Here are three articles to guide your FAITH FEEDS conversation. For each article you will find a relevant quotation, summary, and suggested questions for discussion. We offer these as tools for your use, but feel free to go where the Holy Spirit leads.
This guide’s theme is: Suffering
DON’T MISS THE SECOND HALF
By Richard Rohr, OFM
You’ve said that spirituality is different in the two halves of life. What do you mean by that?
In a nutshell, the task in the first half of life is the development of identity and boundaries. One must develop a necessary concern for the self: “Am I special? Am I chosen? Am I beloved?” Unfortunately it often takes the form of “Am I right?” leading to either/or thinking.
This accounts for much of our contemporary confusion, it seems to me. The first half of life is concerned with the container; the second with the contents. But most people become preoccupied with the container.
Can you give an example of a first-half-of-life person? Let’s look at a typical military school cadet. Who would not admire him? His pants are creased; his hair is cut; he’s clean; he’s polite; he’s on time; he loves God and country. If I need to hire an employee, give me a West Point cadet. He’ll do what he’s told. Great stuff, but don’t for a second call it the Gospel.
But unfortunately, I think we have. For many of us, that’s what it means to be a Christian, and that not
only misses the point, it openly obstructs it. Remember when Jesus said: “Your virtue must surpass the virtue of the scribes and Pharisees.” It’s a virtue of sorts but not yet what he is talking about.
A mere concern for order, purity, identity, self-esteem, and self-image is necessary to get you started. You have to have an ego to let go of your ego. You have to have a self to die to yourself, but the creation of a positive self-image is not the issue of the Gospel. Quite the contrary. That’s probably why Jesus did not start teaching until he was 30 and seems to have almost exclusively taught adults.
Once you teach something like “love your enemies,” you’re not talking about tit-for-tat morality anymore. That kind of thinking is not understandable to people still involved in the tasks of the first stage of life. In fact, it appears dangerous and heretical to them.
How does someone move from the first half of life to the second?
The two stages are not primarily chronological, al-
though they can be affected by chronology. Normally there has to be a precipitating event that leads to transformation. I call it the “stumbling stone,” using a biblical term. Your two-plus-two world has to fail you, has to fall apart. Business as usual doesn’t work. Usually that involves something very personal: suffering or failure or humiliation.
The fair-haired boy or girl who just dances from success to success will easily stay in the first half of life forever. I think that’s what Jesus means by saying that it’s harder for a rich man to enter the reign of God than for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle. It’s a strong statement.
Thomas Merton wrote about new monks coming in. He recommended that monasteries not accept anyone who had not gone through a spiritual crisis. He argued that they weren’t ready for religious life. In fact, he thought the monastery’s job might be to facilitate a spiritual crisis for many of the monks.
If you are lucky, God will lead you to a situation you cannot control, you cannot fix, or you cannot even understand. At that point true spirituality begins. Up to that point is all just preparation.
Does suffering always lead to the second half of life?
Not always. Sometimes it just leads you to circle the wagons of your own little group. It depends on whether you deal with your suffering in secular space or sacred space.
The secular response to suffering is to fix it, control it, understand it, look for someone to blame. You learn nothing. Unless suffering pulls you into sacred space, it doesn’t transform you. It makes you bitter.
In sacred space, if you can somehow see God in it, suffering can lead you to the universal experience of human suffering, even identification with the suffering of God. At that point, you’re moving into the second half of life. The questions are now more mystical than merely moral.
Are you in danger of idealizing suffering?
Yes. But I’m not saying go out and search for it. Suffering is inevitable, and if you can be convinced that it is a teachable moment and not something to run from, you’re doing yourself a great favor.
There are really only two paths to transformation: prayer and suffering. But because few of us just walk into a wonderful journey of surrendered prayer, you can really say there is only one path, which is suffering.
That’s why Jesus talks about the Way of the Cross so much. Until your nice, coherent interpretation of reality has been beaten up a bit, why would you let go of it? Some form of suffering is the only thing strong enough to destabilize the ego, in my opinion.
What specific experiences can cause this to happen?
Loss of a job can be a big one, especially if you’re very invested in your work. Death, of course, is the biggest of all, especially the death of someone close or an unjust death. A major humiliation is another way. I know a lot of priests who have come to God through being accused—rightly or wrongly—of sexual abuse. The public persona isn’t there anymore, so who am I now?
Moral failure is a common biblical pattern that leads to the second half of life, as we see very clearly in both Peter and Paul. Somewhere along the way my own moral failures have the power to get me to finally fall into the mercy for a loving God. If I lied to that person or I used that woman, I have to ask myself, “What kind of person am I that I did that?”
