Topic: Philip Yancey on pandemics, pain and words of wisdom from a 16th century churchman – Christian News 5 September 2022 – Faithwheel.com
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Philip Yancey on pandemics, pain and words of wisdom from a 16th century churchman
Philip Yancey speaks to Christian Today about his new book, A Companion in Crisis, a modern paraphrase of John Donne’s Devotions on Emergent Occasions, and the lessons he is still learning about why God allows suffering and how believers can accept it in their own life.
CT: Why did John Donne’s work resonate with you during the pandemic?
Philip: After the pandemic started, books started being published about God and the coronavirus, and God and the pandemic, but I wondered whether we could go back a little bit further and learn from the wisdom of the past rather than try and reinvent the wheel.
John Donne lived through a different pandemic 400 years ago and he wrote a classic of literature that has never been out of print since that time. It’s still on people’s lists of top 100 books ever written. So we’re not the first person to live through a pandemic and in his case, a third of London died from the Black Death. Here was one of the great minds and writers of his age and the pastor of the largest church in England struggling with circumstances that were much more difficult than what we are living with.
CT: The text of the original is quite difficult for modern readers. Why did his writing still appeal to you?
Philip: I had given copies of his book, Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions, to a bunch of different people and they never read it! The reason why is that it’s old fashioned language. It’s as old as the King James Version so the syntax is Elizabethan. One sentence has 234 words and people in 2022 just don’t read sentences that long! The other thing is that the science and medicine is very outdated and antiquated, so some of the suggestions for treating plague seem quite strange!
But if you take all that away, it’s a brilliant exposition of somebody who’s wrestling with God. He is someone who believes he was called by God for this moment in time and then suddenly fears he’s dying of the plague. He’s lying in bed and can’t get up but he still has a great mind.
It’s an extreme context but his writings capture what we go through when we are in crises. We immediately think: what do I do?! I called my book A Companion in Crisis because that’s exactly what we need. We need to know that we’re not the first person who’s gone through something like this and we’ve got something to learn from wise people who have.
CT: Pain and suffering are recurring themes in your writing. What is it about this topic that brings you back to it again and again, and do you feel you are still discovering answers to these difficult questions?
Philip: What we believe about this topic matters and my new memoir, Where the Light Fell, answers some of those questions. It opens with a true scene from my life, when I was only one year old. My father was living through another pandemic – polio – and he was completely paralysed, in an iron lung, and could not even breathe on his own.
The people around him decided he would be healed because he was planning to be a missionary. The thinking was: how could God allow someone with so much potential like this to die? They believed it so strongly that against all medical advice they had him removed from the iron lung and he died. These weren’t people who hated him. They loved him but they took on a prerogative they didn’t have the right to take on.
And that’s the issue John Donne is dealing with. He’s wondering: is God punishing me? Does He want me to pray for more faith? What’s going on? How do I decide these things? He does it with great biblical knowledge but more importantly, he’s just a fully emotional human struck down and confused, bewildered, betrayed. There are all these feelings we have that sometimes we’re afraid to voice to God, but here’s John Donne, this great pastor, doing exactly that – and doing it beautifully and eloquently.
CT: When you were reading John Donne’s writings, did you discover any new insights?
Philip: Popular phrases from John Donne that are still with us today include “no man is an island” and “for whom the bell tolls”. They are Donne’s way of saying: get your mind off yourself buddy!
He’s lying in bed feeling sorry for himself and it’s like taking a selfie that says ‘poor me, poor me, poor me’, and he hears a funeral bell and wonders if he’s next. That’s when he realises the bell is probably tolling for someone in his parish and yet he’s so concerned about himself that he doesn’t even know this person’s name!
He realises he needs to use this opportunity to care about other people who are going through similar things. That’s when he realises for whom the bell tolls. It tolls for me, for you, for every one of us. Every one of us is going to go through something like this but we’re not alone. In fact, if just a piece of dirt gets washed away from an island, that island is diminished and made smaller.
He realises his job in the midst of this crisis is to reach out to the suffering people and let them know that their life matters, that what they’re going through matters. He realises that he needs their compassion and they need his compassion and that we’re all in this together.
