Suffering and Post-Modern Consciousness: The Imaginative Appropriation of Tradition in Contemporary Culture

SANDRA M. LEVY* Suffering is a topic of wide interest these days. Horrendous suffering, pain, loss, or destruction follows from some sinful acts (e.g., drowning two helpless little sons in a lake) or natural disasters (e.g., a sudden spring blizzard wiping out lives of Mt. Everest climbers; a brain tumor in a young mother).l The subject has spawned a plethora of both scholarly and popular books.2 Why this spate of books at this time? From days of Job, humans have anguished over innocent, suffering. But why current upsurge of interest? Perhaps one reason (and only related to suffering as a function of undeserved disease) is availability of technology allowing suspension of humans in living death by equipment and experimental treatments. But more profoundly, perhaps western humans are less equipped today than ever before to make sense out of their own suffering owing to erosion of religious consciousness in our post-modern era. In a recent article,3 I grappled vertically with question of theodicy, or problem of horrendous suffering juxtaposed with concept of a loving God. That is, I considered transcendent Being of God in relation to suffering human, expressed and experienced symbolically in Coleridge's Rime of Ancient Mariner. In Coleridge's telms, such symbolic vision is both descending God, reaching down and manifesting to human perceiver, and is ascending man, participatory s;yInbol maker, reaching upward to God, in the joy of symbolic act.4 Although I will return below to aesthetic expression as a human response to chaos of suffering, I will not in this paper consider further vertical, transcendent dimension. Rather, I will address anthropological side of coin-the horizontal dimension of humans in community in face of evil. However, in contrast with previous work on this topic,5 I will not be primarily concerned with clinical, therapeutic, or pastoral aims. Rather, I will consider sense-making response out of a base of postmodern consciousness. That is, I will consider dilemma of quest for meaning in face of horrendous suffering in contemporary men and women, who seemingly have no firm ground of meaning upon which to stand. After an initial review of post-modern response to suffering reflected in recent literature, I will consider human capacity to create meaning in face of personal chaos. Finally, I will discuss possibility for re-creation of an overall Horizon of meaning through faculty of relig;ious imagination, with weaving of stories through conversation and preached Word. Post-rrwderi Response to Suffering Post-modern is a term currently aired in scholarly circles. Although there is no one definition of post-modern, as a philosophical arena, writers such as Derrida, Barthes, and Foucault are representative of this line of epistemological thought. In broad generalities, such writers refute possibility of objective knowledge. Basically, their work represents a reaction against possibility of knowledge generated by disengaged reason, as well as a reaction against possibility of knowledge arising out of epiphanic disclosure. Since all knowledge is perspectival, with no way out of historical circle, humanity is finally celebrated as infinitely free of any absolute ground of meaning. But question has to be raised whether this post-modern consc*ousness is widespread. To what extent does proverbial man-inthe-street share in this skepticism regarding modern project of Truth (the ideology of a totalizing identity or Sufficient Reason which seeks to unify limitless plurality of meanings that make up our language and our world6)? After all, this is also a time when there seems to be a worldwide rise in religious fundamentalism-Christian, Jewish, Hindu, and Muslim alike. I do not have an answer to this question. …