Episode 396 - Liz Hall, "Find Meaning In Suffering"

Dr. Liz Hall is a psychologist and professor at Biola who, at 45, was diagnosed with stage two breast cancer — and discovered that her training had barely prepared her for it. She joins Michael to talk about her book When the Journey Hurts, co-written with theologians Kelly Kapic and Jason McMartin, and what a decade of research and lived suffering taught her about meaning, faith, and staying human in the hard middle.

They talk about why the degree to which something threatens our worldview is exactly the degree to which it causes distress. They discuss the "problematic roadmaps" Christians often get handed — vague theology that begins and ends with Romans 8:28, triumphalism that rushes past suffering toward victory, and theodicy that answers a question no one in crisis is actually asking. Liz also describes a study on Ignatian prayer, walking people through twenty moments of Christ's suffering on their phones — and finding that identifying with Christ in suffering drew people closer to God in measurable ways. And they end where you might not expect: with lament, and with Psalm 88, which doesn't resolve.

Transcript

Introduction to Suffering and Meaning

Michael John Cusick 0:00

Hi, everybody. Welcome to another episode of the Restoring the Soul Podcast. I'm Michael, and today my guest is Dr. Liz Hall, the author of When the Journey Hurts. I'm reaching for the book, Liz, because I'm bad at remembering subtitles. The book is called When the Journey Hurts: Finding Meaning in Suffering for Heart, Mind, and Soul. Welcome to the podcast.

Liz Hall 0:24

It's really great to be here, Michael.

Michael John Cusick 0:26

This is a joy because I got to meet you last uh September at the Apprentice Gathering in Wichita. And we got to spend just a little bit of time together. But the time with you and with Todd was really delightful. And I was so thrilled when Intervarsity sent me a copy of your book. Um, it's so rich and it's so integrated with uh theology and psychology in a way that is, I think, very, very practical and helpful. So, first of all, thank you for uh writing and co-authoring this book. You do have two co-authors, Kelly Capick and Jason McMartin, uh respectively theologians, I think, at Covenant College in a Biola. That's right. So yeah, just great work. Thank you.

Liz Hall 1:12

Thank you. Uh, you know, we uh this is the result of a long journey of work together. And so we're really hoping that this book finds its way into the hands of people who can really benefit from it. That's that's really the desire.

The Intersection of Personal Struggle and Academic Insight

Michael John Cusick 1:26

So uh you are vocationally a psychologist and professor at Biola. You've been there for many years. You train uh graduate students to be psychologists and therapists. So you've lived at the intersection of a deep understanding of psychology professionally and academically, but also theology, which is what Biola is famous for in a very particular way, with an emphasis on spiritual formation in many cases. So there's that professional aspect, and you've researched that and done studies and written studies around that, but you're also a cancer survivor, and you integrate that in really lovely ways into the book. So tell me about how this book came about in light of those two uh points of personal struggle through cancer, but then also academic and professional research interests.

Liz Hall 2:23

It's actually almost embarrassing, Michael, to recognize how little my psychological training uh had to do with a book in the sense that when I was diagnosed with stage two breast cancer at age 45, I was really thrown for a loop. You would think that of all people, I would have been prepared. Uh teaching, as you said, at a at a uh a Christian program that really specializes in bringing together the insights of psychology and theology. You would think that I would have a particularly robust theology of suffering. And I, you know, I I felt as helpless as the next person, I think, in light of uh just the the well, the treatment that I was going to face, but even more than that, the the threat of death. So that year um really was a turning point in my life. I God taught me so much during that year, but uh significantly at the end of that year, uh God had redirected my area of research into what is now that book. And so shortly after uh finishing my treatment, I connected with uh a group of other uh interdisciplinary scholars. And uh, in one form or another, we've actually been collaborating since then. It's been over 10 years now. And uh we've uh we've done some really what I think is fun and interesting work together, really exploring the deep resources that the Christian faith brings uh to the process of coping with suffering. Uh we had written uh a gazillion academic articles, and we started saying, okay, now we have to do something to land this plane. We have to not just uh you know benefit ourselves and academic audiences, but we need to put something in the hands of people who are suffering, people who might be able to use some of our insights. And so that's when Kelly and Jason and I uh decided to write this book.

Understanding Meaning in Suffering

Michael John Cusick 4:20

Yeah, I'm so glad you did because there's so much rich um information, data, insight that's gleaned from academia, and very often it doesn't get down to everyday helping people. Um, and so I thought, again, you just did a marvelous job about that. I think there were three big ideas that stood out in the book for me. One is that suffering isn't something we can go around, it's something that we have to go through. Number two is this idea that in order to get through it in a way where it becomes, for lack of a better term, productive, fruitful, and transformational, we have to have meaning in the midst of it. Thirdly, and maybe this is a roadmap for our conversation today, um, that there are actual practices that the Bible and Christian tradition provides that can help us to get through this. And those are not just research-based, but in your story about your own cancer journey, you wrote about how these were things that you just clung to in the midst of that. So let's uh let's jump into that middle point. And that is first of all, talk about what meaning is. You know, we throw that word around as Christians, but what do you mean by meaning and why is that so critical in the midst of suffering?

Liz Hall 5:43

The field of psychology is really enamored with meaning right now, and I'm so glad because the just the key insight is that we don't live our lives in some kind of unfiltered way where we access reality directly and we respond to it, you know, directly. But instead, we are always interpreting the world around us in light of our particular set of beliefs and convictions. Uh, you know this from your own work uh with attachment with respect to relationships. But the reality is that we do this not just in our relationships. We do this just overall. We understand the world and our place in it in a certain way, and uh that guides our actions. That helps us to make decisions as to how to live our ordinary lives. And so meaning is uh, you know, one simple way of thinking about it is it's simply the kind of the lenses through which we all view the world and uh often in profoundly different ways uh from each other.

