The Mystery of Suffering Read online

  Our solution lies, as always, in trying to get nearer to Christ. The text, “I live, not I, but Christ lives in me” (Gal 2:20) becomes “I suffer, now not I, but Christ suffers in me . . . I fall under the weight of the cross, now not I, but Christ fall with me and for me and because of my falls.” We have to learn that the enemy of true cross-bearing is self-satisfaction. On the evidence of the gospel itself nothing succeeds like failure, and if we are to be sanctified in Christ we have to share in the failures of Christ.

  General experience seems to show that after the age of about forty the normal state of men and women is failure. This should be acknowledged without useless regret. “I have learned in whatever state I am to be content.” In the beginning, when we first set out to serve God, there was a certain freshness about the whole thing. It was an adventure. We were confident of being able to achieve. Prayer, we imagined, was simply a matter of concentrating a little bit more each day, which would mean becoming a little bit more recollected each day: with the grace of God we ought to be able to manage this all right. The cross? We had a great devotion to the cross. Our share in it, we imagined, was simply a matter of suffering a little bit more each day, which would lead to a purer and purer intention so that in the end we would be able to say, “with Christ I am nailed to the cross”: given the grace of God we ought to be able to manage this all right.

  But somehow it does not work out like that. The problem of suffering (as of prayer) is more complex, more subtle. We find that suffering, which seems to occupy a larger part of life than we had expected, follows the pattern of life itself: it spells failure. Aspirations have come to nothing; ideals have worn thin and have to be supported by sheer determination and acts of faith; hope is no longer the jolly thing of looking forward in the way that we look forward to Christmas. If this gradual change from cheerful assurance to manifest deficiency and even bankruptcy is not to make for indifference and unwillingness, it has to be seen in an unequivocally supernatural context. We must find Christ or we rot. The problem of human suffering is not what people suffer, but what they can miss when they suffer. If we miss Christ, we suffer more than ever. And if we find Christ, we learn the meaning of his falls.

  4

  Loneliness in Suffering

  If you blew a kiss from the Statue of Liberty to Admiral Nelson on his column in Trafalgar Square, you would not expect a response. If you threw a leaf over the Niagara Falls, you would not listen for the splash. There are too many things in the way. In human relations there are also, if we are looking for perfect correspondence, too many things in the way.

  Each separate soul is a separate soul, and, though all belong to the family of the human race, mutual comprehension is not possible. Even though souls are brought together in Christ, forming one body with him and with one another, they still remain individual cells. Christ is the true vine, and we, the branches, derive our corporate and individual lives from the original stem. Branch is related to branch, but one branch can never get under the bark of another and know exactly what is going on there. Even when two branches are grafted together becoming one, as in matrimony, there is still the union of two: there is not such an identification as exists, for example, in the relationship between the Persons of the Blessed Trinity.

  However close we get, then, to other people, we are not all-inclusive. Allowing for grace and charity and everything else, we are indeed worlds apart. Fortunately we do not notice this gulf most of the time, and if we are reasonably careful we can cover over the defect by exercising the gifts of sympathy and understanding, but there are times when we do notice it and it is of these that this chapter proposes to treat.

  Experience shows that the deeper the human emotion, the less easy it is to communicate. Precisely because it lies so deep. Thus we can communicate enjoyment but cannot communicate rapture. We can communicate fear but not desolation. We can talk about our deepest feelings, and this, so long as we do so without being boring, will elicit an appropriate response. An understanding listener will show pity or appreciation, which will be genuine enough. But even if in his own experience he has shared the same kind of emotion, the betting is he will not be able to convey this. He will not be able to share it now—with me.

  The fact that another human being has to stop short at a particular point of perception makes us feel cut off from an essential humanity. Though we see how impossible it is, from our side, to get beyond that point, we still go on trying to do so. The more we want to get ourselves across, the more hopeless we know it to be. We question the value of human nature—if it lets us down in the one department where it might come to the rescue. Why should an exchange be so much easier where it is a matter of trivialities? In trivial things, we do not do so badly. Why at the one level where unhampered correspondence would help must there be this barrier? At the level of happiness we do not ask for congratulation; we want co-happiness. At the level of unhappiness, which is a serious business and can involve things like despair, loss of faith, and hatred where once was love, we do not want to be patted on the back and told that we all have to go through it and that everyone has his ups and downs. What we want is Durchleiden—common experience actually going on. And since this is the one thing we cannot get from others in this life, we have to get it in faith—borrowing it from the next life.

  Unless we face the limitations attaching to our human state, recognizing without pessimism the inevitability of loneliness, life becomes like a game of tennis in a bad dream—where the deciding strokes of the match get put off because each time the ball sails higher and higher out of reach, and we end up trying to push ourselves through one of the squares of the net. Pessimism and cynicism destroy the chances of sanctity latent in suffering. Realism is not the restriction of ideals; it is the discarding of a too facile application of ideals.

  In all this we must take care not to belittle the work of compassion. The word itself means co-suffering, and the implication is perfectly valid as far as it goes. But it cannot be pressed to go all the way. Compassion is one of the noblest of virtues and has to be developed to its fullest if we are to come anywhere near the ideal of charity. Certainly it softens the edge of another’s loneliness. It is the will to suffer with; it is not interpenetration.

