A Wrestling Match with the Almighty

In this essay, Editor-at-Large Philip Yancey, author of Where Is God When It Hurts? and Disappointment with God, reflects on how his life and work have been changed by John Donne’s meditation on, and experience of, suffering. This is the second in a series of essays produced for CHRISTIANITY TODAY on how contemporary Christian writers have been influenced by the classic authors. These essays will be published in book form as The Reality and the Vision (Word).

No matter where I start, I usually end up writing about pain. My friends have suggested various reasons for this phenomenon: a deep psychological scar from childhood that has not yet come to light, or perhaps an additional melancholy chromosome. I do not know.

“How can I write about anything else?” is the best explanation I can come up with for my fixation. Is there a more fundamental fact of human existence? I was born in pain, and I offered up, as my first announcement of life, a wail. I will very likely die in pain as well. Between those brackets of pain I live out my life, traveling from the one toward the other.

Before writing the book Where Is God When It Hurts? I spent a month in a library exploring what other people had written about pain. Books about “the problem of pain” filled five long shelves. While browsing, I came across a remarkable book, written 366 years ago, that has changed forever the way I think about pain: John Donne’s Devotions upon Emergent Occasions. The great Elizabethan poet and preacher wrote it in bed, convinced he was dying of bubonic plague. It is trenchant and inquiring without being blasphemous, profound without being abstract or impersonal. It combines the raw humanity of modern treatises with the reverent sagacity of the ancients.

How shall they come to thee whom thou hast nailed to their bed?

John Donne was a man acquainted with grief. During his term as dean of Saint Paul’s Cathedral, London’s largest church, three waves of the Great Plague swept through the city. (Donne’s own illness turned out to be a spotted fever like typhus, not bubonic plague.) The last epidemic alone killed 40,000 people. Mangy, half-crazed prophets stalked the deserted streets, crying out judgment; and in truth, nearly everyone believed God had sent the plague as a scourge. Londoners flocked to Dean Donne for an explanation, or at least a word of comfort.

Donne had, in fact, grown up in the school of suffering. His father had died in John’s fourth year. Being raised in a Catholic family was a crippling disability in those days of Protestant-sponsored persecution. Catholics could not hold office, were fined for attending mass, and were often tortured for their faith. After distinguishing himself at Oxford and Cambridge, John Donne was denied a degree because of his religious affiliation. His brother died in prison, serving time for having sheltered a priest.

At first Donne responded to these difficulties by rebelling against all faiths. A notorious Don Juan, he celebrated his sexual exploits in some of the most frankly erotic poems in all of English literature. But finally, riven by guilt, he renounced his promiscuous ways in favor of marriage. He had fallen under the spell of Anne More, a 17-year-old beauty so quick and bright that she reminded him of sunlight.

In a bitter irony, it was just when Donne decided to settle down that his life took a calamitous turn. When Anne More’s father found out about the marriage, he determined to break Donne forever. He got Donne fired from his job as secretary to a nobleman and had him, along with the minister who performed the ceremony, thrown into prison. In black despair, Donne wrote his most cryptic poem: “John Donne, Anne Donne, Un-done.”

Although Anne’s father eventually softened, still he refused to help the young couple. Donne, now branded, could not find further employment. For nearly a decade he and his wife lived in poverty, in a cramped house that filled with their offspring at the rate of one per year. Anne was subject to periodic depression, and more than once nearly died in childbirth. John, probably malnourished, suffered from acute headaches, intestinal cramps, and gout. His longest work during this period was an essay on the advantages of suicide.

Sometime during that gloomy decade, John Donne converted to the Church of England. Later, his career blocked at every turn, he decided to follow the king’s advice by seeking ordination as an Anglican priest. He was 42 when he made that decision. Contemporaries gossiped about his “conversion of convenience” and scoffed that he had “wanted to be ambassador to Venice, not ambassador to God.” But Donne gradually grew reconciled to his calling. He earned a doctor of divinity degree from Cambridge, promised to write no more poetry, and devoted himself instead to parish work.

