Solidarity with Suffering: A Light in the Darkness

This morning in my quiet time, God brought this thought to my mind: “There is no holier ground than standing in solidarity with suffering.” As I sat with that, I began remembering some experiences of solidarity with suffering.

I first remembered a bullying incident, in which I was on the bullying team. I was about six years old and had been playing in the neighborhood with other kids. I remember gathering around one child—a very meek and timid kid. He was scared. We circled him, and I felt the energy of mockery and violence arising in the group. It seemed to have a life of its own. I can’t recall what was said, but the kids began to take turns verbally abusing this boy. I stayed silent, as I always did as a child. And a deep grief and sadness came over me—such an awareness of the wrongness of this moment. I didn’t participate but didn’t dare stand up for him either. At that moment, I knew I never wanted to be like the children hurting this boy. It was a tragic experience, but there was something more to it that I could not define. I believe now that it was an early experience of solidarity with suffering.

God reminded me of another moment of solidarity with suffering. For one of my seminary courses, my class had a surprise field trip to a large jail. Our task was to lead a worship service for a special cell block of men committed to growing together in God in a community. They had shown a deep interest in healing and were invited to live together in one group within a silo of the jail, five to six stories tall. Each floor of the silo was lined with two-man cells and there was open space in the bottom. In this open space, they had an area with chairs, a projector, a screen, and a couple of microphones—and they gathered there four times every day to worship and pray.

As our group drove to the jail, we made some quick decisions about who could do what for the gathering, and I offered to sing a song. When my time came, I stood in front of the men and began to sing “How He Loves.” I didn’t have any accompanying music—I just began singing into the microphone:

He is jealous for me
Loves like a hurricane
I am a tree bending beneath
The weight of His wind and mercy
When all of a sudden
I am unaware of these afflictions eclipsed by glory
And I realize just how beautiful You are
And how great Your affections are for me

And the “all of a sudden” seemed to drop into this space. The jail was a loud, tinny place. Even during the worship service, while this part of the jail—this silo—was relatively quiet, any movement or sound in any cell would echo around and down like an amplifier. It was also attached to other cell blocks that were much louder and could be heard throughout the service.

As I sang, it became silent. First, the silo we were in—and then you could hear the silence move out and down into the other cell blocks as they stopped and listened. The men in our gathering began to weep as I went on:

And we are His portion
And He is our prize
Drawn to redemption by the grace in His eyes
If His grace is an ocean, we're all sinking
Then heaven meets earth like a sloppy, wet kiss
And my heart turns violently inside of my chest
I don't have time to maintain these regrets
When I think about the way He loves us

Yeah, He loves us
Oh, how He loves us
Oh, how He loves us
Oh, how He loves

The intensity continued to grow, and other than my voice, you could hear a pin drop among these hundreds of prisoners. I was becoming so overwhelmed by this experience that my entire body felt like it was coming undone. The compassion pouring out of my brokenness was almost unbearable. I closed my eyes and prayed just to be able to finish the song for them. When I opened my eyes, I looked out at these men and saw the most precious, sweet, angel baby boys I’ve ever seen. I saw them as deeply loved children, and my heart broke.

Later in the day, many came to me to tell me how much they appreciated me singing to them. They said they hadn’t heard a woman’s voice or felt that kind of motherly love wash over them in so long.

As I remembered this experience this morning, I recognized it as a deeply true moment of solidarity with suffering. It was beyond me, coming through me. It was God’s love and solidarity with the suffering of these men—and all those they had hurt in their lives, too.

I then remembered a healing experience I had of solidarity with suffering. With guidance and care from a counselor who walked with me for five years as I began my spiritual journey of healing, I was sharing a painful memory of something I experienced when I was about 15. In our work together, she often invited me to go deeper into these memories to see if I could find Jesus there. I agreed to try—and as I closed my eyes I saw myself there, I felt the full weight of it all over again. Then it happened. I opened my eyes in the memory and saw Jesus with me, looking deep into my eyes, grieving with me. His grief and pain were as present as mine. He was in solidarity with my suffering in a way that changed that memory in me forever.

I’ve come to believe this is how healing happens most often for me: Jesus, who is outside of time, reveals himself in a specific memory to reconstruct it in my holy imagination and show me where the light was in the darkness. It doesn’t remove the memory or even the pain fully. But it changes the memory at an emotional level to create more freedom and peace around it. I can even become thankful for it because now I remember this new experience of Jesus with me there. It becomes part of our relationship.

This morning, as I recalled the new memory I’d made many years ago with my counselor, I saw Jesus with me in my suffering, but it changed again. I not only experienced Jesus’ solidarity with my suffering, but it was so clear that His grief and anguish were not just for me. Jesus was in total solidarity—an experiential grief—with me and with my abuser. We can get stuck if we think God only cares about our suffering and not another’s. Jesus is in solidarity with all suffering. The suffering of my abuser. The suffering of the men in that cell block living with the painful reality of their choices.

Love can’t exist outside of free will—or it is not love. Our free will causes suffering for others. We have all hurt people. But God is not like us. God loves us. God doesn’t hurt us and never has or could. And when we are wounded, God doesn’t see any difference between the perpetrator and the victim. God grieves it all. God loves us all. And if we are open to it, God meets us all in our suffering to offer redemption.

We are called to follow Christ and to be in solidarity with suffering. He showed the way—taking it to its absolute completion—as He was crucified and called on God to forgive His crucifiers in solidarity with their suffering. This is the only way to redeem suffering, to make it mean something—to make it holy.

I can only imagine what a thin place the gas chambers in Auschwitz must have been. That amid inconceivable suffering, God was with them in solidarity, too. On every battlefield, God was with every young man who died or killed another—grieving with them.

Today, so many are being bullied and treated as less than human. Jesus ministered to the sick, the poor, the outsider, the leper, the untouchables—all while the religious leaders of His day stood accusing Him. And today, many who call themselves Christians are supporting the abuse of innocents or simply not speaking up—like I didn’t speak up for that young boy in my neighborhood who was so scared, so tender, so innocent.

I’m sure that Jesus, if He were here in America now, would be in public, active solidarity with the suffering of LGBTQIA+ people, in solidarity with immigrants, in solidarity with the poor who have no insurance, in solidarity with the single mom who needs school lunches, in solidarity with the elderly who can’t afford medicine, in solidarity with workers who don’t get to participate in the fruit of their labor—who are essentially slaves. He is in solidarity with the incarcerated and their victims.

To follow Christ, we must learn to be in solidarity with suffering. We must learn to forgive those who caused our past suffering. We also must learn to forgive and love those who are perpetrating suffering now—even while we speak up for the marginalized.

Solidarity is a light in the darkness. It only exists in the darkness. And it can’t be overcome. (John 1:5)

God loves us. Let’s love one another as Jesus taught us to do.