by Andy Crouch
I will never forget the first funeral I attended for someone my age, in the church across the street from The Little Peach. Matt had been practicing with the freshman football team when he noticed unusual bruises from the gentlest of collisions. Four months later, he died from leukemia, and my friends and I sat in the overflow crowd in the vestibule of the church as we watched his parents walk in to the service. In his grief, his father looked to me like the strongest man in the world carrying the heaviest weight in the world on his shoulders. Out of nowhere, suffering had found him, and us.
All this happened to me, and around me, in one of the most protected corners of the world, in one of the most affluent places on the planet. (Even decades later, the wounds are deep enough that I have changed names and identifying details in this chapter out of respect for friends’ privacy.) Wherever you come of age, suffering will come into your life earlier than you expected, in the form of risks you cannot manage and pain you cannot avoid, a room with no exit.
Ultimately, suffering—vulnerability without authority—is the last word of every human life, no matter how privileged or powerful. We will end our days, one way or another, radically vulnerable to others, only able to hope that they will honor our diminishment and departure with care and dignity. The authority we carefully store up for ourselves will evaporate slowly or quickly, over the span of decades—or over brunch.
Eric and Kate
Before I really talk with Eric and Kate for the first time, I can already make a rough guess of their status and occupations. Eric is athletic, handsome, in a suit with an open collar; Kate is dressed with the effortless panache that takes a great deal of effort. It’s not hard to picture her on the paths along Boston’s Charles River with the other early-morning runners (a more apt name for her Lycra-clad tribe than “joggers”). He works in finance; she works in marketing—they both live on Beacon Hill, Boston’s neighborhood for young professionals with good jobs, good friends and good prospects.
They began dating, I find out, shortly before Eric started going to church. Eric is effusive in his newly discovered faith—Kate is more reserved. And yet you sense her opening up to the possibility that a loving God knows her and is seeking her, along with a growing wonder at the openness and generosity she has discovered among the followers of Jesus.
On Easter Sunday, a few months after we meet, Eric and Kate attend church and go out for brunch with friends. In the middle of the meal, Kate’s head droops, and then her whole body goes limp. An ambulance rushes Kate, unresponsive, to the emergency room of Massachusetts General Hospital. By the time I get Eric’s anguished email to a few Christian friends later that night, she is in the neurological intensive care unit.
On Monday morning, and every morning for the next week, I visit to support Eric and to pray with him as Kate’s chest rises and falls with the mechanical rhythm of the life-support equipment. Her face is expressionless, pale, soft as with sleep. The hospital’s chief of neurology takes over Kate’s case and spends hours with the family and with attending physicians, interns and nurses at Kate’s side. They have arrived at a diagnosis: a rare and undetected genetic condition has made Kate vulnerable, all her life, to a massive stroke. It could have happened years ago; it could have waited years longer. On Easter Monday, there is still some hope Kate might recover, at least partially. Over the coming days that hope dwindles. She will never open her eyes again. Late one afternoon, with her family around her, the doctors remove the equipment from her body and she is gone.
I attend the funeral in one of Boston’s most affluent suburbs—not very different from my own home of Needham. The impeccably dressed mourners arrive in late-model SUVs, and I am reminded of how highly New England’s elite value their control—control over slippery roads, over appearances, over emotions, over relationships. Kate’s roommates give bewildered eulogies, grasping for profundity out of friendships born largely of carefree partying and the small trials of college life. The faith that she had just begun to explore hovers over a service that is hollow with grief.
At the graveside I am surprised to see the hospital’s chief of neurology. He is perhaps sixty years old—he has cared for countless patients, has risen to the very top of his profession at one of the most prestigious medical centers in the world, and yet here he is at this young woman’s grave, his face streaked with tears. He is shorter than I remembered from the hospital. He reaches up to embrace Eric and says, “I’m so sorry we couldn’t save her.”
The Paths to Suffering
Of the four quadrants, Suffering is the one we least want to visit. And yet it is the only one I can be absolutely sure every reader of this book has experienced. You may or may not feel you have ever tasted the flourishing that comes from simultaneously experiencing great authority and great vulnerability; you may or may not have ever lingered in the withdrawal of having neither authority nor vulnerability; perhaps you have never had the opportunity to taste the tantalizing promise of authority without vulnerability. But without a doubt you have experienced vulnerability without authority, risk without options.
Of the four quadrants, Suffering is the one we least want to visit. And yet it is the only one I can be absolutely sure every reader of this book has experienced.
We suffer in the hospital waiting room, knowing that the child or parent or friend who just was taken into surgery has taken everything we cherish in life with them—but also knowing that we can do nothing, beyond faithful waiting and prayer, to affect the outcome.
We suffer in romance, being on the receiving end of one of the worst and most cowardly inventions of the modern age, the breakup by text message. (Now that is vulnerability without authority!)