Michael John Cusick 6:42

Yeah. So in one sense, the word meaning has to do with, and and sorry if for listeners if this is offensively obvious, but it's not to me, meaning has to do with what does this mean.

Liz Hall 6:53

That's exactly right.

Michael John Cusick 6:54

Yeah. So if I am driving down the road and there's a stop sign, that means that I should stop. And if I have an unexpected medical diagnosis or uh an unexpected um betrayal in my life or financial ruin, I'm asking the question, what does this mean? And one of the things you talked about was this psychological term of global meaning, and you equated that with worldview. So my world view is this terrible tragic thing happens. What does this mean? And then we fill in the blank. And you talked about a number of those blanks that are filled in. Um and we can we can get to that in a minute, what you guys call in the book uh problematic blueprints. But um first I want to talk about the statement where you said the degree to which our view of what's happening challeng challenges or threatens our worldview, that's the degree to which we experience distress. Was that information that you found in the research as well as uh personally?

Coping with Distress and Meaning-Making

Liz Hall 8:02

Absolutely. So that comes directly out of the meaning-making model, which is a model that a prominent psychologist of religion, Crystal Park, came up with. And we had the fortune of having Crystal on our team, and so that really, that framework really guided a lot of our work. And that is the insight that I found so incredibly helpful. Uh we, you know, we go through life, we understand it in a certain way, our life works for us, it makes sense. We're we have certain goals and purposes in life that are tied in with our understanding of the way that that world works. And then something comes at us, right? Uh an injury, uh, a loss, uh, a diagnosis, whatever it might be. And the the again, the key insight here is that we automatically uh make meaning of that event. Uh we make sense of it. What does it mean, uh, in your words? And so uh a cancer diagnosis in my case. What does it mean? Well, what it meant is a terrible threat of loss, perhaps leaving my young teenage boys uh without a mother, my husband uh without a wife, uh a kind of a stop of all of my goals and aspirations to live a long life with my husband and uh, you know, enjoy my job and see grandkids and all of that just potentially gone in a second. So there was a discrepancy between my evaluation or my understanding of my cancer diagnosis as a threat and this overall life that I was living that had larger purposes, that had a God that was good and that wanted good things for me, that was a an area of tension, right? Uh how how's this good God, right? And so out of that comes distress as you're trying to fit the pieces of what's happening to you into your overall life meaning. And so that's where uh psychologists describe a process of meaning-making coping, which is the process of kind trying to reconcile those two things that seem to be in such tension with each other, trying to bring them together in order to reduce that distress that's resulted from the discrepancy.

Michael John Cusick 10:15

You touched on this about halfway through the book, but this idea of the meaning, the coping meaning making, and this whole model of um the tension on the one side of this is how my worldview tells me the world should be, and then here's what's really happening. This is a helpful model beyond suffering. As as you wrote about in the story of one person who was suffering and then they they turned away from their faith. And I know there's a lot of reasons for that, but but this idea of we've somehow have to reconcile that gap or that distance or that space between our worldview. And one of the tricky things is that uh our worldview is is cemented, and I would argue that part of growth is that that cement needs to be loosened and sometimes broken up because our worldview we think is distinctly Christian, but we may have, as you discovered, uh beliefs deep inside of us or assumptions that are really not um consistent with who God reveals himself to be.

Liz Hall 11:24

I love that metaphor you're using of cement that's been poured and that needs to be cracked, because uh I really think that that is one of the potential gifts of suffering is that it uh uh some people have talked about it as shattering our assumptions, right? Shattering our worldview assumptions. But but the the great thing about that is it allows us to rebuild in perhaps a a better and and stronger way. And uh yeah, it's even as Christians, you know, I I I I don't I wouldn't say that my main ideas about the world uh change that much from before or after the cancer. I still believe in God. I still believe God is good, you know, those kind of primary uh beliefs that are part of our Christian worldview. But I can tell you one thing is that they have become a lot more nuanced uh than they were before the cancer. And so I think even when uh those of us who are kind of committed Christians, maybe relatively mature in our faith, hit hard things, uh, that there's room for growth. There's room for some uh contextualizing and nuancing and just learning more things.

Michael John Cusick 12:34

Yeah. Well, I appreciated your vulnerability through the whole book, starting with the cancer diagnosis, but also a lot of your mental process in that. There was a time where you blamed yourself, you know, like how could how could I do this? Or, you know, what what what did I do wrong? Um, but you you stated that one of the things you learned about yourself was that you had a belief that life should be fair, and that that fair equaled if I was a good person and you know, a relatively good Christian, that this kind of suffering shouldn't happen.

Liz Hall 13:07

And that that discovery actually caught me very by surprise because pre-cancer, if you had asked me if I believed that, I was at it, I would have said, of course not. That's ridiculous. We all know that the world is not fair, right? Uh so the the the interesting thing, uh again, a gift uh out of that experience was that I learned some things that I might believe in my heart and kind of at kind of an implicit level, even when I didn't really explicitly believe it. Uh I learned that because I was surprised. I learned that because my diagnosis just, I was like, cancer. How could how could I have cancer? And that made me dig down a bit more and discover that, yeah, I I had kind of this belief that if I did the right things, life was gonna go well. So, yeah, I think that's a a pretty widespread belief. Uh psychologists study that in the form of just world beliefs. And it turns out that a lot of us are kind of primed uh to think that way. Which is probably why our kids always tell us that's not fair, and we have to teach them, right?

Michael John Cusick 14:12

Yeah.

Liz Hall 14:12

That life's not fair.

