in what we bring on ourselves and in what comes to us unbidden. It must also inspire a clear-eyed commitment to address, with neither fear nor judgment, the suffering that arises from the corporate sins of injustice and oppression and the personal sins of the wayward human creature. Christianity must open a way for us to face suffering, not as an anomaly or a momentary obstacle on the way to a place where God will be present to us but as an enduring feature of human life in which God is with us.