The Mystery of Suffering
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So avoiding all idea of a vindictive God, inflicting pain because he has every excuse for doing so, we have to remember that he is love itself, wisdom itself, power itself. We have to believe that we are all the time objects of his love, that his wisdom is being brought to bear upon our affairs, and that his power is there to help us. We have to understand why he sent his Son into this world to suffer, and how, by suffering willingly ourselves, we can share in the work of the Passion. We have to accept it as true that the more we pray and try to see Christ in others we shall come to appreciate the connection between these things: between God’s love and our pain, between the Father’s will and the Son’s mission, between the Son’s Passion and our own trials, between feeling sorrowful and possessing peace, between the horrors in the world about us and the essential harmony of God’s design. Without prayer and the desire to develop charity, we shall see none of this.
What as followers of Christ we have to recognize throughout the study of this subject is that our purpose is a quite different one from that of the materialist, the hedonist, the worldling. Our aim is not to get through this life with the maximum of pleasure and the minimum of suffering. Our aim is to handle everything in this life, whether pleasurable or painful, in such a way that it becomes matter for the love of God. Pleasure accepted with thanksgiving, pain accepted with thanksgiving—it does not very much matter which. The important thing is to receive whichever it is with love. “Always and everywhere to give thanks”—we have it in the Preface at Mass. Gratitude supposes a certain degree of love, even if the gratitude is expressed only at intervals. When the gratitude has become habitual, always and everywhere covering pleasure and pain, it supposes the abiding love, which grace builds up in the responsive soul.
Some people imagine that in order to be holy you have to cultivate the sad side of life, choosing the darker prospect wherever the alternative comes up. Surely what holy people choose is the will of God, whether it happens to be dark or light. Holy people know—and know it better than others—that suffering must anyway occupy a fair slice of life. They accept this as normal, meeting their sorrows as calmly and cheerfully as they can. They do not focus their whole attention on the necessity of suffering; they focus their whole attention on the necessity of loving. It is just that they see the necessary place of suffering in the overall activity of love.
The saints flinch as instinctively as others when the cross comes along, but they do not allow their flinching to upset their perspectives. As soon as it becomes clear to them that this particular suffering is what God evidently wants suffered, they stop flinching. Their habitual state of surrender to God’s will has a steadying effect: they do not get stampeded into panic or despair or rebellion or defeat. After a while—sometimes only after a very long while—they find that the grace of suffering produces the opposite effect: instead of fear there is trust, instead of hopelessness there is hope, instead of revolt there is peace, instead of defeat there is the sense of the triumph of grace.
The saints realize, and without a trace of morbid interest or cynicism, that frustration pays off in the end. Without sorrow of some sort, whether it is disappointment or loss or loneliness, the soul is likely to grow soft. Suffering comes in to prevent corrosion. Nor has suffering a negative value only: it comes to play a positive part—to bring the best out of what is already there. Many souls drift through life making themselves as snug as they can, never becoming either very happy or very holy. If they were to forget about being comfortable, and concentrate on being generous, they would have far more to enjoy and far more to offer. To a man who is as smooth and soft as a grape, the bloom rubs off all too easily. A coconut or a pineapple may not look so elegant, but at least it keeps and provides more for your money. Pineapples and coconuts are tougher because they have not been raised in a hothouse. The Christian who runs away from the first suggestion of discomfort will back away from the challenge of sacrifice. And the challenge to sacrifice himself on one or other altar of life—whether in marriage, in a religious vocation, in supplying the needs of others, in the demands of a job, a political principle, or simply as a witness to truth—is inevitably bound to present itself. How not—if a Christian is to reproduce Christ?
So in one form or another, suffering is the law of life. Remember how, in Mozart’s Magic Flute, the temple of love and wisdom is reached only by those searchers who are first ill-treated by brutal sentries and who then have to cross water and fire. Remember how the spear of Achilles healed where it wounded. Remember that it is the grain of sand setting up a friction within the oyster that produces the pearl. And there is, I believe, a certain lily in South America which has a nasty smell until its calix (appropriately enough) is pierced: no sooner is it lanced than it begins to smell deliciously.
Why is a swim more satisfying than a bath? Surely because it involves so many discomforts. Why are dogs healthier when they have something to scratch? Perhaps because if nothing itched, they would sit about having nothing to do. Why do sensible men want to get to the top of Mount Everest? Surely it is not because they cannot wait until an air service offers to take them there. Why do people hike, camp, go out to sea on a raft? Would it be because instinctively they know that hardship has an antiseptic, indeed a curative, quality? From this we should learn that doing difficult things not only adds to life but, when seen in its Christian context, unifies life in Christ. The Christian puts up with suffering in the certain knowledge that he is entering into the mystery of Christ’s Passion. This is union. This is identification with the Father’s will. What greater satisfaction can there be than this?