The Life Blueprint: Three Pillars of Meaning

Michael John Cusick 14:14

So Right, right. Talk about uh we've we've talked about this at a high level, but the three pillars of what you and your co-authors call three pillars of the life blueprint. And I love that metaphor that we all have a blueprint. Uh, and for for those that may have grown up in a digital world and not uh seen blueprints, it's it's what the architect designs to build the building. So kind of at a very foundational level, these are things that we all have as a blueprint.

Liz Hall 14:43

Yeah, so these are part of what we call that global meaning system, or we could call it worldviews if people prefer that. But uh it, you know, part of it is just the beliefs about the world. So uh things like uh, you know, reality exists and uh there is a God and God is good, and uh this is who I am, and this is my place in the world. So that's one piece of it is just kind of our cognitive beliefs about it. Uh a second piece would be our our important life goals, uh, the things that get us up in the morning, the things that uh really in the long term are the things that we do every day are are geared toward accomplishing uh in the world, whether or not we've identified them or not. And uh these might be uh like particular um particular goals, you know, a career achievement or uh relational status that you want to achieve, or it might be the kind of person that you want to become. So these are all in that second pillar of uh the the different important life purposes or goals that we have. And then the third level is uh kind of the more subjective emotional state. It's that sense that we matter, that life matters, that the world has meaning in it, that life is meaningful. Uh and I mean the interesting insight is these things can be relatively distinct, although they tend to hang together. Uh, one of the interesting things we found in our qualitative studies is we uh often ask people uh in those studies, do you do you feel that your life has meaning and purpose? And most people said yes. And then we would ask them, what is the meaning and purpose of your life? And very few of them were actually able to articulate it. So uh it's not something that we often do is stop to kind of name uh our important goals or purposes. But boy, do we know it when those are blocked, right? Yes. When something comes up and we're no longer able to achieve it, we suddenly realize what our purposes were.

Michael John Cusick 16:47

So the good segue into um this isn't necessarily the order of the book, but as people move through suffering, growth and transformation is possible, not just of whatever transformation does not equal resolution or positive outcome, but there's growth. And there were three key things, I think, that that you identified there. Maybe four, if you include the idea of I think it was glory and suffering and identifying with God's suffering.

Liz Hall 17:17

Um so are are you took you're talking about like the purposes that God might have for us in the suffering?

Michael John Cusick 17:24

So uh and I I'm well aware that uh, you know, there's an old episode of Saturday Night Live where William Shatner, uh Captain Kirk, shows up at a Star Trek convention, and the first person comes up to ask him a question. He goes, Remember in episode 79, seven and a half minutes in, when you and Spock, so and and fine, then the next person comes up and asks a question like that. And finally, the skit is where William Shatner just loses it and he starts like throwing rotten fruit at the Star Trek, the truckies. So, what's my point in that? It's that I'm aware that we can write a book and not actually have the exact reference, you know, from episode seven. So let me let me just prime prime the pump. So you talked about seeing ourselves differently, deepening of relationships, and then our worldview shifts. And then uh on top of that, it was like the icing on the cake that this idea of glory and that we can suffer with Christ and that there's actually a glory in that.

The Connection Between Suffering and Glory

Liz Hall 18:23

Yeah, yeah. So those the first three are well documented in the psychological research. And so uh, you know, there's been a couple of bodies of research on sometimes called stress-related growth or post-traumatic growth that has been studied in the field of psychology for several decades now. And those are uh, as you articulated, the three areas that tend to come out when people report uh what comes out of uh suffering. The the the what the last one you mentioned, glory, uh, actually has uh a bit of a um a bit of a story to it that maybe I'll I'll tell you before I jump into talking about it. So um I'm not sure that we always learn God's purposes for our particular suffering. Uh and so I experienced it as a real gift that God allowed me a glimpse of why he uh led me through that cancer journey. Um I uh it was 2013, it was uh sometime in uh November, and I received an email inviting me to go to a conference and speak on growth through suffering. At that point, I wrote had written one paper several years before on the topic. It was not my current area of research, and so after briefly thinking about it, I just I politely declined, said, you know, I'm sorry I'm not doing work in that area. And uh that afternoon I unexpectedly got a phone call from the organizer of the conference, and in the course of that conversation, she was able to convince me uh to say yes to that invitation. Now, the invitation for the conference was uh a little more than a year out, and uh as part of that, I was supposed to write a book chapter for part of an edited book. Three weeks later, I walked into uh my regular yearly mammogram uh and came out a couple of days later with my cancer diagnosis. And I had uh this kind of profound realization pretty soon there that God wanted me to write that chapter uh not just as kind of a clinical psychologist with access to the research findings, but as from the inside, as someone who wanted me to explore that topic. And uh and so that book chapter was at kind of the back of my mind as I was going through all of my treatments and my my uh you know, my musings about what was going on. And uh as I started looking through my Bible, because again, I I didn't feel like I had a um, I didn't feel like I had the resources I needed at my fingertips to get through this. As I went back to my Bible and discovered that my Bible had a lot to say about suffering, one of the things that I discovered that was a completely new idea to me was the really tight connection between suffering and glory in our Bibles. And glory is one of these words that we throw around in churches and we rarely stop to think about, to talk about. Uh, and uh, you know, C.S. Lewis has this funny kind of rift on the top of a glory where he says, you know, the first impression is of like a light bulb uh that uh, you know, we we think of that when we think of of glory. Uh but the the biblical idea really is about uh God's presence, and then as we move into the New Testament, about God uh, in a sense forming us as we take on the likeness of Christ. And that is a that's a strong that's A strong thread throughout the Bible, the connection between suffering and glory, that God has purposes for our suffering. And they are tied very, very tightly to our being shaped into the glory of Christ and to leading us to our eventual glory, which is in a sense being able to see God face to face because He's transformed us enough that we can tolerate that is one way I might put that.