The year after Donne took his first parish job, Anne died. She had borne 12 children in all, 5 of whom had died in infancy. Donne made a solemn vow not to remarry, lest a stepmother bring them further grief. He preached Anne’s funeral sermon, choosing as his text these words from the Book of Lamentations: “Lo, I am the man that hath seen affliction.”

This, then, was the priest appointed by King James I to Saint Paul’s Cathedral in 1621: a lifelong melancholic, haunted by guilt over the sins of his youth, failed in all his ambitions (except poetry, which he had forsworn), sullied by accusations of insincerity. He hardly seemed a likely candidate to inspire the nation in plague times. Nonetheless, Donne applied himself to his new task with vigor, arising every morning at four and studying until ten. In the era of the King James Bible and William Shakespeare, educated Londoners honored eloquence and elocution, and in these Donne had no equal. He delivered sermons of such power that soon the cathedral was filled with worshipers.

Two years later, the first spots of illness appeared on Donne’s body, and doctors diagnosed the plague. For six weeks he lay at the threshold of death. The prescribed treatments were as vile as the illness: bleedings, strange poultices, the application of vipers and pigeons to remove evil “vapours.” During this dark time, Donne, forbidden to read or study but permitted to write, composed the book Devotions.

“Variable, and therefore miserable condition of man; this minute I was well, and am ill, this minute,” the book begins. Anyone who has been confined to bed can identify with the series of circumstances, petty yet overpowering, that Donne describes: a sleepless night, doctors in whispered consultation, the false hope of remission followed by the dread reality of relapse.

The mood of the writing changes quickly and violently. Such emotions as fear, guilt, and the sadness of a broken heart take turns chasing out all inner peace. Donne worries over his past: Has God “nailed him to bed” as a mocking punishment for past sexual sins? In his prayers he tries to muster up praise, or at least gratitude, but often fails. He pictures himself as a sailor tossed capriciously about by the towering swells of an ocean in storm. Occasionally he gets a glimpse of faraway land, only to lose it with the next giant wave.

In the tradition of Job, Jeremiah, and the psalmists, Donne uses the arena of his personal trials as a staging ground for a wrestling match with the Almighty. For Donne, as he looks back on life, the facts do not add up. After spending a lifetime in confused wandering, he has finally reached a place where he can be of some service to God, and now, at that precise moment, he is struck by a deadly illness. Nothing appears on the horizon but fever, pain, and death. What to make of it? In Devotions, John Donne calls God to task.

Give me, O Lord, a fear, of which I may not be afraid.

I have interviewed many people whose lives are defined by suffering. In every case they have described to me a crisis of fear, a crisis of meaning, and a crisis of death. And the central reason I keep returning to Donne’s Devotions is that the book continues to yield new insights into these primal confrontations with the mystery of suffering.

Most of the time, Donne was left to battle fear alone. In those days, victims of contagious diseases were subject to quarantine, and as Donne lay on his bed he wondered if God, too, was participating in the quarantine. He cried out, but received no answer. Where was God’s promised presence? His comfort? Always, in each of the 23 meditations, Donne circles back to the central issue underlying his suffering. His real fear was not of the tinny clamor of pain cells all over his body; he feared God.

Donne asked the “Why me?” question over and over again. Calvinism was still new then, and Donne pondered the notion of plagues and wars as “God’s angels.” But he soon recoiled from that idea; “Surely it is not thou, it is not thy hand. The devouring sword, the consuming fire, the winds from the wilderness, the diseases of the body, all that afflicted Job, were from the hands of Satan; it is not thou.”

And yet, he never felt certain. Guilt from his spotted past lurked like a demon nearby. Perhaps he was indeed suffering as a result of some sin. And if so, was it better to be scarred by God or not visited at all? How could he worship, let alone love, such a God?

Although Devotions does not resolve many of Donne’s questions about suffering, it does record his emotional resolution, showing us a step-by-step process of transformation. At first—confined to bed, churning out prayers without answers, contemplating death, regurgitating guilt—he can find no relief from omnipresent fear. Obsessed, he reviews every biblical occurrence of the word fear. As he does so, it dawns on him that life will always include circumstances that incite fear: if not illness, financial hardship; if not poverty, rejection; if not loneliness, failure. In such a world, Donne has a choice: to fear God, or to fear everything else.