We even suffer in ambition, having sent off an application for a job or a place at university, all the documentation we could muster of our authority—but then having to wait weeks or months for a decision.
Indeed, sometimes suffering is simply the painful payoff of risking love in a broken world. This is the burden of Eric at Kate’s grave, but it is also the burden of the chief of neurology at Mass General Hospital, with all his professional success and skill; it’s the burden of the widower closing his wife’s casket after fifty years of marriage; on a smaller but still very real scale, it is the burden of my friend grieving his breakup with Janet six years later.
But there is another path to suffering, one that has nothing to do with the risks that come with true flourishing. The other path is injustice—the spiritual and physical violence done by those who seek authority without vulnerability. Abby’s father had done nothing to earn the violent contempt of the proprietor of The Little Peach, but that man’s distorted use of his petty power did damage all the same—far more damage, surely, than any satisfaction he gained from his display of superiority. One bleak day I sat with my friend Jeremy the day after his divorce was finalized. His ex-wife had opted out of marriage with its demands for growth and transparency. It is surpassingly unlikely that she will end up happier in the long run, but the damage has been done in their lives and the life of the young daughter she left behind.
The most painful path to the quadrant called Suffering is the human choice, at the very origins of the species, to pursue Exploiting—to seek authority without vulnerability, godlike power without God-like character. We are vulnerable without authority because our first parents sought authority without vulnerability—and because their fallen children seek it still.
Generations of Suffering
Any experience of vulnerability without authority is painful, but the deepest and most intractable examples of suffering are communal and multigenerational. They involve whole peoples who find themselves stuck in suffering, whole communities with a shared painful history and a dismal expected future.
This is not just a matter of financial deprivation. Even if you are personally materially poor, if your community—your family of origin, your ethnic group, your nation—has some measure of authority and can resist the worst of human vulnerabilities, y
ou are at a much lower risk of true poverty. You are connected with others who can restore some measure of flourishing in your life.
The deepest and most intractable examples of suffering are communal and multigenerational.
Conversely, even if you are personally materially well-off, if your community is mired in suffering—if your parents, people and nation have known little for generations but enforced helplessness due to tragedy and injustice—then you are not free from the oppressive reality of suffering. And this kind of suffering is far deeper, and far less tractable, than the suffering all of us experience as individuals—because simply escaping it as an individual does nothing to change the fundamental systems of vulnerability without authority.
Sandra grew up in Ventura County in southern California, and she carries herself with the confidence that seems to be the birthright of children of those safe, sunny, endless suburbs, the confidence that carried her to university and into a professional career. Meeting her for the first time, I make a host of assumptions—almost all of which turn out to be wrong.
I assume that like so many young Americans, she can largely chart her own course in life, choosing her college major and career—when in fact, every one of these decisions has been discussed and debated and decided by her whole extended family.
I assume she grew up knowing she would go to college. In fact, no one in Sandra’s family had ever gone to college. For most of her childhood it was a distant and hazy dream.
I assume her parents worked hard to pay for her education—but in fact, Sandra’s parents worked hard her whole life at several jobs each, not to save money but to pay for basic daily expenses.
I assume she grew up in a loving, stable home, which is half true. Her family was generous and warm, but stability was far beyond their grasp—because although Sandra was born in the United States, her parents were not. They have spent her whole life in the United States without legal status. Early in her teens, translating from the Spanish that is their only fully comfortable language to the English that she speaks like the American native she is, she fully grasped the reality: any hour, any day—at a routine traffic stop or when a white Immigration & Customs Enforcement vehicle would pull up at the places where they held down their informal, under-the-table jobs—they could in an instant be taken away from her, back to the land they left before she was born.
Her family is part of the vast and complicated story of undocumented immigration to the United States—a story of brave and hard-working people leaving homes of little opportunity and perilous violence to take back- and spirit-breaking work in American factories and fields. During Sandra’s years in junior high school, a movement began to force the issue of these long-term, tax-paying residents and workers. Sandra and her friends skipped school to march in the peaceful procession through downtown Los Angeles. For them, American-born citizens, the worst that could happen would be a night in jail. For many of the immigrant workers in the march—their uncles, aunts, parents and neighbors—speaking up for basic recognition and fair treatment could have been the last act of their lives in America.
As Sandra tells this story, you can still glimpse the scared and perplexed thirteen-year-old she once was. She describes her yearning for her eighteenth birthday, the day she could apply for family-based green cards for her own parents. She cannot speak without emotion about the day those green cards arrived two years later. Sandra no longer lives with that radical vulnerability, knowing her parents could disappear to a country she has never visited. Or maybe, since all of us live with the vulnerabilities of our teenage years long after those years are gone, she lives with that vulnerability every day.
