THE CO-SUFFERING CONSCIENCE by Bradley Jersak

Awareness

1. I am aware of the gifts I’ve been given as blessings from God, family, and the body of Christ. I will use these where I’m able, let go where I can’t, and seek to use them in service of others.

2. I am aware of the harms I’ve done along the way, including those I hurt who are not yet in a place to forgive or to heal. I will co-suffer the pain I caused as a consequence, bearing it as I remember them in prayer.

3. I am aware of the prevailing culture’s aggressive commitment to retribution, humiliation, and public shame to cut off pathways to redemption of the sinner. I’m aware of the fear they have sown in me.

4. I am aware of the mercy I’ve received through healing communities who hold me accountable for my life and my obligation to pay forward that same mercy to anyone who needs it as God gives me the opportunity and within the limits God prescribes.

5. I am aware of the humility required to continually resist pedestals that those I help are tempted to erect, remembering the great suffering that occurs when idols topple. 

6. I am aware of the need to centering my redemption rather than my failures and to testify that God has removed our transgressions from us.

The Co-suffering Conscience

People with addictions who have harmed others live with the reality that some of those they’ve harmed are not healed and may never fully recover in this lifetime. Some of those they’ve injured cannot and likely will not forgive them or be reconciled on this side of eternity. Appropriate boundaries for their safety often mean that the opportunity to offer a direct amends is shut off.

For the addict with an awakened conscience, the daily torment of this reality can either lead to relapse or to such depths of self-loathing that they despair of life. Perhaps worse, the self-loathing is no longer about the pain they caused others but becomes focused on the pain they feel, making it all about themselves. The moral injury of their own actions energizes a new locus of self-centeredness in self-pity. The memory of those they hurt thus fuels the character defects that drove the addiction in the first place.

What to do? The solution is not found in the defensive posture of denial or of forgetting and simply moving on as if nothing happened. That's dangerous and it’s not actually forgiving oneself. It’s repression of shame that will resurface under pressure.

One possible way forward: “the co-suffering conscience.” The idea here is that instead of indulging in our own shame-based pain OR the panacea of denial, we allow the conscience to bear (to co-suffer) whatever pain our past actions continue to cause the other today and to offer that suffering to God on their behalf as intercession. 

ONLY in the act of praying do we allow ourselves to feel their pain because only there will it cease to be selfish or dangerous. Only there is it redemptive—only there is it love. 

We continue this practice for as long as we suffer the pangs of a stricken conscience and beyond that, for as long as we are aware that the people we hurt continue to suffer the harms we caused. A lifetime of intercession will be a lighter burden than a lifetime of shame and self-loathing and will be far more effective for our recovery and for theirs. 

We will discover that in centering the person’s well-being by praying for their liberation and flourishing, the transgression itself will be and has already been forgiven and removed. But now we will begin to experience the truth of infinite mercy by lifting our eyes to the throne of grace (the Cross) and surrendering ourselves and them into the loving care of the Good Shepherd, rather than forever lowering ourselves in ineffective self-debasement (which is still an obsession with the self).

I wonder if this approach can apply to anyone for the actual harm their conscience knows they have done—not just as addicts, but as parents and children, as pastors and teachers, as soldiers and police, as sinners. Wherever they have caused physical and emotional injury to another and moral injury to oneself—and where the wounds that persist cause ongoing dysfunction and alienation. This is one way we can be reconciled to our accusing conscience that saves us from self-centered shame, from denial, or from trying to control outcomes or extract forgiveness from our victims.

The active ingredients to the approach are (1) a strict adherence to consciously staying at the Mercy Seat, (2) surrendering the ones we have harmed into God’s care, (3) focusing the prayers on blessing their flourishing, and (4) encountering the love of God for ourselves.

Bottom line: coming with our tormented and tormenting conscience to the Mercy Seat of God, our suffering is transfigured into co-suffering intercession that liberates us from the machinations of the squirming self that seeks an exit from shame.

Generally, the person in this place has bottomed out on the compulsion to make everything right (they know they can’t), with their obsession over self-disqualification, and the delusion of manipulating others or managing God with their prayers. But the ego is sneaky… so even “doing this right” must be surrendered and, instead, offer our pain and theirs into the loving care of the Divine.