Practices for Identifying with Christ's Suffering

Michael John Cusick 22:29

Let's take a minute and just camp out with this for a bit, because very, very unexpected, but I'm really moved by the idea. And I love the analogy of that C.S. Lewis described as like glory is like a light bulb. I I've often put words to it for people that we think that it's radiance and that it's, you know, this this ultimate white light that's just shining somewhere. And that and that's a a metaphor. And it's also potentially true about just the glory of God, and we see in the transfiguration, right? That that there's just this this brilliance uh that's that's emanating. Um but there's something so intimate about presence and about transformation in that presence, because I've heard a lot of people in suffering live with this sense of pressure that I'm somehow as a Christian supposed to shine so light, my light shine before men and women that God's gonna get glory out of this. And we can't actually be human. We can't actually go, this sucks. I hate this. Because we have this picture of Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane that is going through misery and anguish, it says in Luke, and he's saying, God, take this away, take this away. So what you talked about is so important that this idea of glory, it's actually more of a resting, as I'm hearing it, kind of a resting and trusting into this presence. And the, I think the the Hebrew word for glory or one of them is havod, which ironically means weight. So it's not just the shiny, but it's substance that's holding us, that's grounding us in place. And that substance is actually a presence of a loving God, a caring God. Sorry if I borrowed language from my book, but a God who sees us, soothes us, uh, creates a sense of safety, and in whom we're secure. So this is really beautiful. And that resting into this glory is simply a surrender of the suffering that's there and joining in that suffering with Christ.

Liz Hall 24:38

Yeah, I I love how you put it. I I had not heard that connection with rest, but that really does fit beautifully because it is it is this sense of almost like soaking in God's presence uh that that uh that I think is is uh the the connection there. As it we're it's we're basking in a sense in the salvation that he brings and in the restoration uh and renewal that that were promised. So yeah, that that fits very well.

Michael John Cusick 25:04

And many would argue that we're resting not just in his presence, but in a co-suffering presence, uh where not not only did he suffer on the cross, but if we look at Matthew 25, when Jesus says, what you've done to the least of these, to feed the thirsty, uh give drink to the thirsty and feed the hungry, and clothing to the naked and those in prison, we've done it unto him. So there's a sense in which Christ suffers in all the suffering of the world, and when we rest and trust our suffering to him, that in some mystical way that there is a co-suffering that happens that only deepens our sense of ability to rest, because it's like it's like I imagine um I've been in the hospital with kidney stones, not cancer, and it felt like I was going to die because I had surgery, um, and very, very, very miserable. And just the presence of a loved one sitting beside the bed, they're not feeling the pain of the kidney stone, but if they're empathic, they're feeling the impact of my suffering. And we all know what that means to be hurting when someone else is hurting.

Liz Hall 26:54

Yeah, I love that. I'm I'm I'm choosing now between two paths to pick up on what you just said or what you said earlier. So uh, I mean, one of the practices that we recommend uh later in the book that I think is a forgotten Christian practice is identifying with Christ's suffering. And so that's where we're, in a sense, uh intentionally stepping into what you just so beautifully articulated of a kind of this co-suffering with Christ, uh, where we are recognizing that one of the purposes of our suffering is in fact to draw us closer to Jesus and to becoming more like Jesus as we connect our suffering intentionally with the suffering of Jesus. So that's uh I think uh kind of a practice, something we can do intentionally in the midst of suffering, that uh really, I think really uh signals our participation in this effort of God transforming us in the suffering.

Michael John Cusick 27:50

And I know you addressed this in the latter half of the book uh with the number of practices that are there, but I can imagine listeners saying, well, how do I identify with the co-suffering of Jesus? You know, is that a verse that I memorize? Uh give me a podcast to listen to. What are some big thoughts with that?

Liz Hall 28:07

Aaron Powell Well, I mean the big thoughts are certainly uh it's never going to be a good, uh bad idea to go to our Bibles, right? To see what's going on there. But uh so uh Philippians three is one of the places I would point people to. Uh we participate in Christ's uh suffering. We join him in what one translation calls the fellowship of his suffering. And so that's kind of a verse to land on. Uh, but you're asking the really practical question. I mean, if we're talking about a spiritual practice that goes beyond just knowing a verse in our heads, I think Christians throughout the ages, maybe not in our trish tradition, but in other traditions, have actually developed practices that are explicitly aimed at this. So uh some people from maybe visiting churches uh in Europe uh or Catholic churches in our country might be familiar with the practice of the stations of the cross that are intended to help people uh to uh just pause and um consider the the uh the the different moments of suffering of Jesus uh in that those final days uh of his life on earth. Um and so that could be a structure for doing it. Uh we in the book we talk about the fact that uh, depending on your tradition, weekly or monthly, you might partake of the Lord's Supper, of communion. And that's a moment of remembering Christ's suffering on our behalf. And it's also an opportunity for us to then consider our own suffering and connect with that. We just finished a study where we developed uh an identification with Christ's practice uh based on ignation prayer, imaginative prayer, where you kind of prayerfully uh and imaginatively enter into a Bible story. And so we selected uh 20 passages uh depicting uh moments when Christ suffered, not just in the around the events of the cross, but also in his daily life. And we sent these to people once a day uh on their phones, and uh they took some time to go through some prompts that we sent them uh around those stories to imaginatively enter into uh that and consider how their suffering helped them to uh more fully understand what Jesus was going through. And so that's a study we we just completed, ran the results. Turns out that as we might expect, it's helpful to people. Uh they came out saying that they felt much closer uh to Jesus and to God, which is what we would hope from a practice like that.