  Mary, Mother of Divine Compassion, entered as far as it was possible for her to enter into the mind of Christ at his Passion. This was entirely selfless, entirely loving: as perfect a compassion as could be found on earth. But there are two things to remember about this. First, Mary was not held back by any of the obstacles that can come between man and man as the result of original sin. Second, although her compassion was that of a mother whose son is God as well as man, she was not divine. She had only one nature; our Lord had two. It would be heretical to suppose that her compassion extended beyond her capability as a human being. This would attribute a divinity to Mary which the Church has been careful to deny her. Privileged and sanctified beyond all other women but not divine—not a goddess in her own right.

  Mary, then, shared Christ’s sufferings in her degree. But her degree was not our Lord’s degree. Her son was the Son of God, God himself. If before the Passion there was much that our Lady had to learn in the ordinary way about our Lord, much that did not come to her by direct personal revelation, there must have remained an element in the suffering of the Divine Person that still eluded her experience as a human being. With her will she shared everything, in her nature she suffered all that human nature can suffer. It was “compassion” as far as we can understand it, and much farther than we shall ever be able to follow it. All it lacked was the spark of divinity to match the divinity of Christ.

  Apply all of this to our subject of loneliness in suffering. Mary, suffering with Christ, was accordingly lonely. And correspondingly Christ, seeing his mother suffer on his account, endured in addition to all his other sorrows the loneliness of a son prevented from comforting his mother. Theologians and spiritual writers alike are prepared to say that the loneliness of Christ during
his Passion and death outweighed his physical agonies. They instance as illustration of this the cry from the cross, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Mk 15:34 NASB). Desolation. Separation even from the awareness of his Father’s presence. Even when it has been pointed out that the words were from the thirtieth psalm, and were therefore not the spontaneous utterance of one in his death agony, the fact remains that our Lord would not have quoted them if they did not reflect what he was feeling. Our Lord could not have been exaggerating. It would have been misleading beyond all reason, casting doubt on everything that he had said about himself hitherto, if now at the end he did not mean to be taken at his word. And what did his word, the inspired word of the messianic psalm which he had now made his own, imply? It was the cry of loneliness.

  We need to consider loneliness at this exalted level if we are to draw advantage from our own very modest experience of it. Always our Lord is the example, and it is against his acceptance of trial that we should measure our own. Acceptance and trial: these are here the ideas to follow up. It is specifically for the lonely soul that acceptance is so difficult. The lonely soul, like any other, can tell God in prayer that this trial, like any other, is surrendered to in the will. But it is one thing to make the act of the will, which is the first and most important step, and another so to extend and perfect that act as to eliminate what is contrary to it. True acceptance is not saying “All right,” and leaving it at that.

  True acceptance rules out indulgence of sorrow. There is nothing wrong with sorrow, but it is wrong to feel sorry for oneself. So there is nothing wrong with loneliness, but it might be seriously wrong to encourage it. If even virtues can be spoiled by overindulging them (generosity can become extravagance, penance can become ostentation, love can become sentimental and worse), trials can be devalued in the same way. On an earlier page we have noted an inevitable admixture of self in the undergoing of pain: hair-trigger reactions which cannot altogether be guarded against. We are not talking now of instinctive reflexes but of moods more or less settled. While feeling lonely, for instance, you can make yourself feel more lonely by going off on your own and rejecting whatever relief is offered. But this is not to meet your trial head-on as you are meant to. Once enjoyed for its own sake, loneliness becomes a luxury.

  It is sad to think of souls becoming enervated by the very graces which God intended for their purification. God arranges the circumstances best calculated to promote our perfection, and by turning them inside out we make them obstacles to our perfection. God gives us a particular temperament that carries with it special opportunities of sanctification, and by selfishly exploiting this temperament we go in the opposite direction. God gives you a chance to be alone for a time. This may constitute a great trial for you. What are you going to do about it? Shall you use your solitude as a means of drawing closer to God in prayer? Do you mean to develop whatever interests and talents are yours? Are you prepared to look upon your isolation as a cross and not simply as a nuisance? Do you try to smother the feeling that the whole thing is a waste? Or, on the other hand, does your aloneness really become a waste? Do you let yourself stagnate? Do you pity yourself and hope that others are pitying you too? Do you rebel against the causes that have led up to this? Do you play the martyr, going deeper and deeper into the shades and hollows of your mood? Do you say “since I have been saddled with this against my will, I am not going to try . . . I give up . . . and whatever the consequences are, they are not my responsibility?” If the first loneliness was full of promise, the second is full of bitterness.

