Imagine being rescued from a fire. Flames encircle you. There is no way of escaping on your own. At the last second, just when hope has all but faded, a figure appears, presumably, to carry you away to safety. To your horror, however, the figure rushes through the flames only to join you in your helpless state. Where there was only one person at risk of peril, there are now two, and still there is no way out. Such a botched rescue mission is not only deeply upsetting, but utterly confounding. What good does it do for someone to join in another person’s suffering? And yet this is how help is often presented to us.
For the past year, our church has hosted a series of support groups for our parishioners: Widows/Widowers, Dementia Caretakers, Parents of Estranged Adult Children, Couples Struggling with Infertility, and Those Who Have Lost a Loved One to Suicide. Each group is facilitated by a parishioner who has had personal experience with the topic. A clergy member attends to offer pastoral care support.
It always feels like a risk when these groups gather for the first time. Will anyone RSVP? Will someone dominate the discussion? Will being together actually help, or will it simply aggravate people’s pain? Yet, time and again, each group provides a deep source of comfort. Tears are often shed. Laughter occasionally breaks through. Long-buried emotions rise to the surface. Friendships are formed. And, by the sheer grace of God, healing occurs, not through advice-giving or spiritual disciplines, but through shared understanding.
Contrary to a culture that can barely ever detach the word “help” from “self-help,” the church can offer the unique power of carrying each other’s burdens. Help is not given through imperatives (i.e., “You just need to forgive yourself!”), but through solidarity. Nothing soothes an angry soul like someone else who has had a similar experience saying, “It’s OK for you to be angry. I felt really angry for about three years.” Rather than giving a young parent a sleep training manual, the most supportive thing a fellow parent could do is to say something to the effect of, “Those first few months can be so hard. I had no idea what I was doing,” before offering to watch the baby while the parent takes a nap. When a person offers consolation, they become a placeholder for the one who calls himself Emmanuel, or “God with us.”
Such is the focus of Andrew Root’s remarkable new book, Evangelism in an Age of Despair. In it, Root makes a powerful argument that the church’s main work is consolation. While evangelism and discipleship are important, both are held together by the act of finding solace together, of carrying each other’s burdens and entering into each other’s sorrows. “Consolation — walking into and joining sorrow — is the deepest witness to the beautiful truth that God sacramentally enters death to bring life,” he writes. “We receive the evangel (the good news) of God’s redemption of the finite in the life of the infinite by concretely and practically consoling our neighbor in their sorrow.” His description brought to mind a previous illustration he once shared.
At last year’s Mockingbird NYC Conference, Root shared his experience researching people’s personal encounters with God for another book of his called Christopraxis. He once interviewed a woman in her mid-30s who answered every question with a one-word answer, the constant phrase to excuse her rushed tone was that she was a single mom. It was a painful interview, one that felt like a waste of time for both parties. Toward the end, however, Root offered up a Hail Mary. He asked her, “Rachel, have you ever had an experience where you felt so deeply ministered to that you were sure it was the very presence of Jesus Christ.” According to Root, Rachel’s whole disposition changed. She said the reason why she was a single mom was that her husband had died suddenly on a routine business trip four years ago. The hotel clerk had made the call to tell her that the housekeeping staff had found his body, and he was asking her to fly out to Chicago to identify her husband’s body. She remembers looking down at the floor, seeing her preschooler and her toddler and thinking, “My life is over.”
Shortly after hanging up the phone, Rachel dropped her kids off at her parents, got on a plane, landed at O’Hare Airport and hailed a cab. She remembers giving the cabby a business card with the morgue’s address scribbled down because she couldn’t even talk, she was just in a daze. When they arrived at the morgue, she didn’t notice that the cabby parked the car; she just remembers walking into the morgue and being taken to a side room. She stood there for a minute and a half, it felt like a day and a half, until her husband’s body was wheeled out, under a sheet. Just as the sheet was being lifted, Rachel felt a hand on her shoulder. An arm coming around the front with a water bottle and she started to cry. “It was the cabby,” she told Andrew. “It was the cabby!” she repeated. “I never felt more ministered to. I wasn’t sure how I was going to put my life back together, but I knew that God had not abandoned me.”
Though we often pretend otherwise as we try to make it through the day, everyone carries a burden. Some are better at hiding it than others, believing that grit and persistence will eventually erode the accretions of time. But the only thing worse than suffering is suffering alone. The warmth and assurance of a hug at a wake or the empathetic frown of a stranger across a circle of chairs may not seem like much. Relative to the scale of suffering, solidarity is a relief that does nothing to actually fix the problem. But a burden shared is easier to bear. On this side of eternity, we are often saved not by our suffering being fixed, but by one being present amidst our suffering. In times of trouble, we may hope to be rescued and taken away from our distress. And yet, to our surprise, the depths of our despair are often where Jesus comes to make his home. After all, in order to defeat suffering and death once and for all, he first had to descend into the fires of hell itself.
I read Andy’s book too and it really was a much needed breath of fresh air in the world of what the body of Christ looks like when operating from that place. Incredible book and one I could also relate to having had my own journey through being widowed at a young age. They simply showed up. It was exactly what I needed when I didn’t know my backside from page three.
Thanks for writing this article on the book. Andy is great.
I love this and I think it is so true. We know we can’t fix it, but just being there is the thing. To make someone feel that they are not alone in it. God has recently given me many opportunities to just be there for family members and friends and sometimes it just doesn’t feel like enough. Thank you for reminding me that “a burden shared is easier to bear”.