The Power of Art and Imaginative Prayer

Michael John Cusick 30:42

That's so beautiful. And and what it does is it ushers people into a place where there's a bridge between the global meaning of this is how life is supposed to be, and my assumptions and the blueprint that's there, and the actual experience, because it takes them imaginatively into that. You know, one of my favorite practices is Visio Divina, and that involves the imagination. But I thrilled when I read the chapter that opened with uh the discussion about Mark Shigal's white crucifixion. Uh that's one of my favorite paintings. I have three Shigals on my wall, and I won't start to nerd out about that here in my office. But Mark Shigal uh was born into poverty in Russia in the late 1800s, was a uh a faithful Jew all of his life, and yet he painted this white crucifixion, which is one of the most profound uh depictions of Christ in the midst of sufferings. And certainly Jesus died for our sins, but I think what a lot of Bible-believing Christians uh miss sometimes, and it tells us right in Isaiah 53, that he bore our infirmities and he took up those things upon himself as well. So this white crucifixion, which you and your co-authors unpack, is that in the midst of Hitler's reign and in the midst of pogroms happening all over Europe, and how appropriate for today, you know, there's a boat with refugees that are falling over, and it's just all this chaos in traditional Shigal fashion with brilliant color, by the way. Uh it's this depiction of Jesus suffering in the midst of our suffering. And if any listener has never seen White Crucifixion by Mark Chigal, just Google it and gaze upon it. Don't try to figure it out. Don't try to, you know, do an art analysis, but just to gaze upon it and allow your heart to be moved by that. And I do that from time to time with a crucifix, where I'll just sit in quiet and gaze upon the crucifix, not trying to find any meaning out of it except to allow it to seep inside of me. So I really appreciate the fact that uh you're referring to and talked about the the research around the Ignation imaginative prayer.

Liz Hall 33:02

Yeah, it was it was uh such an interesting study to do because again, you know, these are practices that are not common, uh, at least in the corner of Christianity that I live in. So it's uh it it really has been uh a kind of a process of discovering and reclaiming some of these practices that our brothers and sisters over time knew were needed uh to endure suffering well and that we've kind of lost in our American context.

Problematic Roadmaps in Suffering

Michael John Cusick 33:29

If you have time, there's two more things uh that I'd like to cover. And the first is the problematic roadmaps, because I help I think this helps people to number one feel validated that they're not crazy, because I think at least the majority of the people I work with, they'll say, this is where I'm falling into because here's what my community is telling me, or here's what my Christian culture has told me. So I want to talk about the problematic roadmaps and then go a little deeper into the practices, because this is ultimately the hope and the guidance, which is not separate from our faith. Like here's the psychological stuff I need to do, but it's it's a beautiful integration of that. So, what are the problematic roadmaps uh that we that we find ourselves on when our blueprint and reality collide?

Vague and Triumphalist Roadmaps

Liz Hall 34:18

Aaron Powell Yeah, I do hope that people find this validating. I know that uh like writing about this really articulated some of the things that I felt I faced when I hit my cancer diagnosis. And then as we interviewed over a hundred people with cancer diagnoses and other issues, these are things that often came up. So uh the first one, the first uh roadmap that is problematic because it's incomplete is what we call vague roadmaps. When we asked people about like how their faith had informed their struggling journeys, uh often their theology of suffering, quote unquote, started and ended with Romans 8.28. This vague notion that God was going to take this and do something good with it. And that's all they knew. They they couldn't articulate any other kind of biblical principle or thought about suffering or suffering well. Ironically, Romans 8 is a fantastic uh chapter for anyone really wanting to get into a robust theology of suffering. In the chapter itself, it unpacks some of the specifics of a theology of suffering. It talks about uh our, you know, growing into that sense of adoption as sons and daughters of God, of really uh recognizing that intimacy and how our preparation and uh becoming more like Jesus leads us toward that. And then, of course, the chapter ends in like that exuberant uh kind of hymn to uh God's love that nothing can separate us from God's love. So vague roadmaps is the first problematic uh one that we ran into. The second one is what we've called triumphalist roadmaps, and this is one that actually, Michael, in our conversation, has already come up a couple of times today. It might be, it might be the most prominent one. And it's this idea that we live in a culture that is so avoidant of suffering that we have unintentionally been influenced by that in our church contexts. And so we have come to believe that the right way to do suffering as Christians is to quickly jump to victory, to claim victory, and to, in a sense, ignore both the depth of our suffering and the process of our suffering in our hurry to claim that victory that we have in Christ. Now, don't get me wrong. I mean, I I do believe, and you mentioned it, that, you know, he took on us our not just our sin, but also our sorrows, our suffering. But that doesn't mean that in our lived day-to-day experience, all of that goes away. And yet we're constantly uh sent messages, explicit or implicit, that we're supposed to just kind of pack those feelings deep down and uh jump to a place of joy and triumph and and victory. And so that's pretty pervasive. That's pretty pervasive in our churches.

Michael John Cusick 37:09

And and that's not um I I love the phrase that you used, and that was that we want to jump to the end and ignore the process. And process in and of itself is something that God cares about, because God could just catapult us to the end, and there's meaning in the process.

Liz Hall 37:29

There's meaning in the process, and you don't get the meaning unless you go through the process, I would say.

Michael John Cusick 37:34

Yeah. Yeah.

Liz Hall 37:35

So uh yeah. And uh again, as mental health professionals, uh, all kinds of bad things happen when you just take distress and you stuff it down. It doesn't go away.

Michael John Cusick 37:46

Yeah.

Liz Hall 37:46

It'll find its way out, uh, you know, physically or mentally, or uh all kinds of other ways. And so it's profoundly unhelpful to hear from others that this is what God wants you to do.

Michael John Cusick 37:58

Yeah. So other people can contribute to this, not just maybe the obvious when I saw the word triumphal, I thought of certain church denominations which almost require that and that kind of thing. But there can be I I don't like the word toxic in front of everything now, but there can be a hyperpositivity of just verses about joy in the midst of suffering versus I keep um I keep an extra copy of this greeting card in my desk drawer and it says there are no words for how shitty this is right now. And that's that's you open it up and it's just blank. But that I think I've twice in my life I've sent that card. But when I when I saw that card, that greeting card, I bought a whole bunch of them.

