God suffers through the tragedies of loss and destruction and is with us in our weakness as the power of human, compassion and peace. God is the power of love that enables the victims of tragedy to carry on amidst life’s struggles and to hope for new future of life. God suffers in us without losing anything of God’s integrity, for indeed, God is love and the only real response of love is compassionate suffering.   While God cannot suffer ex carentia since God cannot lose what pertains to God’s integrity, God can (and does) suffer ex abundantia: out of the divine plenitude God suffers out of love for us. God shares our pain and bears our burdens out of the divine fullness of love. This is a God who gets so “foolishly close” that the boundaries between what is human and what is sacred become blurry.

Suffering is a door through which God can enter and love us in our human weakness, misery and loneliness. As we sacrifice and suffer loss, so too God personally experiences loss with us and in us. One can experience God’s suffering as desolation or absence of God’s comfort, and yet God is deeply present as Spirit and thus sustaining me in love. It is my act of surrender that brings God’s indwelling Spirit to life within me because I am now joined to God on a new level that is open to the future. My act of surrender is an act of trust by which Saint Paul writes, “now it is not I who live but Christ who lives in me” (Galatians 2:20).

In this mystery of love and surrender is my hope that I will not die because God’s love is pulling me forward into a new future. Hence, my suffering and willingness to offer my life for others is, at the same time, God’s own suffering and sacrifice in me. My commitment to love is God’s commitment to love; my willingness to surrender in love is God’s willingness to surrender in love; my pain or sorrow is God’s pain as well. My hope comes precisely in the act of relinquishing control of my pain or sorrow, recognizing that I am not alone; that God suffers with me. By surrendering to God, I am one with the Son in his obedience to the Father and I am one with the Father in his surrender of the Son and thus I am caught up in the breath of God’s love and this love is always new; hence despite my loss, I live on the cusp of new life because God’s love is the power of the future. As Holmes Rolston writes: “Things perish with a passing over in which the sacrificed individual also flows in the river of life” (Creation as Kenosis 2001: 59).

This deeper truth of suffering must lead us beyond a sense of loss to compassionate suffering; that is, a willingness to be sacrificial love for others. Suffering and sacrifice are intertwined. Suffering ex abundantia can lead to sacrifice when love for another impels one to give oneself entirely to the other. Several years ago, I heard of the story of Mary Johnson,  On February 12, 1993 Mary Johnson’s only son, 20-year-old Laramiun Byrd, was murdered. The perpetrator was 16-year-old Oshea Israel who received a 25-year sentence for second degree murder. Many years later Mary visited Oshea in prison and realized that she would face a difficult decision:  remain bitter or forgive. She was initially deeply angry but realized that “unforgiveness is like cancer. It will eat you from the inside out,” she said.   Her decision to forgive her son’s murderer was a choice she made out of her own deep faith and the need for reconciliation. “It’s not about that other person, me forgiving him does not diminish what he’s done,” she said in an interview. “Yes, he murdered my son – but the forgiveness is for me.” Oshea was released on March 7, 2009, after serving sixteen years of his sentence. Mary’s organization hosted a homecoming celebration for Oshea and his family. Mary also introduced Oshea to her landlord, who invited Oshea to move in next door to her. Mary came to regard him as her “spiritual son,” and he saw Mary as his second mother.  Since his release from prison, Mary Johnson and Oshea Israel have been working out a new future together.