Terri Schiavo & the Innocent Who Suffer

Kallistos Ware, an Eastern Orthodox bishop from England, took his Chicago audience on a tour of the Book of Job Tuesday evening that brought us face-to-face with the mystery of suffering. In Job we see someone who suffers innocently and through that experience is granted by God an intercessory role—Job now may pray on behalf of  his comforters, who in the end had nothing to say.

Only the experience of the divine presence resolves Job’s dilemma. But there is comfort in the fact that Job does not speak into a void, that God in fact responds to him, even if he does not explain Job's suffering—he still enters into dialogue with Job, who prefers to repent and no longer speak. In just this way God, according to Hebrews 1:1, speaks to us now, not through the words of prophets, but by the very life of his Son, who like Job, suffered in innocence. Hebrews portrays Christ as the supreme intercessor, foreshadowed by Job, and also as the one who actually faced our temptations and lived among us, God-in-the-flesh who does not explain evil and suffering so much as accompany us through it. He is present with us.

In this light, there is little to be said in explaining the death of Terri Schiavo, whose name was mentioned on Tuesday night in the Q & A afterwards on suffering. All present, I believe, felt a solidarity with her and her family, and the prayers offered for the suffering included her most assuredly.

Terri Schiavo died today as a result of many forces beyond her control and the control of her parents, ultimately. The threads of some of these forces likely go back into recesses of time beyond our grasp. Given some of the statements of those who favored her death, it would seem also that some of these forces were aligned with the powers against which we struggle that are not flesh and blood.

We cannot view her death as a victory for evil, which in some way it certainly is, but as an opportunity in that it shows more clearly the grip that the culture of death holds on our society. We must continue to speak for life whatever the cost. If one needs motivation to do so, I cannot think of one better than the fate of Terri Schiavo. In the end, though, it is the faith of Job that sustains us, the faith that “my Redeemer lives.” Terri has left the hands of her abusers for the company of the One who touched the leper, placed his hands on the eyes of the blind, set his fingers upon the ears of the deaf, and called forth Lazarus from the day of corruption. If He did that among us before His Passion, then what He is capable of now in the time when His Resurrection must be beyond what we can even imagine.

Terri Schiavo, may she rest in peace, in the company of Christ and all his saints.