  Suffering, whether that of loneliness or of any other sort, is always full of promise. It is a grace. But there are obligations attaching to graces, and if these are not met, the promise turns sour. Under the cross of loneliness, whether occasioned by the setting provided or by the psychological make-up of the sufferer, a soul would be wise to look outward and not turn in upon the trial. Whatever the pull toward introspection, and never is the pull so strong as when one is lonely, there has to be a planned determination to penetrate with faith and hope the enveloping fog. Otherwise the trial is doing the soul no good and may easily be doing harm. All pain is isolating—notice how a man with a raging headache wants to be alone whereas a man who has just had a letter of good news wants to read it to everybody—and the pain of loneliness is all the more so. The happy man tends to be gregarious, the unhappy man solitary. God allows for this, supplying all the graces needed to bring out the respective perfection of each. People, on the other hand, do not allow for it enough. They muddle along, now in the society of others and now on their own, forgetting that there is a providential plan about their lives.

  A diseased animal crawls away and hides itself from its own kind; a healthy animal does not normally care to be alone. We must not allow a diseased loneliness to turn us into animals—if only because there is no earthly reason why loneliness should ever become diseased. Whatever the danger, the infection can be prevented. The Passion is the antipyretic. At one moment during the agony in the garden, our Lord would have liked the Passion changed to something else. Instead he went on with it—by himself and knowing he would get little help from anyone.

  For the follower of Christ, the best way is frankly to admit to unheroism, and then ask to be led by grace to a more heroic attitude of mind. God will not allow our suffering to be more than we can bear. God will not scoop out a hollow inside us, the ache of which must drive us to despair. In what may seem to us an emptiness, void of virtue and companionship and the hope of attaining to happiness, God himself will come and dwell.

  I will ask the Father, and he shall give you the Paraclete, that he may abide with you for ever . . . he shall abide with you and shall be in you . . . I will not leave you orphans, I will come to you . . . you have heard that I said to you: I go away and I come unto you . . . and now I have told you before it comes to pass, that when it shall come to pass, you may believe . . . it is expedient for you that I go; for if I go not, the Paraclete will not come to you; but if I go, I will send him to you . . . you now indeed have sorrow, but I will see you again and your heart shall rejoice and your joy no man shall take from you . . . these things I have spoken to you that in me you may have peace. (Jn 14:16–18, 28–29; 16:7, 22, 33)

  What clearer statement could there be than this in answer to our cry of loneliness? He tells the whole secret of his plan “before it comes to pass,” yet when it does come to pass, how many of us believe?

  5

  The Problem of Evil

  We have seen how God, by arranging the contingencies that go to make up human life, supplies the individual soul with the suffering appropriate to sanctification. If divine Providence means anything at all, there can be nothing haphazard about the allocation of human sufferings. If not a bird falls to the ground that God does not know all about, not a human being suffers an affliction with which God is unconcerned. Even those afflictions we bring down upon ourselves by our stupidity, obstinacy, failure to respond to his light, are part of his plan and can be used to his greater glory.

  It is a mistake to look upon every unpleasant thing that happens to us as a deserved and God-sent punishment; far better to look upon it as a God-sent opportunity, whether deserved or not. What may well be consequences of sin can be pressed into the service of sanctity. For instance, a man may ruin his health by a life of dissipation, and then spend his enforced retirement in the study of the spiritual life. A man may be injured while robbing a bank and then go on a pilgrimage to Lourdes to be healed of his wounds. Indeed one of the signs of advancement in the spiritual life is the readiness to turn to good account things which of themselves are far from good. Much that surrounds us is evil, but to the clean of heart it does not appear so.

  People who allow the evil which is in the world to dominate their horizon either become fascinated by it and plunge in or are disgusted by it and made miserable. The horizon does not have to be crowded with evils, and though it would be absurd to pretend that sin was reall
y not very widespread after all, it would be equally absurd to see it everywhere and to conclude that there was no longer any good. Sin, temptation, suffering, disaster, cruelty, war: these things hit the headlines because they possess greater sensation-content than generosity, justice, order, kindness, truth, peace. It is for the Christian to look squarely at the first list in a spirit of faith and penitence, and confidently at the second in the knowledge that he can make his own conribution to the sum of good represented there.

  This brings us to that old enigma, the problem of evil. Well-worn as the discussion is, its points should be briefly surveyed in a book which has to do with human suffering and the love of God. Not that a conclusion satisfactory to the unbeliever is ever reached, but to the believer the argument is apt as belonging to his stock of apologetics. Not necessary to the Catholic’s grasp of suffering, but useful when cornered by friends who have no wish either to grasp suffering or to believe in a God who may want them to. A parallel case is the question of miracles: to the man without faith no explanation is convincing; to the man who has faith none is needed.

  The objection to be met is presented in some such form as this: If God exists, and is all that we assume him to be, how can he allow so much suffering in the world? Supposing that God loves us, he must want us to be happy. Supposing that God is all-powerful, he must be able to do what he wants. But in fact people are not happy. So either God does not exist, or he is not all that you assume him to be.

  At first sight, the reasoning looks pretty good. It is when you come to examine the terms that the logic falls apart. For one thing, the existence of God is unaffected by the difficulties that arise from the exercise of his providence. There are two things at issue here: God’s existence and man’s pain in relation to God’s supposed goodness and power. Once admited that God is, you do not have to square human suffering with the kind of God you hope he is. It is not a question of squaring, making concessions out of reverence or obedience, but of getting your concepts right about his nature and our necessity.