The principle of Christian suffering, then, is Christ’s Passion. Ours is not the endurance of the Spartan nor the exploratory ambition of the spaceman. For us it is simply a matter of synthesis—seeing to it that our human ills are molten in Christ. The old tag about the crucible, about the dross being burned away and only the gold remaining. But always in the furnace it is the image of Christ which gives the whole thing meaning. We do not submit to the flames for the sake of the flames. “Greater love has no one than this,” said our Lord (Jn 15:13: NASB), but he did not stop short at the words: “than that he should lay down his life.” There was more to it than merely laying down life. Any fool can commit suicide. There had to be a purpose about laying down life. If voluntary death were to be counted for the greatest of all acts of charity, it would have to be offered in the name of charity.
Seen apart from charity, apart from Christ, suffering is a waste. Indeed it is an evil. There is nothing in itself good about suffering; its good lies in what it is associated with. God created a world in which there was no suffering. He pronounced it good—good the way it was in the first place. Then came sin, bringing with it a new dispensation in which suffering occupied an essential part. It was bad that man and animals had to suffer, but there it was. Man had to shoulder the bad and make the best of it.
But man found that he could not make the best of it. It was always defeating him: suffering was “getting him down.” Sin was getting him down still more. Then came Christ and the scene changed once again. Christ took sin upon himself and atoned for it. He also took suffering upon himself and sanctified it. He changed it from an evil to a good. He took death upon himself and removed the sting from it. Here was a quite new dispensation. Suffering and death still occupied an essential place in the general scheme of things, but they were not to be dreaded in the way that they were dreaded before. The Father could now look down from heaven upon his creation and see suffering transformed by his Son from an evil to a good. Creation, in spite of sin and suffering, could still be pronounced “good”—in some ways, because of the Incarnation, better than before.
Nor is it as if by magic that what was hitherto to be dreaded and avoided—the Jews of the Old Testament looked upon all affliction as a sign of God’s disfavor—is now to be prized. It is not as though Christ so imputed his Passion to the affairs of man as automatically to put a halo round human suffering. Yes, we are
made free of the merits of his Passion—”Your wounds are my merits,” said St. Gabriel of the Seven Sorrows quite correctly in his prayer—but this very freedom assumes the need to choose. The halo which surrounds Christ’s sufferings will surround ours only when we unite our own with his. There is no guarantee that the hideous amount of pain, which is everywhere in the world, is counted for penance, is swept up into the volume of charity directed by man toward God. By the mercy of God it may work out this way—undirected suffering finding its way by the magnetic power of Christ’s Passion to its appropriate destination in love—but if so, it will be because God chooses to substitute one thing for another. From our point of view, the safer course is to rely upon direct application: we relate our sufferings to Christ’s; he sanctifies our sufferings with his. No magic, just the normal operation of grace. Too often we Catholics tend to treat grace as though it were a trick. A faulty understanding of the doctrine which teaches that certain sacraments confer grace ex opere operato can lead to a confidence which borders on superstition.
The sacraments of the Church are one thing, the sufferings of human beings are another. Since there is nothing to show that our pains sanctify us ex opere operato (by the very fact that the pain is there), it is for us to make sure ex opere operantis (by the intention and disposition of the person concerned) that what is given us by God is given back to him through Christ.
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The Mystery of Suffering
From what has been said so far, it might be thought that suffering always presented itself as a straightforward cross and that all one had to do to get on was carry it. But the worst sufferings are not always like that. One sees them as sufferings certainly, or they would not be sufferings at all, but very often one does not see them as fitting into the designs of God. Either because of the form they take or because of the way we take them, our trials can be so misunderstood as hardly to qualify as reflections of Christ’s cross. We need the light of prayer to see our way in cross-bearing.
Prayer enables us to transcend not only the natural reluctance that all of us have when it comes to putting up with difficulties but also the very good reasons that suggest themselves as to why this particular cross was not really meant for us by God. We feel intellectually convinced that our present suffering is bringing the worst out of us and not the best, that if it were not for these frustrating circumstances we would be doing so much more for God, that the spiritual good of others is suffering on account of our existing state, that if things go on as they are we may well lose our faith or our reason. How can this be the suffering, which, according to the books, is supposed to be so sanctifying?
The Passion is described as the mystery of Christ’s suffering. It was a mystery at the time because people could not reconcile it with what they had expected. In the sense that we can never fully understand the idea of God suffering, the Passion is still a mystery. Now if our sufferings are somehow or other to fit into the Passion of Christ—and this is no fiction because this is where they belong—there will surely be an element of mystery about them. They will make demands upon our faith.
If we think of suffering as making demands upon our heroism, our powers of endurance, our physical and psychological make-up, we think of it incompletely. The demands are usually more subtle. The holier the soul is, the more subtle the demand is likely to be. Thus you get St. John of the Cross with his Dark Night of the Soul setting out to instruct rare and favoured spirits about demands, which are now very subtle indeed. But long before we need bother to study the interior ways in which St. John of the Cross wrote, we have to get to the idea that pain, if it is going to be purifying, is going to be puzzling.