Liz Hall 38:43

Yes.

Michael John Cusick 38:44

And I think sometimes we just need to have someone, especially a Christian brother or sister, just say there's no words for how shitty this is. Yes. I mean, this is in one sense not the way things are supposed to be. And yet in another sense, it's um exactly how they're supposed to be because it's our reality right now.

Liz Hall 39:05

That's right. And you know, it's yeah, I was laughing about that. I was thinking, maybe I not the last half of that, but I've certainly sent people uh, you know, messages with the first part of that. Just there's no words. I I don't even know what to say. But um ironically, the place where we find rough equivalents of what you just said is in our Bibles.

Michael John Cusick 39:23

Yes.

Defensive Roadmaps and Theodicy

Liz Hall 39:24

In the book of Psalms. Right. Those lament psalms are basically David and some of the other psalmists' equivalents of there are no words, and this really sucks, you know? So um why we have come to believe that it's not okay to just simply sit with somebody and comfort them with those words is is beyond me because it's it's it's there, it's in our Bibles.

Michael John Cusick 39:50

Yeah. Like Job's friends for the first six or seven days, right? Where they just sat there and That was great. Yeah. Then they opened their mouths and everything went south. So there's there's one more uh problematic roadmap. Talk about that, the defensive roadmap. Um that's the idea. Uh uh it's about um people that feel misled and then they end up needing to defend God.

Liz Hall 40:15

Yeah. So when I mention the word theology of suffering, people hand me books on theodicy. Now, for uh for listeners who who don't know what theodicy is, it's basically a justification of God in the face of the existence of suffering or evil. So these are attempts to defend God. Like the, you know, the classic problem is how can a good and just and all-powerful God exist and also have suffering and evil exist? And so this is something that, you know, Christian thinkers have thought about for centuries, uh, but they've done so much work on this and they feel so compelled to do this in light of some of kind of current cultural trends that they've squeezed out any other kind of theology of suffering that might be more pastoral or more about the experience. And so uh I would pick up book after book that was supposed to be helpful to me in my suffering. And instead, what I found were intricate philosophical arguments about why God would allow suffering. That did absolutely nothing for me. That was not what I needed. I needed to know what I was supposed to do in the next day, in the next week, in this year that faced me of really difficult treatment, uh, what I was supposed to do with my fear of death, what I was, yeah, all the things. Uh so I think that our roadmaps are often defensive. Uh they people are trying to be helpful, but they're giving us roadmaps, uh, as I put it in the book, they're leading us to, you know, Paris when we want to get to maybe Denver.

Michael John Cusick 41:48

Right, right. And so much of the writing on theodicy is really for our left brain and not for our right brain or for just helping us get through daily life, which is probably a a necessary integration between the two. There was a a point that you made in talking about the defensive roadmap that you and your colleagues have discovered or learned that many, if not most, people in the midst of great suffering are not actually asking um, why is this happening and how could God let this happen? They're actually wondering, how can I get through this? What do I do tomorrow? How do I sleep tonight?

God's Role in Suffering

Liz Hall 42:24

That's exactly right. So that that was my experience. And so we checked with the people that we interviewed uh about this, and very few of them reported struggles with God around issues uh that we would call theatical struggles. Uh they really their concerns really were about uh other things. Um and in fact, you know, we did a follow-up study. Uh there's a wonderful scale uh out there that uh articulates some of the most common theodicies that have been developed. And so we gave this to a bunch of Christians who had gone through difficult times uh in the last few years. And uh what we found was interesting. So we uh we uh measured how how um severe the event was, and then how distressed they were, depression, anxiety, that kind of thing. And as you might expect, there was a tight relationship between how distressing the event was and how many symptoms they had. Um we wanted to know if the uh theodicies, if embracing certain theodicies would be helpful. What we found is that most of them not helpful at all. Like it did not alleviate that distress uh at all. But the most startling thing, and I think that was unexpected, is that a couple of them actually made things worse. So it's not just that theodicy isn't helpful, but it seems like for many people it's actually hurtful. So, like this idea that God brings suffering into your life to help shape your character. People who believe that actually did worse. I think there's kind of a sense of like, uh, how would a good God who loves me, who is supposed to be a father to me, do like bring bad things into my life to to to yeah. I mean, none of us would inject our kids with a cancer cell to make them become better people. So why would we think that God would do this? Now I think it's important to make a distinction between God causing the suffering, which is what the theodicies are are talking about or allowing it, and purposes. So I think it could be helpful to know that regardless of how the cancer came into my life, God is going to redeem it. I think that's a hopeful thought. But that's not theodicy. The Odyssey is about God causing or allowing the suffering.

Michael John Cusick 44:43

Yeah. And I've I've often thought, and it's not a perfect analogy, but of God as the conductor of the symphony, and yet the musicians can play their instruments in any particular way they want. It can be a cacophony, they can play offbeat, they can they can play the wrong sheet of music. And the conductor is up there somehow able to direct and marshal it in a way where uh something beautiful can come out of it.

Liz Hall 45:13

And uh amazingly, I mean the fact that God is able to do that with our cacophony is is astonishing. Uh I mean, just when you stop and think about it, to take something, to take suffering, uh, some of which is evil. Uh and for God to take that intrinsically bad thing and somehow turn it into something good. I mean, it's it's magic, right? It's yeah, it's amazing.

