Scotch College

You, Me and the Two Impostors Chaplain’s Column

If you can meet with triumph and disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same;

In his poem If, Rudyard Kipling speaks of ‘triumph’ and ‘disaster’ as two impostors which a man must learn to ‘treat the same’. It did not occur to me until recently that these are the same two issues to which we were directed in our assembly readings in Proverbs. I called these ‘success’ and ‘adversity’, and on the cusp of school exams, I described these as life’s most important tests, current exam schedule notwithstanding.

WHAT CAN IT MEAN TO TREAT THESE POLAR EXTREMES ‘JUST THE SAME’?

In the particular proverbs read in assembly we heard triumph or success described in terms of ‘barns filled’ and ‘vats overflowing with wine’. The image is clearly of material success and prosperity. The danger to which the Bible alerts us here is that we may imagine our success to be evidence that we’re better than others, especially those who do not have similar success. If this occurs we may, by small increments, come to think we are better or more important than other people. This is not so. But the danger is subtle and real. We so easily feel that our value as people is contingent upon material success or failure. We may feel better about ourselves if we enjoy success, but we are not a better self.

On the other hand there is ‘disaster’; this is adversity, hard times. The particular proverbs we read described it in terms of ‘the raging storm’ and ‘times of trouble’. How could Kipling have expected us to treat disaster ‘just the same’ as success!? If being unmoved by success seems deceptively simple, being unmoved by disaster seems impossibly difficult. The danger here is that on the basis of suffering or hardship, we may form distorted understandings of ourselves or even of God.

One common distortion of ourselves is expressed as ‘I’m no good’ or ‘I must have done something bad’. To draw these conclusions from the experience of adversity is invalid. There is no essential connection between our value as persons and an encounter with disaster. It is also true that God is misconstrued by our encounter with adversity. After all, we reason, if God is good and almighty, how can bad things happen? Or at least, happen to ‘good people’? So, we ask ‘What has God got against me?’

We can see that at a simple level there may be growth through adversity, ‘no pain, no gain’ we casually overhear. We might ask ‘Why did it have to rain on the Tattoo the year my son was on parade?’ only to discover that he felt a sense of personal achievement enduring such an evening. In fact many boys were keen to experience a truly soaking evening.

WHAT ABOUT CATASTROPHIC LOSS OR ADVERSITY?

In 1940 C S Lewis published a calmly analytical and philosophical volume called The Problem of Pain. In it he deals theologically with this complex question. However, his personal Christian struggle with disaster did not emerge until his wife Joy died of cancer in 1961. Then he expressed his raw emotion in A Grief Observed, a book which he chose initially to publish under another name.

On the evidence of the New Testament, Jesus also found adversity emotionally unnerving and fearful, yet he faced it resolutely. By his experience of suffering we have become convinced that God endures the darkness with us. On this basis the apostle Paul affirms in Romans 8that ‘nothing can separate us from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus our Lord’.

Our value as people is not diminished by the experience of suffering and the disposition of God toward those in physical or emotional pain is not altered. God still loves. While Paul’s answer is that nothing at all can separate us from God’s love, it doesn’t always feel that way! That’s when we need to stand with one another and mirror the love of God most urgently into the darkness experienced by our neighbour.

Graham Bradbeer