In a passage reminiscent of Paul’s litany in Romans 8, Donne checks off his potential fears. Great enemies? They pose no threat, for God can vanquish any enemy. Famine? No, for God can supply. Death? Even that, the worst human fear, is no permanent barrier to those who fear God. Concluding that his best course is to cultivate a proper fear of the Lord, for that fear can supplant all others, he prays, “As thou hast given me a repentance, not to be repented of, so give me, 0 Lord, a fear, of which I may not be afraid.”

In his wrestling with God, Donne has changed questions. He began with the question of origin—“Who caused this illness and why?”—for which he found no answer. His meditations move gradually toward the question of response. The crucial issue, the one that faces every person who suffers, is, “Will I trust God with my pain and fear? Or will I turn away from him in bitterness and anger?” Donne decided that in the most important sense it did not matter whether his sickness was a chastening or a natural accident. In either case, he would trust God, for in the end trust represents the proper fear of the Lord.

As Donne explains, the decisive reason for trusting God traces back to his son, Jesus. Illness opens up a great gulf between ourselves and a God who knows nothing like weakness or helplessness. A sense of distance from God may creep in that only magnifies our fears. But in Jesus we have a Great Physician “who knows our natural infirmities, for he had them, and knows the weight of our sins, for he paid a dear price for them.”

Make this … very dejection and faintness of heart, a powerful cordial.

Viktor Frankl, survivor of a Nazi concentration camp, expressed well the second great crisis faced by people who suffer: the crisis of meaning. “Despair,” he said, “is suffering without meaning.” And in a society like ours, saturated with comfort, what possible meaning can we give to the great intruder suffering?

What is the meaning of AIDS? A loud, public debate rages over that one, but what about the meaning of progeria, the bizarre abnormality that speeds up the aging process and causes a 6-year-old child to look and feel 80? Or what is the meaning of cerebral palsy, or strep throat, or a freak January tornado?

Most of us can see only a negative “meaning” to suffering: It is an interruption of health, an unwelcome break in our pursuit of life, liberty, and happiness. Visit any card shop and you will get the message unmistakably. All that we can wish for suffering people is that they “Get well!” But as one woman with terminal cancer told me, “None of those cards apply to the people in my ward. None of us will get well. We’re all going to die here. To the rest of the world, that makes us invalids. Think about that word. Not valid.”

John Donne, thinking himself terminally ill, asked similar questions about meaning, and his Devotions suggest the possibility of an answer. The first stirrings came to him through the open window of his bedroom, in the form of church bells tolling out a doleful declaration of death. For an instant, Donne wondered if his friends, knowing his condition to be more grave than they had disclosed, had ordered the bell to be rung for his own death. But he quickly realized that the bells were marking another’s death from plague.

A short time later, sounds from the funeral service itself drifted in amongst the street noises. Donne croaked out a feeble accompaniment to the congregational singing of psalms, and then he wrote Meditation 17 on the meaning of the church bells—the most famous portion of Devotions, and indeed one of the most celebrated passages in English literature (“No man is an island.… Never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee”). Donne realized that although the bells had been sounded in honor of another’s death, they served as a stark reminder of what every human being spends a lifetime trying to forget: We will all die. “So this bell calls us all; but how much more me, who am brought so near the door by this sickness.”

The tolling of that bell worked a curious twist in Donne’s progression of thought. He had been wondering about the meaning of illness and what lessons he should learn from it. Now he began contemplating the meaning of health. The bell called into question how he had spent his entire life. Had he hallowed the gift of health by serving others and God? Had he viewed life as a preparation, a training ground, for a far longer and more important life to come—or as an end in itself?

The review prompted by the bell proved revealing to Donne. “I am the man that hath seen affliction,” he had told the congregation at his wife’s funeral. But it now seemed clear that those times of affliction, the periods of sharpest suffering, had been the very occasions of spiritual growth. Trials had purged sin and developed character; poverty had taught him dependence on God and cleansed him of greed; failure and public disgrace had helped cure worldly ambition. A clear pattern emerged: Pain could be transformed, even redeemed. Above all, his lifelong struggle with vanity and ambition appeared in a new light. Perhaps it was God’s own hand that had blocked all temporal employment, an apparent failure that had forced him to enter the ministry.

