Rector's Blog: Comfort and Affliction
I have heard it said by more than one person in my vocation that a pastor’s job is to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. I have always had problems with that. My experience is that almost any person I meet is some mixture of comfortable and afflicted. At any given time, we are unsettled about some things, settled about others, rising to some challenges, failing at others, and consistently in need of some respite in our lives.
Tossing people into the categories of Comfortable and Afflicted flattens them out and denies the complexity of their living in the world. We are every one of us afflicted – assaulted by an evil that seeks to undo our understanding of God’s presence in the world, of our belongingness to one another, and of the essential beauty and belovedness of all creation. We are addicted to sinning, really, for the same reasons any addict is addicted to any thing: Not because we want to think or do or be evil – but because we live in fear of ourselves, our world, and our death. Sometimes the fact of our eternal belonginess to God seems impossible. Sometimes God’s presence itself seems implausible. This is an affliction, and we seek to be comforted. All of us.
Look, I get that there are people who live in material comfort, and many who do so at the expense of or are oblivious to the affliction of others. That is a spiritually criminal reality. It’s just that affluence and convenience aren’t comfort – they’re false idols, objects of obsession and addiction, that cause their own affliction. Rich and poor alike, all people are afflicted by the dread of unbelonging.
The question is not: Are we afflicted? We are. And the question is not: Do we deserve comfort? I’m not at all interested in whether or not we deserve comfort, because I don’t believe God works in the realm of deserving. Today the question is: What does real comfort look like in my life?
I mentioned earlier the part of our lives that evil seeks to undo. Ignore evil for a moment and go back to that sentence. Our understanding of God’s presence in the world, of our belongingness to one another, and of the essential beauty and belovedness of creation. This is where we find our comfort: Real comfort, honest comfort – a resting sense of abiding, dwelling, being home.
If we’re going to seek comfort (and we are) it’s worth knowing what will actually be a comfort to us.
God’s presence is a comfort.
My belongingness to you and yours to me is a comfort.
The beauty and belovedness of this creation is a comfort.
These things - when seen, felt, heard, and known - are the places where our souls find home.
