#dorothee soelle

[weil-weil-lautre]

The Christian faith relates to suffering not merely as remover or consoler. It offers no 'supernatural remedy for suffering' but strives for a 'supernatural use for it.' A person's wounds are not taken from him. Even the risen Christ still had his scars.

Dorothee Soelle, Suffering, p. 155

[apilgrimsprogress]

We should eat more at the Eucharist and we should pray more when eating.

Dorothee Sölle

[marcella-delaney]

Giving and taking are two-sided: we know God only if we also know how much God needs us… Love itself wants mutuality; God wants our joy, our power, our creative participation, and not us as mere vessels of divine inpouring.

Dorothee Soelle, Thinking about God: An Introduction to Theology, pg. 184

[apenitentialprayer]

The Suffering God

In all religions, a question mark has been set against the omnipotent and serene gods by the sufferings of men. But only in Christ does the concept of a suffering God appear. […] Only in Christ does it become clear that we can put God to death because he has put himself in our hands. Only since Christ has God become dependent on us. Christ did not identify himself with a calm spectator of all our troubles. Christ, by his teaching, life, and death, made plain the helplessness of God in the world; the suffering of unrequited and unsuccessful love. [...] That God in the world has been, and still is, mocked and tortured, burnt and gassed: that is the rock of the Christian faith which rests all its hope on God attaining his identity. This pain is inextinguishable; this hope can never be taken away. What Christians share in common is 'their participation in the sufferings of God in Christ. That is their faith.' In this faith they know that God is helpless and needs help. […] He put himself at risk, made himself dependent on us, identified himself with the non-identical. From now on, it is high time for us to do something for him.

- Dorothee Soelle (Christ the Representative: An Essay in Theology After the 'Death of God,' pages 151, 151-152). Bolded emphases added.

Man of Sorrows, by Theophilia

[hymnsofheresy]

“To remember God dissolves dependency on the ego because the ego is said to be a concretization of “God-forgetfulnness” and the human brain is the organ of that forgetfulness.”

Dorothee Solle | The Silent Cry

[theinwardlight]

Sometimes I suspect that love is the only thing death respects.

Dorothee Soelle, The Mystery of Death

[beguines]

Is it at all possible to understand the desire for suffering and the yearning for even more suffering? I think that it is possible only in conjunction with the other basic Christian concept, compassio (suffering with Christ and all who suffer). Mystical love for God makes us open to God's absence: the senseless, spiritless suffering that separates humans from all that makes for life. The privation and eclipse of God ought at least to be felt and suffered. The nausea caused by this world of injustice and violence ought at least to he perceptible; it ought to increase to the point of physical vomiting, as is told about so many highly gifted women from Catherine of Siena to Simone Weil. That kind of nausea is an experience of compassio.

Dorothee Soelle, The Silent Cry: Mysticism and Resistance

[ladyhearthkeeper]

At the heart of Franciscan spirituality is to be found resistance against melancholy. This is not to be confused with deep, genuine mourning. Francis [of Assisi] did not fear it, but he flees from the joylessness and negativity of life that is coated with the devil's fine dust, the dullness of the senses that lets us see, taste, and hear nothing. That bland, all-embracing sadness neither weeps nor prays because it has taken away our ability to feel. It is said that whenever Francis felt even the littlest touch of it in his heart he took refuge in prayer. Praying, singing, praising, dancing were his antidotes to this sadness. When an illness overcame him he began to sing a hymn of praise to God in all God's creatures. Francis ran away from the dull inaccessibility that brings with it a joyless emptiness and ran to prayer and, mysteriously, into tears.

The Silent Cry: Mysticism and Resistance - Dorothee Soelle