Every one of us is a neighbor to communities in suffering. This can literally be true—the pleasant town where I live borders a postindustrial city with one of the highest murder rates in my state. Nearly every reader of this book will live within an hour’s drive of a place similarly entrenched in vulnerability without authority—and we all live a short plane flight away from even more extreme examples. Within our businesses and our workplaces, our hospitals and our colleges, in even the healthiest places, there are pockets of persistent and seemingly intractable poverty, material and spiritual.
You might object. Not all workplaces, you might say. What about those darlings of the media, the social media startups of the last decade where every employee is a millionaire, the companies with stratospheric valuations, onsite masseurs and free vegan cuisine in the cafeteria, the firms full of authority and healthy risk-taking?
But in fact these firms also are neighbors to and intertwined with an economic ecosystem that leaves whole communities in suffering. In October 2014 Wired magazine reported on the dirty work every social media company must somehow handle: moderating the deluge of exploitative, degrading content posted in unimaginable quantities around the world and around the clock by boors (and increasingly by bots). This is not simply material that might offend those of gentle or puritanical sensibilities, but truly unthinkable representations of real and fictional violence, abuse of women and men, children and animals, and countless other horrors conjured up by the human mind.
Someone has to prevent the average user from encountering these horrors or else all of our news feeds would be regularly infiltrated by retch-inducing images and text. But this means that a human being has to review every degrading image. And that someone is usually a resident of a distant country, employed by an outsourcing firm—at the time of Wired’s article, largely in the Philippines, thanks to its cheap labor supply and reasonably close ties to Western culture. Philippine young adults do this work because there is no better work to do, and they do it until they are utterly undone by it.
This is the reality of the globalized Internet world, in which the depredations of a few, the pornographers and exploiters who seek power without vulnerability (Exploiting), are foisted on those with no alternative (Suffering) in order to allow the privileged to live in ignorant comfort (Withdrawing). It’s a world in which poverty of spirit is bought at near-poverty wages. The flourishing of a few powerful companies—and we who use their services—is a mirage made possible only if you avert your eyes from the vulnerability they outsource to others.
Building Authority
The existence and persistence of the quadrant called Suffering is the real test of power—a test that all of us with power have failed. The consequences of our failure to fully bear the divine image fall most heavily on those who live in this quadrant with no prospect of escape—the individuals and communities who exist in a state of continual vulnerability.
Making things worse, some well-meaning attempts to intervene in situations of suffering can actually increase vulnerability and undermine authority. As Gary Haugen and Victor Boutros point out in their compelling book The Locust Effect, half a century’s worth of financial investment in the materially poor world has had surprisingly little effect. Introducing material resources alone into a system of exploitation—treating the symptoms of Suffering without addressing the disease of Exploiting and Withdrawing—actually can increase the vulnerability of the poor. Even at the smallest scale, a family given a few farm animals by a well-intentioned development program can begin to attract the hungry gaze of people willing to do them violence. At the largest scale, global development funds in the hundreds of millions of dollars become powerful incentives to corruption at the highest levels of government.
Too often, our efforts to intervene in suffering end up only reinforcing poverty. It is almost never enough to reduce vulnerability—even though that is what most of us seek to do in our own lives. We must also restore proper authority to individual persons and to whole communities. There is nothing wrong with reducing meaningless risk in people’s lives—their vulnerability to hunger or disease. But the best interventions in situations of persistent poverty increase authority as well.
How do we move people stuck in the quadrant called Suffering toward the authority for which they were made? The only truly sustainab
le response is to help build lasting authority. In 2007 I had the opportunity to visit a district in India where bonded labor—modern-day child slavery—had been endemic. But with the help of the Christian humanitarian organization World Vision, these small, materially poor communities had begun to see extraordinary change. A few of World Vision’s interventions in that situation were focused on pressing, immediate relief of vulnerability (programs to provide basic food, clean water and shelter), but most were aimed at increasing meaningful authority: savings programs for women (financial savings, especially in communities of great poverty, are an important source of capacity for meaningful action), training and support for local law enforcement (encouraging the kind of legitimate authority that could restrain exploitative moneylenders), and, most memorably for me, the “children’s panchayat,” a village council just for children, where they could practice the responsibility for the community that would be theirs when they came of age.
What I found in that community is what can be found in so many communities marked by suffering: when the gospel begins to transform individuals and communities, it does not simply relieve the most immediate needs. Indeed, many of those needs may remain unmet in any material sense. And yet the gospel restores hope and dignity, meaningful action and meaningful risk. At a distance, you might suppose that systemic injustice and multigenerational vulnerability would leave nothing but misery in their wake. But draw closer to even the greatest suffering and you find people of extraordinary resilience and spiritual power. One of them, for me, is named Isabel.