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The second year of seminary was a tough one for me. I had just finished my unit of Clinical Pastoral Education, CPE for short. CPE generally is in a hospital setting and is an opportunity to learn to be a pastoral presence to others while also examining the emotions that come up in us from this kind of work and from helping others.
I know very few who have had a good experience with CPE. A lot of it centers around the supervisor, and we had a pretty terrible one. Her tactics often seemed to try and pit each of us against each other, and her questions to us often lacked clarity. Sometimes it felt like she was conducting some sorts of psychological experiments on us, and through my studies later, I learned she was employing Gestalt therapy on us, which is such a terrible form that it is no longer practiced and has been mined for only one single useful technique that can be found from it.
Even after all this time, it is hard to fully delve into this experience. It was even harder for me to talk about it then. This led my seminary and diocesan examiners to think I hadn’t gotten “enough” out of it, and they required that I take another unit of CPE. If that weren’t enough, I was having multiple surgeries on my finger which has an artificial joint and still cannot bend fully straight to this day.
Now my second unit of CPE went a lot better. I had a much better supervisor and got to work with people who live with various illnesses and mental disabilities, ministry I relished in and learned a lot from. Still, all the events with my first unit, my seminary, and my diocese left me broken inside.
It is times like these that I find taking a retreat can help gain perspective. Fortunately my long-time mentor, The Very Rev. Heidi Kinner, let me stay with her out in Montana. The only thing I had to do is help with the youth group at the Cathedral, a group I knew very well at that point.
As I was getting ready to go on the retreat portion of my trip, I told Heidi about everything I’d experienced in the past year. She paused and said to me, “Trey, are you mad at God for something God did, or for something people did?”
One of the questions we face so often in life and in the church is “Why do bad things happen to good people?” Now I would never call myself “good”. I wouldn’t need God’s Grace like the rest of us if I was. At the time, though, it felt like I was going through so many different hardships that I didn’t deserve.
The other question that often gets asked is “Why did God allow this to happen?” These are big questions. They are serious questions. They are questions that at some point we all have to face or, at the very least, we all get asked.
The preacher Thomas Long has a great book about this. It’s called What Shall We Say?, and it offers an introduction and starting place for these issues.
The most helpful chapter out of the entire book comes at the very end when Long discusses the very story in our Gospel today: the Parable of the Wheat and the Chaff. In this story, an enemy comes in and plants weeds in a field of wheat. Both grow alongside each other, and the servants tilling the field don’t know what to do.
The master tells them the wise thing for a farmer to do. He knows that if he removes the weeds, it will damage the wheat as well. Instead he allows both to grow together until the end of the season when the wheat will need to be gathered. Then, after the wheat is taken away to be stored, the weeds will be sorted away before being thrown into the fire.
Evil happens in this world, but God doesn’t cause it. Others do that, just as Heidi reminded me all those years ago.
Yet in the end, Good does win. God wins. Though evil tries to make things worse and causes us to suffer, it is only for a little while. Later, as Paul reminds us, we will come away from suffering and destruction into the glory of our Lord Jesus Christ. All we need to do is take time and be patient.
Though it may seem unfair that we have to face any of the plots of the evil one, we never do so alone. God is always with us. That is the lesson behind Jacob’s Ladder today. In Jacob’s time, deities were thought to be tied to the land. As Jacob exits the land of his father, he believes he is escaping God too. Yet God is everywhere, as he finds in his dream. God is with us wherever we go.
In my own life, I take comfort that God is never the cause of my suffering. I take more comfort that God is with me in my trials and tribulations, even in times when I, like Jacob, didn’t even realize God was there. Good will win out in the end. All we have to do is remember Paul’s words and be patient for when that time comes.