Richard Rohr OFM is a Franciscan priest of the New Mexico Province and founder of the Center for Action and Contemplation (CAC) in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
From C21 Resources, Spring 2010.
DON’T MISS THE SECOND HALF
“I think [God] wants us to love, and be loved. But we are like children, thinking our toys will make us happy and the whole world is our nursery. Something must drive us out of that nursery and into the lives of others, and that something is suffering.”
—C. S. Lewis
Summary
In this interview, Fr. Richard Rohr explores the meaning of suffering. He claims that a person can live their life in one of two “halves,” either a state characterized by blind obedience and legalistic morality, or one that is more mystical and meaningful, having been broken open by suffering. In the face of painful moments or difficult circumstances, the Christian is invited to more perfectly understand the teachings of Jesus about carrying one’s cross and helping others to carry theirs.
Questions for Conversation
1. Do you agree with Rohr’s categories of the first and second halves of life? Why or why not? In which do you think you currently live?
2. Rohr writes, “If you are lucky, God will lead you to a situation you cannot control, you cannot fix, or you cannot even understand. At that point true spirituality begins.” Have you had one of these pivotal, transformational moments or seen it in another person’s life? Describe that experience.
3. Rohr makes the claim that suffering with faith, or suffering in a sacred space, helps us to see God in difficult circumstances, helps us to have compassion for others, and helps us to understand God’s own suffering. Do you think he’s right that faith makes a difference when it comes to the question of suffering?
THE ANTIDOTE IS LOVE
By Patrick Downes
My beautiful, loving wife, Jessica, and I were blown up in the name of God. Our bodies were torn apart and our psyches shattered in the name of religion. We were casualties of a religious war. At least that’s what we were led to believe.
This may seem reductionist, but most of the great religions have three central tenets: love of God, love of self, and love of neighbor. This is true for Christianity, Judaism, Buddhism, and yes, Islam as well. Ultimately, religious faith is about love, as so well evidenced by the simple message of Jesus in the Gospels. We may all have different customs, languages, symbols, or stories, but ultimately we’re all talking about love. So if anyone conducts themselves in a nonloving manner, and certainly if they act with hatred and evil in the name of God, their actions are not authentically religious. Period. Regardless of how much they pray,
speak God’s name, or subscribe to being a steward of God, they are nothing of the sort if they act with malice.
In fact, as I learned from my clinical psychology training, we may even describe someone who says that they act in the name of God, but does nothing of the sort, as having delusions of grandeur. Somehow their minds have been deceived into assuming that if they really believe that hatred for some others is God’s will, then they will be granted salvation. If this view seems hypocritical, perverted, or disconnected from reality, it’s because it is. It is sacrilegious rather than religious. All truly religious leaders have attempted to unite people—bringing them together for a common good and to inspire hope through words and deeds. This particularly includes Jesus, Moses, and Muhammad. Their intent was to make peace rather than war
Patrick Downes and his wife, Jess Kensky, at the finish line of the 2016 Boston Marathon, Boston College News.
and violence. We still speak of them and carry forward their message because of their everlasting example of love. As their religious followers, we too hope to be remembered for our love.
Terrorism is desperation. It is a desperate search for attention and legitimacy. But these terrorist attempts will never accomplish their end goal. Terrorists may colonize some people’s social conscience from time to time, but their message can never finally triumph. That is because terrorism seeks to pull us apart. It is the antithesis of unification and love, and of any religion that claims to promote peace.
We, as citizens of a divided world, must have the wisdom to know the difference between true religion and terrorism, love and hate. It is not an easy distinction to maintain, but once we possess this knowledge, we have an obligation to one another to be loving—to demonstrate for the world a love that is pure, genuine, and for the greater good of all.
I experienced this love firsthand after the Marathon bombings. While the world saw the attack through a lens of “radical Islamic terror,” and some were understandably overcome with anger and despair, all I could see and experience was love. In the time it took for me to regain consciousness, a city had coalesced with a communal determination to spread compassion, generosity, and unity. For me the message was clear: loving and peaceful societies and people will prevail over hate.
In my eight years of Jesuit education at Boston College High School and Boston College, and two years of working for Jesuit schools or service programs, I learned that my faith is only as good as how I put it into practice. And my practice was only as good as the love it conveys. My best mentors—Jesuit or layperson—practice way more than they preach, and spread love with every deed. And when they preach, they do so with the intent of practice of a living faith: serving as catalysts for goodness and love.