Donne’s mental review led him to reflect on his present circumstances. Could even this pain be redeemed? His illness prevented him from many good works, of course, but the physical incapacity surely did not inhibit all spiritual growth. He had much time for prayer: The bell had reminded him of his less fortunate neighbor, and the many others suffering in London. He could learn humility, and trust, and gratitude, and faith. Donne made a kind of game of it: He envisioned his “soul” growing strong, rising from the bed, and walking about the room even as his body lay flat.

In short, Donne realized he was not “in-valid.” He directed his energy toward spiritual disciplines: prayer, confession of sins, keeping a journal (which became Devotions). He got his mind off himself and onto others.

The Devotions record a seismic shift in Donne’s attitude toward pain. He begins with prayers that the pain be removed; he ends with prayers that the pain be redeemed, that he be “catechized by affliction.” Such redemption might take the form of miraculous cure—he still hoped so—but even if it did not, God could take a molten ingot, and through the refiner’s fire of suffering, make of it pure gold.

God had demonstrated that power beyond all argument, Donne notes, in the death of his Son. The shed blood of Christ had become a kind of toast of health to all the world. In the end, even the unimaginable suffering of the cross was fully redeemed: it is by his stripes that we are healed.

Though so disobedient a servant as I may be afraid to die, yet to so merciful a master as thou I cannot be afraid to come.

Two great crises spawned by Donne’s illness, the crisis of fear and the crisis of meaning, came together in a third and final crisis, the crisis of death. The poet truly believed that he would die from his illness, and the cloud of impending death hangs over every page of Devotions.

We moderns have perfected techniques for coping with the crisis of death, techniques that doubtless would have caused John Donne much puzzlement. First, as Ernst Becker has detailed in Denial of Death, we construct elaborate means of avoiding the crisis altogether. As shown by our exercise regimens and nutrition fetishes, we treat physical health like a religion, while simultaneously walling off death’s blunt reminders—mortuaries, intensive-care rooms, cemeteries. Living in Elizabethan London, John Donne did not have the luxury of denial. Each night huge carts were driven through the streets to collect the bodies of that day’s plague victims; their names appeared in long columns in the next day’s newspaper. No one could live as though death did not exist.

On the other hand, some modern health workers have popularized the notion of acceptance as the ideal attitude toward death. After Elisabeth Kübler-Ross established acceptance as the final stage in the grief process, scores of groups sprang up to help terminally ill patients reach that stage. One need not read long in Donne’s work to realize how foreign such an idea might have seemed to him. Some have accused Donne of an obsession with death (32 of his 54 songs and sonnets center on the theme), but for Donne, death was always the Great Enemy to be resisted, not a friend to be welcomed as a natural part of the cycle of life.

Donne took some comfort in the example of Jesus. The Garden of Gethsemane hardly presented a scene of calm acceptance. There Jesus sweat drops of blood and begged the Father for some other way. He too had felt the loneliness and fear that now haunted Donne’s deathbed. And why had he chosen that death? The purpose of Christ’s death brought Donne some solace at last: he had died to effect a cure.

The turning point for Donne came as he began to view death not as the disease that permanently spoils life, but rather as the only cure to the disease of life. For sin had permanently stained all life, and only through death—Christ’s death and our own—can we realize a cured, sinless state. Donne explored that thought in “A Hymn to God the Father,” the only other writing to survive from his time of illness:

Wilt thou forgive that sin where I begun,
Which was my sin, though it were done before?
Wilt thou forgive that sin, through which I run,
And do run still: though still I do deplore?
When thou hast done, thou hast not done,
For, I have more.

Wilt thou forgive that sin which I have won
Others to sin? and, made my sin their door?
Wilt thou forgive that sin which I did shun
A year, or two: but wallowed in, a score?
When thou hast done, thou hast not done,
For I have more.