The Practice of Lament

Michael John Cusick 45:42

Yeah, it's a it's a real kind of holy magic and mysticism. I just want to, just for listeners' benefit, uh again, just say that the book is called When the Journey Hurts, Finding Meaning in Suffering for Heart, Mind, and Soul. And although we've been talking about your cancer journey, the book talks about a lot of a lot of other kinds of suffering. And I would even argue that for people who are walking through trauma and abuse and betrayal, that this book and the categories they're in are just as helpful. And I recommend this read for anything like that, where we're dealing with any kind of wound that has caused us pain and overwhelmed us. And to use the word that I use in sacred attachment, and you guys used it too, when we are disoriented, when life as we knew it is no longer happening, and it's life as we really prefer that it not be, we're disoriented, and then there is this reorientation that can happen, but does not always happen because of how we're able to close this gap. Out of the practices, I'll just run through them. We talked a lot about um identifying with the sufferings of Christ. There's surrender, forgiveness, gratitude, remembering our mortality, and then weaving our story with God's story. But I'd love it if you came back and talked about lament. So I know that this is a personal interest of yours. And the Psalms, as you said, I think 40% of the Psalms are lament. How do we go about lament? Like how would someone in the midst of suffering say, okay, I want to engage in a practice of lament?

Liz Hall 47:20

Again, it's one of these forgotten practices. It's it's so clearly in our Bibles, and yet uh I had never heard of lament until actually after my cancer uh diagnosis when I ran across a book by Todd Billings called Rejoicing and Lament. Uh Intuitively, during my cancer, I did lament. I would spend time every morning, and I was just crying out to God. I was just pleading for mercy, you know. And uh so I look back on that and recognize that it was a time of lamenting. So, how do we go about lamenting? Well, one easy way would be just to Google Psalms of Lament, uh, and you can find online, you know, several lists of where people say, these are the ones, go to them. And so finding one that uh maybe helps you to express your suffering in a way that uh that really fits would be one really easy way to do it. Um another way to do it is to consider the different parts of lament and to construct your own psalm of lament. And so I've I've done workshops on constructing lament where uh I prompt people to call out to God, uh, to complain honestly and transparently to God. That's really the key to lamenting well, uh, to uh ask God for what you want, again, honestly, to remember what God has done in the past. And then finally, and this is a really unique part of the biblical uh form of lament, to express trust and confidence in God, to be able to, after all of that kind of laying out to God your suffering, to be able to return to that position of trust and confidence. And so this is the model that we see in the Psalms of Lament that I think we can use even to put our own uh suffering uh into words here.

Michael John Cusick 49:06

And I, if I am not mistaken, you did a workshop on Lament at the Apprentice Gathering. Is that right?

Liz Hall 49:12

That's right. Yeah. As part of a larger yeah.

Michael John Cusick 49:14

Yeah, I remember that. I had I'd wanted to uh at least pop my head in the door, but I wasn't able to do that. Um I I may have shared this story with you when we were at the airport. Uh, you and Todd and a group of us were all kind of hanging out before we went to our gates because the Wichita airport is so small. Um, but I'm gonna say this just because I I think it's fitting. Um a lot of people hear what you're saying and they say, okay, here's the part about writing down my hard feelings, my anger, my confusion, et cetera. And then we get to this place where we say, okay, I'm gonna put my hope in God. And so I I'd like to believe that some of the psalms like that were written over maybe days, weeks, or months, that I have some journals that I have about 10 pages that I've written in, and then because of my ADD, about six months later, I'll go back and I'll start journaling again. But I I'd like to think that it wasn't in a 30-second writing the poem where the psalmist was pouring out their heart, you know, and then saying, Oh, okay, I'm gonna put my hope in God. It that too is a process.

Liz Hall 50:23

Absolutely, it's a process. Now, what I would say is that uh to the extent that lament is a spiritual practice, one of the things that we are doing is we are shaping and guiding our heart in that process. And so uh I do think that there is value in reaching for uh expressions of trust and praise at the end of it. I I think that that what we do in the early parts of lament actually facilitates that. Um, but I I think that it might be a good thing to uh to stretch oneself even in terms of doing that, because uh it's the the psalms are there, I think, not just to help us express our pain, but they're also there to shape our pain, to sh the meaning-making function of it. Now, with that, I'll I'll say a caveat. There is one Psalm of Lament, Psalm 88, that does not end in expressions of trust and confidence. Uh it's a very, it's a very dark psalm. Uh it it talks about crying out uh for salvation, about God casting uh one's soul away and hiding one's face, and it ends in absolute despair. And I actually find it very comforting that that psalm is included in our Bibles, because sometimes even when we want to reach for that expression of trust and confidence, we just can't get there. And I I think that's okay. I think that we can we can rest in the fact that God knows us and he knows that these things take time and he values that.

Michael John Cusick 51:56

Yeah. Yeah.

Liz Hall 51:57

Psalm 88, it's there for a reason, I think.