Scripture advises us that we should turn the other cheek to violence. However, my Jesuit training has taught me that in addition to nonviolent resistance we should hit back with love. Violence, in all of its forms, is meant to separate us and instill fear in our hearts. The most powerful antidote is love. It cannot just be about the absence of evil; it must be about the omnipresence of love.
Since that fateful April afternoon in 2013, Jessica and I have made it our mission to respond with love. We have attempted to sow compassion by advocating for people with disabilities and using our family’s experience to care for others who have been scarred by physical and psychological trauma. Caring for people has always been a part of our identities, but now it is essential to our daily existence and our way forward together. We choose to respond this way because that’s how we were raised and educated in our faith. It is also how we have seen the world at its best. We encounter life this way because it is how countless individuals responded to our tragedy—with love.
While hate took months to plan, and caused so much pain and suffering in the lives of those it sought to destroy, love responded in an instant. Complete strangers, fueled by human instinct, became our lifelines and took responsibility for our welfare as if we were one of their own. If that is not a true indication of the power of the human spirit, then I do not know what is. No longer do we have to wonder what it means to be my brother’s and sister’s keeper.
Boston College taught me that love will always triumph over hate. I hope to live out the rest of my life honoring that lesson.
Patrick Downes is a graduate of the Lynch School of Education and recently received his doctorate in psychology.
From C21 Resources, Fall 2017.
THE ANTIDOTE IS LOVE
“Suffering can refine us rather than destroy us because God himself walks with us in the fire.”
—Timothy Keller
Summary
BC alumnus Patrick Downes reflects on how he and his wife chose to respond to being severely injured in the 2013 Boston Marathon bombings. In the wake of profound suffering and loss, Patrick and Jessica witnessed boundless compassion and decided to move forward in faith by spreading love in the face of hate. According to Patrick, “Violence, in all of its forms, is meant to separate us and instill fear in our hearts. The most powerful antidote is love.”
Questions for Conversation
1. What do you think about Patrick’s claim that because religion is ultimately about love, those who act in an unloving manner in the name of religion are “nothing of the sort?”
2. Do you think you would or could respond in a similar way to an experience like this? Have you chosen to love in the face of hatred or division, or have you seen inspiring examples of this?
3. How does the Christian faith help you to navigate the mystery of suffering, especially suffering that takes place at the hands of others?
THE LAST NEW PERSON
By Mary Lee Freeman
Friday afternoon at the hospice center. I punch in and eye the whiteboard, looking for empty white strips and unfamiliar names, quickly piecing together who has died, who is still living in this 18-bed facility. I start at the bottom of the list, Room 19 (no Room 13 here—these folks have had their share of bad luck). Room 19 is the stomping ground of the Delgado family. Miguelito, five years old, with his bald pate and big eyes, is speeding up and down the hallways in a motorized Big Wheel. His two older sisters will be coming “home” from grade school soon, and his younger sister, Lily, is being her cute, showboat self, hanging out once again at the nurses station while mom naps on the extra bed in Miguelito’s room….
In Room 16 is the John Roth family, with Miles Davis on the CD player and pale ale in the cooler. They were hanging out last night, and they’ll be hanging out tonight and through the weekend, spirits never flagging, manners always impeccable, their love for their husband and father and brother deep and wide and joyful….
In Room 12 is “Airman” Mike Grable, an African-American and former professional wrestler, whose seven children will one day soon accompany his barrel-chested body down the long corridor, past the nurses station, through the lobby, and out the front door, singing “Amazing Grace” as they go.
The north-wing patients are present and accounted for.
It is a quiet but lively place, this unit. Periodically, ambulance drivers enter with their bright orange stretcher contraptions, bearing sedated patients whose pale faces look tiredly out over white sheets and blankets, a small knot of family bringing up the rear. And while many of these patients end up being discharged to their homes after short stays, a great many of them leave on the black stretchers maneuvered down the corridor by funeral home attendants, the same family members trailing behind.
What happens while they’re here cannot but prompt reflection.
I am a nurse practitioner by training, and the field of hospice and palliative care is my métier. I have assumed various roles and performed various duties over the years, spending time as a field nurse visiting hospice patients and families in their homes, as a hospital-based palliative-care consultant tending to terminally ill patients in the hospital or being discharged, and as a nurse in the freestanding hospice facility.
There are a few things one learns, playing a bit role in the lives of the dying and their families. One is that “death with dignity” is an ambiguous term. Another
is that suffering is part of the human condition, and trying to stamp it out or ignore it or gloss over it is a dangerous illusion….Some patients and families are veritable black holes of need, with generations of sin and dysfunction that hardly lend themselves to easy understanding, let alone tidy solutions, happy deaths, and what the bereavement experts call “uncomplicated grief.” Affixed to the wall above my desk is a scrap of paper with this reminder from H.L. Mencken: “There is always an easy solution to every human problem—neat, plausible, and wrong.”
