The Mystery of Suffering
It’s probably fair to say that we all start out wanting to be good and to do right, but it isn’t easy to be honest, or fair, or kind in a world which is often dishonest, unjust, and unkind—in a world, that is, which the Church calls “a fallen world”. That world is sorely afflicted with original sin and its consequent moral disorders and confusions, some inherited from our history and others peculiar to the present ambient culture.
But one may notice (as a priestly friend and university colleague likes to say) that Jesus didn’t tell us to “Come, pick up your lollipops and follow me.” In fact, He told us to be prepared to shoulder the Cross many times a day, the many crosses of love, if we want to follow Him and be His friends. If we are serious about love, compassion, and striving to be good and do the right things, one of the many mysteries we run up against almost immediately is that of the Cross—the reality of sacrifice, suffering and setback in our lives and efforts. The Cross is at the heart of every great love: first the will, but then the ability, to sacrifice or suffer if necessary for the sake of others and for the sake of what is true, just, and generous.
In the Gospels we encounter this mystery over and over again. In Matthew (10: 39), Jesus says, “Whoever finds his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.” Jesus assured us that those who mourn will be comforted, and that those who thirst for justice will be satisfied. He said that the last would be first, and the first last, that the meek and modest would inherit the earth, that the merciful would obtain mercy, and that the last and greatest of all blessings would be to be abused and persecuted, slandered and calumnied on the Lord’s account, and on account of His Gospel. “Rejoice and be glad on that day,” He says, “for your reward will be great in heaven. This is precisely the way they treated the prophets” (Ch. 5). The Lord’s followers can expect to be persecuted, as He was persecuted.
The Catechism (§1725) insists that the Beatitudes (Mt. 5) “respond to the desire for happiness that God has placed in the human heart”. These blessings will truly satisfy, and make us happy, but not with the kind of happiness that this world promises. For true happiness and peace of heart are not to be found in riches and pleasure, in fame or power or any merely human achievement, or even in good health; only in God are they to be found, and in doing His will.
Among other things, life’s pain, suffering and setback, both physical and mental, can wake us up to God’s presence, and help us accept our finitude, i.e., the basic fact which should be self-evident, that we are creatures, radically dependent on the Creator for every moment of life. Pain can lead us to a peaceful and loving acceptance of that fact, and help destroy false pride, the deadliest of the seven deadly sins and the real root of the others—the idea that we can live our lives without God.
The spiritual tasks of life are more important than the material ones, and pain, like nothing else, can wake us up to that fact, and thereby help nurture a more honest, mature faith and a simpler life. Similarly, nurturing our children spiritually—passing on the Pearl of Great Price, that Faith the attainment of which would be worth the selling of everything else we have—is every bit as important as feeding their bodies, or clothing their nakedness.
No one, I think, did more to show us how to shoulder the inevitable crosses of life than did our beloved and courageous Holy Father, John Paul II. His mother died when he was six; his father and brother followed before he was twenty, in the midst of war and National Socialist terror. Then he and his compatriots had to survive another forty years of socialist totalitarianism. (No people other than the Jews suffered more grievously than the Poles did during the twentieth century; they were in many ways the weakest and most despised of peoples. But yet they became God’s chosen instrument for accomplishing His purpose in history, and ending the Cold War and the thermonuclear stalemate.)
In his later years, the pope had to endure an assassin’s bullet, a grapefruit-sized cancerous tumour, surgery on his hip, a dislocated shoulder, and the burdens and ravages of Parkinson’s disease. If anyone ever lived a hard life, it was this man. If anyone had a right to question God, or shake his fist at the heavens, it was he. But yet, he was at peace with reality—how?
He gave us many parts of the answer to that question in his book Crossing the Threshold of Hope, which has sold over thirty million copies, and in his apostolic letter Salvifici doloris (“On the Christian Meaning of Human Suffering”), written during his recovery in hospital from the attempt on his life.
The whole of the Bible, John Paul tells us, is God’s answer to suffering. God has chosen to rescue and redeem us from the many evils which afflict us, in the most awesome and mysterious of ways, through the mystery of the Incarnation and its extension in history, the mystery of the Real Presence in the Sacrament of the Eucharist. It is important to understand that suffering was no part of God’s original plan for us, but a consequence of rebellion against His love for us. Scripture also affirms that even though we have been separated from God, He has never turned from us. Divinely in love with His creation, God has willed to redeem and rescue us from evil by being with us or in us, if we open our minds and hearts to His grace and gift.
The evils which afflict us will continue to try our souls, but in the “New Creation” they need no longer destroy our will to love and serve, or drive us to despair. In fact, not only can we survive evil, we can actually thrive and be purified in its midst. Jesus compares it to the testing of gold and precious metals in fire. Just as in the fire they are tested, and in the testing purified, so suffering can test, purify, and strengthen our inner being. In particular, suffering is meant to strengthen our faith, trust, and love.
Because of our wounded nature, we tend to place our trust and hope in human beings, material possessions, our reputations and successes in life. The loss of these things helps us to realize how misplaced such trust is, and to relocate it in God’s power and promise. Only He is worthy of our ultimate trust. Other things, good as they are in themselves, must not become the ultimate focus of our lives. Our hearts were made for God, and cannot rest until they rest in him, as St. Augustine says.
In Salvifici doloris John Paul tells us that “it is suffering, more than anything else, which clears the way for the grace which transforms human souls. . . The Gospel speaks unceasingly this strange paradox: the springs of divine grace gush forth precisely in the midst of human weakness.” Suffering is present in part, he says, to unleash love: the unselfish gift of oneself on behalf of others, as the world of human suffering unceasingly calls forth another world, the world of human compassion. The very word for love is compassion—suffering with, and for the sake of, others.
Through the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass the Church consecrates and unites our sufferings to Christ’s suffering, and reaffirms her faith that the evils and setbacks which test us are temporary and are to be swallowed up in the Lord’s victory over sin and death in a mystery of resurrection and eternal life. Like Christ on the cross, we must struggle to the point of peaceful resignation where we can say with the Lord, “Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit.” And, “Into thy hands I commend my family, my work, my children and grandchildren, my hopes and my life. Into thy hands I commend all that I am and all that I have.”
Pope John Paul showed us, not only how to shoulder our crosses, especially the cross of true love, but also how to stay hopeful in a world that is often depressing and discouraging. He called his book Crossing the Threshold of Hope, but when he became pope nothing seemed more hopeless than the thermonuclear impasse and the repressive atheism and communism that controlled Eastern Europe. Yet, the theological virtues of faith, hope and charity, as taught by the pope and explicated in his Catechism, inspired and sustained a profound moral and spiritual conversion in the hearts and minds of his people, which made the political transformations possible in Poland and its neighbours. The path out of totalitarian darkness had led through much suffering, but faith and virtue eventually won. The same virtues can similarly inspire and sustain us in our own struggles to lead decent and upright lives, today and in our own future.