I have a sin of fear, that when I have spun
My last thread, I shall perish on the shore;
But swear by thy self, that at my death thy son
Shall shine as he shines now, and heretofore;
And, having done that, thou hast done,
I fear no more.

The word play on the poet’s own name (“thou hast done”) reveals a kind of acceptance at last: not an acceptance of death as a natural end, but a willingness to trust God with the future, no matter what. “That voice, that I must die now, is not the voice of a judge that speaks by way of condemnation, but of a physician that presents health.”

John Donne did not die from the illness of 1623. He recovered and, though weakened, put in eight more years as dean of Saint Paul’s. His sermons and other writings often returned to the themes touched upon in Devotions, especially the theme of death, but never again did they express the same sort of inner turmoil. In his crisis, Donne managed to achieve a “holy indifference” about death: not by discounting death’s horror—his sermons contain vivid depictions of those horrors—but by a renewed confidence in resurrection.

If Jesus’ death had made possible a permanent cure for sin, his resurrection made possible a permanent cure for death. Donne liked to use the analogy of a map. Spread out flat, a map, in two dimensions, radically separates east from west. The two directions appear irreconcilably distant. But curve that same map around a globe—a far more accurate representation—and the farthest eastern point actually touches the farthest western point. The two are contiguous. The same principle applies to human life. Death, which appears to sever life, is actually a door opening the way to new life. Death and resurrection touch; the end is a beginning.

Death be not proud, though some have called thee
Mighty and dreadful, for, thou art not so.…
One short sleep past, we wake eternally,
And death shall be no more; Death, thou shalt die.

Seven years after the illness that inspired Devotions, Donne suffered another illness that would severely test all he had learned about pain. He spent most of the winter of 1630 out of the pulpit, confined to a house in Essex. But when the time of the Passion approached on the church calendar, Donne insisted on traveling to London to deliver a sermon on the first Friday of Lent. The friends who greeted him there saw an emaciated man, looking far older than his 59 years. A lifetime of suffering had taken its toll. The friends urged Donne to cancel the sermon, but he refused.

Donne had often expressed the desire to die in the pulpit, and he nearly did so. The impact of that sermon, “Death’s Duel,” one of Donne’s finest, did not soon fade from those who heard it. To John Donne, death was an enemy that he would fight as long as strength remained in his bones. But he fought with the confident knowledge that the enemy would ultimately be defeated.

Carried to his house, Donne spent the next five weeks preparing for death. He dictated letters, wrote poems, and composed his own epitaph. Acquaintances dropped by, and he reminisced. “I cannot plead innocency of life, especially of my youth,” he told one friend, “but I am to be judged by a merciful God, who is not willing to see what I have done amiss. And though of myself I have nothing to present to Him but sins and misery, yet I know He looks upon me not as I am of myself, but as I am in my Savior.… I am therefore full of inexpressible joy, and shall die in peace.”

A carver came by during those last few weeks, under orders from the church to design a monument for the dean. Donne posed for him in the posture of death, a winding-sheet tied around him, his hands folded over his stomach, his eyes closed. The effigy was carved out of a single piece of white marble. After Donne’s death, workmen mounted it over his funeral urn in Saint Paul’s Cathedral.

It is still there, John Donne’s monument. It was the only object in the entire cathedral to survive the Great Fire of 1666, and modern visitors daily file through the ambulatory, behind the choir stalls, to gaze at the white marble monument set in a niche in the gray stone. Tour guides point out a brown scorch mark on the urn dating from the fire. Donne’s face wears an expression of serenity, as though he attained at last in death the peace that eluded him for so much of life.

Our last day is our first day; our Saturday is our Sunday; our eve is our holy day; our sunsetting is our morning; the day of our death is the first day of our eternal life. The next day after that … comes that day that shall show me to myself. Here I never saw myself but in disguises; there, then, I shall see myself, but I shall see God too.… Here I have one faculty enlightened, and another left in darkness; mine understanding sometimes cleared, my will at the same time perverted. There I shall be all light, no shadow upon me; my soul invested in the light of joy, and my body in the light of glory.

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