Hospice workers know—but sometimes forget—that we are seeing just the tip of the iceberg of people’s histories… I often find myself, when I am visiting patients in their homes, in the position of being the last new person to get to know them, of being the last non-family contact with the outside world. Sometimes I am rather absurdly but quite obviously looked to as the embodiment of “the world,” as in, “What does the world think of me? How will the world remember me?” Opinions about the dying person are already well established and seemingly unshakeable among family members. It is with the visitors from hospice that the dying person has a last chance to be better than he really was….
It’s 9:30 p.m. on the unit. The Delgados have become so many lumps under blankets on the beds, the couch, the floor. I learned that lesson the other night, when I unsuspectingly stepped on tiny Lily as I tiptoed into Miguelito’s darkened room to administer, through the “central line” sutured into his chest, the final medications of the day. It is against his grieving father’s chest that Miguelito’s sedated body will be pressed weeks later after a morning of fright and struggles for air. Death will come that afternoon, quietly, before his doting sisters return from school….
John Roth’s family welcomes me with smiles. Frank Morgan’s “Mood Indigo” has replaced Miles Davis on the CD player. A daughter follows me out into the hallway. “Those doors to his patio—a bed can fit through them?” “Sure,” I say “We could wheel him out there?” “Sure,” I say. A few days later, the sun will be shining, the breeze blowing, and the omnipresent
family scattered around the patio when John draws his last breath. Each time there’s a “patio death” I think of St. Francis, hoisted outdoors in his last hour by his own request that he might die lying upon the cool brown earth….
In Mr. Grable’s room, one daughter remains. “How do you keep doing this work?” she asks me. “Isn’t it depressing?” No matter how many times I am asked that question, it still takes me by surprise. I am not the one with the chronic disease, dealing with the ravages of it on my body and grieving the impending loss of my life and all that is dear to me. Even more to the point, I am not a family member who has been shouldering the multiple burdens of caregiving, of medical bills, of contemplating life without my beloved. It is a strange thing to walk the hospice hallways, amidst such suffering, and to have a question posed about my sustenance.
I am tongue-tied not only because the question seems directed to the wrong party, but because I struggle to put acceptable words to the images and feelings that crowd my mind. “Should I say it?” I think. “Should I just say, I pray?” For the Dorian Gray families, ugly from decades of sin and dysfunction; for the relentlessly cheerful patient with ALS who smiles even as she cries about no longer being able to walk in the woods or weed her garden; for a 26-year-old patient’s mother, stricken and wide-eyed, absolutely certain that her lapsed Lutheran son will be going to hell; for the family of a strong and vibrant colleague who just weeks before had been bathing patients but then occupied a room of her own on the unit, preceding into death some whom she had bathed. In prayer, as in life, the neat categories—patients, families, professionals—meld into one another. We are all the living; we are all the dying, all of us sustained by grace and mercy and love.
Mary Lee Freeman is an alumna of Boston College (M.A. in Theology) and a palliative-care nurse practitioner.
Originally published in Commonweal Magazine 51, no. 5.
THE LAST NEW PERSON
“Go forth in peace, for you have followed the good road. Go forth without fear, for He who created you has made you holy, has always protected you, and loves you as a mother. Blessed be You, my God, for having created me.”
—St.
Clare of Assisi
Summary
Through her varied experiences as a hospice worker, Mary Lee Freeman explores the grace and challenge of accompanying families as a loved one moves toward death. As “the last new person” many of her patients meet, Freeman’s work is an entry point into the complexity of human life and relationship, especially when that life is in its final days. Within the encounter of joy, conflict, sadness, relief, and more, Freeman names the grace, mercy, and love that sustains her in an encounter with the living and the dying.
Questions for Conversation
1. Freeman describes that prayer sustains her in her work with the dying and their families. How have you seen prayer sustain people in difficult life experiences such as death? What sustains you in these situations?
2. What is the experience of grace that Freeman describes in the midst of what many would identify as suffering? How is this grace made known?
3. Considering the frailty of all human life, what does Freeman’s description reveal to you about faith, community, and the experiences of transition that can bring suffering? How are we to journey through such times in faith?
GATHERING PRAYER
Be With Us Today
St. Thomas More (1478-1535)
Father in heaven, you have given us a mind to know you, a will to serve you, and a heart to love you. Be with us today in all that we do, so that your light may shine out in our lives. Through Christ our Lord.