We heard phrases like that during the pandemic and it’s true; the entire world was afflicted. In my country, the Church didn’t do a very good job of helping and instead, we added a lot of division, anger and hostility when we should have been bringing comfort and hope. That’s what we as Christians are called to do and that’s a lesson we can take away. I wish everybody had read John Donne as we entered this pandemic. Then maybe the result would have been better.
CT: You mentioned earlier how John Donne wondered if God was punishing him and that’s a common thought in times of trial and difficulty. Did you find any answers in John Donne’s writings about why God allows His people to go through things like the pandemic or other times of suffering?
Philip: Donne never concludes or decides and part of the reason for that is that Calvinism is brand new at the time. Calvin said that anything that happened is God’s will and that God is determining that this will happen. Donne wasn’t sure what to think about that – and I’m not sure either, frankly!
But I think we’re asking the wrong question. When God appeared to Job, Job wanted to know why and although God spoke to him convincingly, He never answered the question why. It was basically: Job, do you trust me or not trust me? And Donne said something similar. We can go through life full of fear, whether that’s fear of an illness or fear of an earthquake, or we can just fear God in the right way. This means trusting God even when we don’t understand, because when you do that, you don’t have to fear everything else.
A lot of people do instinctively think God is punishing them. Before his conversion, John Donne lived a pretty randy life with affairs, probably an illegitimate child, and writing erotic poetry, and so he wonders: is God nailing me to my bed?! Is he punishing me for this place where I committed sins? And he never really answers that question but he moves from that to: do I trust the God who is mysterious? Do I trust God’s love? And he looks at Jesus in the Bible and says, ‘Yes, I trust Jesus. Jesus is God on earth, yet he never made people feel guilty about something they did, and if the Son of God treated people like that, then I just need to accept and trust that God.’
I’ve met people dealing with pain in some really difficult circumstances, whether that’s in America in the aftermath of a school shooting or Japan after the tsunami, and it’s important for me to tell them that God is on the side of the sufferer. He’s not against the person suffering, but He is on their side. And I can say that with confidence because every time Jesus was with someone going through hard times, he always responded with comfort and healing, even when it was a Roman soldier – an enemy.
So when you are grieving about what’s happened, know that God grieves more. When you’re dissatisfied with things that happen on this planet, God is more dissatisfied and God plans to do something about it someday. But it’s important to believe God is on your side and that the tears you shed, God also sheds.
CT: John Donne is a leader in a position where people in crisis are turning to him. All the while, he himself is struggling to know what to make of things. Did that resonate with you? Is it hard to be the one that people are turning to in the crisis looking for answers and comfort when you yourself are not immune to the circumstances and are going through the same thing, facing the same risks and challenges?
Philip: Yes, and I’ve just learned to limit what I say to what I can stand behind! It’s tempting to come up with easy answers and I go back again to Job and the three friends who showed up to support him. They were helpful for seven days and nights. They sat beside him and kept their mouths shut. They grieved with him and Jewish people still do that. It’s called sitting Shiva and it comes from that passage in Job. We too have something to learn from this because if these three friends had just kept their mouths shut, they might have been true friends but they tried to come up with these neat little answers and often these neat little answers make you feel worse rather than better!
The most important thing when you are with someone going through a hard time of suffering is simply to say ‘I’m so sorry’ and to show that you care. ‘How can we help someone suffering?’ and ‘how can we love?’ are basically the same question. We can find different ways to love depending on what the person needs but usually the person doesn’t need a lesson in theology or philosophy. They need to know that you care and that you really mean it when you say ‘I want to help, how can I help?’.
CT: What do you hope readers will take away from your book?
Philip: I’m not alone, I have a companion in crisis, I’m not the first person who’s gone through this. It’s ok to ask questions. Jesus himself felt abandoned by God when he said, ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’. The Psalms, too, are full of lament. It’s ok to ask those questions and get that out of your system. God gives us the words in books like the Psalms to do that, and John Donne gives another outlet and I just hope my paraphrasing will help people find some wise words written 400 years ago that can still help them today.
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