Reality Overload and How to Bear It

It has been said that human beings can only bear so much reality. This might imply that beyond a certain point they either go mad, or simply zone out, as happens to most of us when we witness on the news yet another incident of barbarity and pre-meditated cruelty committed against women. What can we do about it? And how do we manage our own feelings in relation to these occurrences? There have been three this week. The first involving the incarceration of a Muslim woman, Mariah Yahya Ibrahim, who became a Christian and subsequently married a Christian man. She awaits execution for apostasy, having first been allowed to give birth to her child. The second is the gang rape and public hanging of two sisters in a village in rural India. The participants included members of the local police force. The third involved a pregnant woman stoned to death by relatives in a major city in Pakistan for refusing to comply with an arranged marriage.

How should Christians, and all people of faith, respond to such things? The disgust and outrage prompts us to get out there and do something – protest, write letters to governments or join an organised petition, all of these being perfectly valid courses of action, even if they leave us still feeling powerless and ineffectual. But they are not the only things we can do. There is another way, an even more powerful way to effect change.

It has to do with being ready to face and fully engage with the pain itself from within our own history of suffering, our well of loneliness, be it ever so slight in comparison to what we see and read in the news. Our inner well of loneliness is that place where human consciousness, or conscience, is rooted in the history of every individual’s life experience and connects with the sum total of suffering which makes up human history. It is the place where we learn, sometimes through bitter experience, the difference between good and evil. We return to this place and face our demons when we pray. Our demons are the thoughts, inclinations and predilections of which we are perhaps ashamed but which may be connected to circumstances beyond our control, circumstances which sometimes do not even pertain to our own lives.

The more we do this returning, and own our pain and our demons before God, the better equipped we become to face the evil and violence that is committed on a daily basis against women and girls. A rape is committed in India every 22 minutes. In the moment that we return to our inner place of darkness, where we know ourselves and are known by God in all the fullness of what we are, we can be pretty sure that some hideous act of violence is being committed against a woman somewhere in the world.

The point of what I am saying is not to induce guilt or a sense of hopelessness. Neither am I suggesting that prayer, the centering down into our own inner dark space, our place of loneliness, is a form of escapism. Rather, it is a matter of owning the darkness in ourselves which makes us part of God’s purpose for our world. His purpose is the complete overwhelming of darkness by light, a purpose which is already being worked out in the moment we own the darkness and loneliness in our world to God.

The psalmist writes, ‘darkness is not dark to him. The night is as bright as the day.’ (Ps.139) This is a mystery and not one which is given to us to understand in this life, but eventually it will be fully understood by everyone, beginning with the perpetrators of the worst crimes against the innocent. They will see and understand what they have done in all its dreadful fullness. So we take the suffering of women and girls, as we hear of it today, into this place where we are ‘known’ by God and we are in solidarity with them, as Christ is in solidarity with us in our own darkness. It is from our own place of darkness that we share in the outrage of people around the world at the crimes which have been committed against these women this week. It is in this place that the world’s anger and grief has meaning and purpose because it is ‘known’ by God in ways which we do not as yet fully understand. We plead for justice in this place of darkness. We ask for mercy, knowing as the prophet Job knew in the depths of his own darkness, that our redeemer lives – and we carry on caring.