Michael John Cusick 52:00

Yeah, your point is really well taken. Uh so for example, even in Psalm 62 and Psalm 63, where I refer a lot to, why are you so downcast, O my soul? It's there twice in Psalm 62, it's there in Psalm 63, and it seems as if the suffering that the psalmist is writing about, and I think it's the sons of Korah and not David, is some kind of church split. Because he's talking about how, you know, I remember how I used to go with the multitudes in procession and to worship you, and now that's no longer happening for whatever reason. And I have prayed that at times. Why are you so downcast on my soul? And then I'll say the next verse, and yet I will find my hope in you. And there's times where even I feel the Psalms are so invitational where I can right then say, and I don't want to put my hope in you, or I don't feel like putting my hope in you, but you're all I've got. And I want to come back to the story because I started to say about the conversation in Wichita. Uh, a lot of our listeners know that I'm a huge Kim Potok fan, and Kim Potok had a PhD in philosophy from the University of Pennsylvania, but he was also born and raised an Orthodox Jew. And all of his novels, uh, six novels and uh prolific other philosophical work, were about the intersection, again, a gap between his Orthodox Judaism worldview and beliefs, and then how he encountered literature and was a rabbi in Korea and just saw this gap. And he remained a faithful Jew all of his life, although he went into conservativism. And I had a chance to sit down with him in 1996, one of the highlights of my life, and uh he told a story from the Talmud, and I think it might have been Memenides, where a little child climbed a tree to rescue a fledgling bird. The mother wasn't around, and the child fell and died. And so this Orthodox tradition began where a person could go to the rabbi before the service and say, I'm angry at God and I want to shout at God. And so, as part of the Hebrew liturgy, the rabbi, after reading Psalms, would invite the parent, in this case the parent, to come up to literally be escorted by the rabbi to the tabernacle to pull back the curtain and for the person to shout at God and to be angry at God. And then the rabbi would, in effect, look at them and say, Are you done? No, there's more. And they would shout at God even more. And then, as part of the worship, they would then be escorted back to their seat and they would read another psalm. And I've never forgotten how powerful that is. And there's a couple things that strike me about that. Number one, it's a part of worship. And number two, it actually happens in community. And I guess number three is the brilliant, beautiful permission that is given to be fully human in our anger, our rage, our confusion, but to be connected to God and others in that process.

Forgiveness as a Meaning-Making Practice

Liz Hall 55:03

That's exactly right. That's what the Psalms of Lament allow us to do. Yes. And you know, Michael and Arcetes, that's the hardest thing for people. I think because of this triumphalism that pervades our churches uh so profoundly, people were nervous about doing it. It was like, is it really okay for me to say these things to God? And then you point them to the Psalms, and the psalmist felt free to say things to God. So uh why shouldn't we? Uh and when you think about it, you know, we've been talking about a lot about uh relationship with God and intimacy with God. Uh any intimate relationship that you're in, if you're just fake, if you don't let the other person know the things that are going on in your heart, that's gonna be a shallow relationship. It's gonna get nowhere in terms of a deepened intimacy. So why would it be any different with our relationship with God? These things that are in our heart have to come into the relationship to grow in that in that relationship.

Michael John Cusick 56:01

Let's end Dr. Liz Hall with the topic of forgiveness, because that's one of the practices. And I don't think a lot of people think of forgiveness as a practice. And yet we're, you know, we're we're taught to pray the Lord's Prayer, where one of the central points of the Lord's Prayer is God forgive us our sins as we forgive others who sin against us.

Liz Hall 56:23

Forgiveness, I think, is a necessary meaning-making coping practice. Uh, one of the big insights of the research, and there's uh a lot of research on forgiveness at this point, is that forgiveness ironically ends up uh often ends up doing more for the person who forgives than for the person who is forgiven, who m actually might not even know or want or care uh about the forgiveness. And so it is a meaning-making practice because it allows us to uh, in a sense, lay to rest uh some of the difficult things that we might have had uh in our past. Now, uh a lot of suffering is directly caused by other people's uh mistakes or uh or uh sinfulness or or that kind of thing. And so certainly it's clear that forgiveness is necessary there. It's also necessary, I think, for all the rest of us, because whether we like it or not, we're on our paths. Uh, even our suffering paths, when we're especially vulnerable, we're bumping into people who just don't get it right. Uh and so certainly there's uh having this forgiving attitude uh toward others who just maybe mess up in what they say or do and make things even harder uh is going to be necessary. But you're right, the the practice part comes in the intentionality of it. Uh and here psychology can be a real partner uh to us. So I want to highlight the work of uh psychologist Ev Worthington, who has spent decades of his life really, really digging into forgiveness and has come up with a very helpful model. He calls it the reach model of forgiveness, where people can intentionally engage in a process that will facilitate uh their being able to uh at the end of it feel as if they really have uh forgiven the person that they're struggling with. So uh it goes through a series of steps that involves uh things like fully recognizing the depth of the injury. Again, that might seem counterintuitive. We might think, well, the best way to forgive somebody is to really not think about it, uh think about it too much or to minimize it. And it turns out that that's not the case. So uh the process starts with really being honest with yourself about the depth of the hurt, the ramifications of the hurt, because only then can we fully bring all those experiences into the process of forgiving the other person. So um, yeah, that's a that's a process that I very highly recommend. Uh you can find all kinds of materials to help you on Ev's Worth uh website. So just uh Google Ev Worthington and you'll find lots of materials that uh can be helpful to you if uh that is a particular struggle that uh you need some help with.

Michael John Cusick 59:07

He's great. Uh he was a mentor to me from a distance in my counselor supervision work many, many years ago. So he's he's a giant in the field and has been around for a long, long time.

Liz Hall 59:19

Yeah, and a real uh inspiration to uh younger scholars uh committed to following in his footsteps in terms of bringing some Christian commitments to the psychological study.

Michael John Cusick 59:33

Well, Dr. Liz Hall, it's been great talking with you. Uh this book that you've written with your colleagues uh is called When the Journey Hurts: Finding Meaning in Suffering for Heart, Mind, and Soul. And I can't recommend this book strongly enough to uh whether someone is suffering or whether they're a companion in suffering. So thanks for being on the program and especially for taking as much time as you did.

Liz Hall 59:56

Yeah, my pleasure. It was really great to be here with you today, Michael.

Michael John Cusick 1:00:00

So as we wrap up another episode, I want to remind everyone that on your darkest day or on your longest night, that love has you. Until we talk again, take good care. So we've wrapped up another episode of Restoring the Soul. We want you to know that Restoring the Soul is so much more than a podcast. In fact, the heart of what we have done for nearly 20 years is intensive counseling. When you can't wait months or years to get out of the rut you're in, our intensive counseling programs in Colorado allow you to experience deep change in half day blocks over two weeks. To learn more, visit restoring the soul.com. That's restoring the soul.com.