There is No Suffering Here

Alongside its internship program, UrbanPromise runs something called UrbanPromise International Fellows, where interns come from all over the world to learn about and experience the UrbanPromise model of ministry in order to emulate at home. One of the UPI fellows recently admitted that she was struggling to see God's purpose for her in Camden. Thinking of what she had seen and experienced in the past, she explained, "there is no suffering here". The children she saw here, she told us, had everything in excess, and even so were ungrateful for what they had.

Now I think there are many things wrong with this. To begin with, the second statement is probably wrong. Just because fewer people starve to death or lack clothing or shelter, or, more likely, they are less visible, does not mean that it fails to occur in America. I also think American children are taught, from a young age, to hide what they do not have. Often what appears to be ingratitude may actually be desperate posturing for something that isn't actually there. Perhaps more importantly, suffering is nobody's prerogative. Suffering is in humans as much as situations, and all human beings have the capacity to suffer. One would not conversely go to a refugee camp and declare, "there is no joy here". And perhaps as poignant as we find joy in the midst of suffering is suffering in the midst of gladness devastating.

Nonetheless, that short, simple statement really rattled me. In all the time I've spent in Camden, it never occured to me that it would be possible to come here and to say such a thing. The issues that I see are so beyond my own experience that I have often wondered that we allow such conditions to persist. The idea that what I have always seen as incomprehensible suffering is no suffering at all to somebody else is staggering in its implication of suffering beyond what I even understood as suffering in this world.

The death of 5,000 people in the attacks on 9/11 shook and restructured the understanding which shaped our nation's policies at home and abroad. In these deaths we saw evil, we saw suffering that we could not but respond to. When Hurricane Katrina left almost 2,000 people dead and a city in ruins, we were indignant at the tragedy and the injustice of apathy or incompetence in our response. This is sorrow, this is injustice, this is suffering.

But in his foreward to Jeffrey Sachs' book, "The End of Poverty" Bono writes that 15,000 people die in Africa each day of preventable diseases. 15,000 people every day!* Realities like these provide the context for statements like, "there is no suffering here", not because they trivialize the suffering we see, but because the sheer magnitude of the suffering they represent is so overwhelming.

So what is my purpose in a place like Camden when the suffering it contains pales before the atrocities of the world elsewhere under a certain metric? Even in Camden I sometimes have doubts about my purpose in one of the more peaceful neighborhoods in the city. But I think the problem here is in the question. My purpose is understood as my meaning: how my presence might be the most meaningful to others. But this comes down to the pure pride of a gloryhound. One cannot love for the purposes of glory or achievement. To seek out greater suffering as worthy of my love is to seek out greater opportunity for my love to be appreciated, to be a greater hero. If I were truly to seek out suffering out of love, then I would be unaffected if God required my love in a more comfortable place; in any situation I would be able to love equally. Instead, personal pride or achievement masquerade as compassion.

*Assuming Africa has a population of roughly 1 billion people and the US around 300 million (and my math is correct), this rate is relatively equivalent to 4,500 Americans, or 1.6 million a year. Other studies suggest that 45,000 Americans actually die each year for lack of health insurance, which might be somewhat analogous to the statistic here. 45,000 a year, while also staggering, comes out to roughly 123 a day, or a little under 3% of 4,500. Of course, people are not statistics, and each of 45,000 preventable deaths is every bit the tragedy of each of 5.5 million.