It has been suggested that our Lord’s contemporaries, even some of his closest friends, missed the Passion because it was not what they had expected. This is precisely the case with us. We have a preconceived notion as to what the cross is like, and when it comes we cannot reconcile the reality with the image. If there was darkness at Christ’s crucifixion, we should not expect broad daylight at our own. Our darkness may be as nothing compared with that endured by the saints—just as theirs is nothing when compared with that endured by Christ when he cried from the cross “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Mt 27:46 NASB)—but the chances are we shall be floundering about and unable to see our way through to the other side. Darkness cannot be fought: hitting out at darkness gets you no result. Nor can darkness be argued into light: you cannot think your way toward God in suffering. The only thing that helps is prayer.
If people prayed more when in difficulties, and thought less about the difficulties themselves, they would be tapping the true sources of wisdom and light. Obviously what is needed is grace: suffering cannot be met without grace. There is always enough grace for the handling of every suffering, but what we want is more. We can always do with more grace. Thinking about grace gets us little further than thinking about the difficulties and sufferings that the grace is required to deal with. Praying, on the other hand, brings the appropriate remedy into play. The man who does not pray is trying to put the fire out by writing letters to the insurance company.
In bearing the cross, a knowledge of the theory takes you some of the way (that is why this book opened with an outline of the Christian principle). A readiness to look away from your sufferings and to try helping others in theirs takes you much further. Prayer, because it shows you the connection between the theory of suffering and suffering itself (other people’s as much as your own), takes you further still. Indeed if it is perfecting charity in you, prayer takes you all the way.
But even given the serious pursuit of love in prayer, the mystery of pain is never fully resolved. Man must not expect to get more than a hint of God’s secret purposes. The inkling God gives is quite enough to get on with, and it is a mistake to question. Some are forever looking for a reason for such manifestly unprofitable reverses coming their way. Why now—when it could quite well have happened two years ago when I was not so committed? Why must I be the victim of human injustice? I could understand it if the trial came from God. How can I be expected to lie down under this—when I see innocent people and even children suffering as the result of it? Oh yes, I can put up with physical and financial troubles—but what happens when there are moral and spiritual issues involved?
The truth is that in this matter of religion, and more especially in this matter of the perfect service of God which is here envisaged, the really important things come to us disguised. The more important, the more disguised. Obvious examples would be the ways in which our Lord comes to us disguised as an ordinary baby, as a prisoner hanging on a cross, as a piece of bread. So it is hardly to be expected that the cross, which is such an essential part of religion and of perfect service, should proclaim its nature with a neatly printed label. If, as Isaiah says in his forty-fifth chapter, our God is a “hidden God, the God of Israel, the Saviour” (Is 45:15), then we must allow for hiddenness in his dealings with man. The quality of hiddenness is certainly present in the matter of suffering.
The “hid divinity”—to quote the term coined by an early writer in the Church, Dionysius the Areopagite—has already been noted in connection with the Nativity. Go on to the next scene as recorded in the gospels: the massacre of the innocents. Put yourself in the place of those children’s parents. Here were mothers and fathers suffering tortures because a godless tyrant had deprived them of their infants. What had the babies done to deserve death? What had they themselves done to deserve this suffering? The men and women of Bethlehem could not see into the inwardness of the agony they suffered. Only in the next life could it have been revealed to them what this suffering was all about, and how their pain had covered up for the safety of Christ. Those dead Bethlehem babies had actually rescued God. Perhaps not until after we are dead shall we understand why we have suffered and what our suffering has effected. Until then we have simply to go on suffering in faith, not questioning the reason nor the wisdom nor the value of it. The suffering a
chieves while the mystery remains.
There was every reason, as far as that goes, why Simon of Cyrene should have resented the part he was forced to play in Christ’s Passion. If he had come to Jerusalem to pray, could he not have argued that this act of ministering to a complete stranger meant an interruption of the direct service of God? Or again reason would have suggested to the good thief that the man suffering at his side was probably just as guilty as he was; and that even if he was not, there was nothing at this late stage to be done about it.
So if the divinity is hidden, and has to be looked for in faith, the means whereby divine wisdom purifies mankind and draws souls along the way is also likely to be hidden. Sacrifice, apparent destruction, renewal: an invariable law in the service of God. Man must let himself be led by God, even when there seems to be neither sense nor sympathy in the lead given. Man’s range of vision is so limited as to give him a false view of the course being taken. “Oh, the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are His judgments and unfathomable His ways!” writes the Apostle Paul (Rom 11:33, NASB). Echoing his words, we must let it go at that.
Indeed, comparing the modern mind with that of the ancients, we see how much more ready people were in Old Testament times to take for granted the mysteries of life and death, of suffering and joy. When individuals began demanding an explanation for everything, they were firmly told to keep their mouths shut. See how the holy man Job—who himself had as good an excuse as anyone, it might be thought, for doubting the love and wisdom of divine providence—argues with his comfortless comforters. He tells them that if there are things which we do not understand about nature, there must be a lot more things which we do not understand about God. Allowing creation to work according to laws which appear unwarrantable to us, we should extend the same allowance to the Creator. The law of suffering, as the story of Job is witness, may assume the disguise of contradiction to man but it certainly speaks truth to God or he would not impose it.