The Mystery of Suffering Read online

  History has shown how nations have been punished, or have punished themselves, out of existence. As life ceases in the human organism when the component cells are predominantly diseased, so it may be that life will cease in the State where the sum total of evil is greater than the sum total of good. If this can be viewed objectively and with a calm eye, it remains an alarming thought that the State is no better and no worse than the people who go to make it up. There is nothing to guarantee that any one nation will last for ever. Indeed everything in history points the other way. The significant fact to be learned from the story of the human race is that only very rarely is the life of a nation extinguished on the field of war; in nine cases out of ten the seeds of decay are within. War is punishment certainly, but more serious as a punishment are the consequences of internal corruption.

  But even in cases where national disaster bears no relation, directly, to national infidelity—as for example an outbreak of plague in India, a potato famine in Ireland, an earthquake in Yugoslavia—there is still the question of God’s retributive justice to be considered. Perhaps the doctrine of vicarious suffering is being called into play. Perhaps India, Ireland, Yugoslavia are providing bail for bankrupt nations elsewhere on the earth.

  Besides, quite apart from the moral and spiritual insolvency of nations that has somehow to be made good, there is another, and still punitive, facet to national disasters. Whether the form it assumes is a nuclear weapon or the collapse of the stock market, whether springing from a drought or a germ, collective suffering can be taken as a warning. It is a foretaste of what God may do on an even larger scale. Man is always eager to discover signs and portents, but when these are granted to him he misreads their meaning. Hardly a month goes by without a national or international crisis, but one after another these crises are seen only in an immediate, material, temporal setting. They are not seen as warnings sent by God but as situations created by circumstances, statesmen, strikers, financiers.

  The word crisis is taken directly from the Greek and means “judgment.” God allows these “judgments,” these mercifully suspended judgments, to recall man to his sense of responsibility. He did this in Old Testament times, and he has done it ever since. Famines, threats of war, plagues, exile, captivity, dispossessions: these were emergencies which the Chosen People were to recognize as “judgments.” Nearly always they recognized them only too late. In our Lord’s time it was the same thing. Christ reproached his hearers for stopping short in their system of interpretation: they could judge from the fig-tree when spring was approaching, and from the red sky when there would be rain, but in the case of less familiar manifestations they would, if they did not exercise greater faith, find themselves at a loss.

  It might be objected here that in Old Testament times, as in our Lord’s time, revelation spoke out. The prophets told the Jews what to expect. Our Lord himself pointed to the signs that, in both the immediate and remote future, were to be looked out for. If authentic voices spoke today, reminding us of God’s judgments which lie hidden in the ramifications of social and racial injustice, in the implications of nuclear experiment, in the effects which certain drugs are having upon the mind and body of man—in all those fields where the unauthentic voice is only too readily raised—would not modern man be less at sea? We have the voice of the Church, which is authenticity itself. It is our fault if we do not read the encyclicals. We have the voice of our Lady, telling us at Lourdes about penance and at Fatima about communism. And now we have the Second Vatican Council. The world of today does not lack the voice of truth to listen to. It lacks, as did its counterpart in the Old Testament and in our Lord’s time, the patience to ponder what is said. It also lacks the faith to believe and the generosity to apply.

  God goes on warning, appealing, pointing to the hints contained in material circumstances, and man goes on looking in the opposite direction. Confronting the same old situations, thinly disguised, man comes up with every solution but the right one. Now it is a treaty, now a discovery; now it is a redistribution of population, now a stockpiling of arms, of a serum, of blood, of money. Seldom in history has a guilty nation turned to God in penance, accepting its sufferings as a punishment for sin. When he wept over Jerusalem, our Lord was weeping over all civilizations and all peoples. Nations kill the prophets and stone those who are sent to them. Christ is ready to gather the populations of the world as a hen gathers her chickens . . . “and you were unwilling” (Mt 23:37 NASB).

  Just as it is not by some legalistic fiction that all men are implicated in the fall of one man, Adam, so it is not a piece of oratorical make-believe that makes individuals share in the guilt of their age. What individual soul is there who can boast that he stands above contemporary thinking, contemporary codes of conduct? Our age is in a sense our Adam. If the stain and guilt of actual sin are transmittable—and cry out for corporate penance—if the human race is in any real sense a family, then the members share not only the love but the blame. They share not only the rewards but the punishments.

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  So What Do We Do Now?

  We have seen how God allows the sinfulness of nations to take its course and result in punishments that they bring upon themselves. Nation would not fight against nation if God’s laws were observed, but since envy is a vice nations are unwilling to forego, there is the corresponding price that has to be paid. In order to control this, or any other passion, man must make use of grace. When man rejects the one influence which would keep him in peace and happiness, God for his part does not pledge himself to step in and avert the consequences of man’s choice. God may be ready to work miracles in the cause of peace when asked to do so, but if man is so bent on destruction or reprisal that miracles are not wanted or asked for then the movement of history is allowed to follow its ordinary course.

  If all the world accepted God, and lived according to the Sermon on the Mount, the whole scene would be different: there would be no envy, and people would be jolly and far nicer than they are. Conversely if nobody in the world accepted God, and if everyone lived in flat contradiction of the Sermon on the Mount, there would be hell on earth. Hell is loss of God, is hatred. Our world crises have not brought us to this yet, thank God, but our suspicion, disorder, spirit of revolt, indifference to religion, and cynicism with regard to morals are not good omens.

  What people have to learn is that life cannot be lived without God. Whether for an individual or a race, this must hold true. God alone can bring order where there is chaos, peace where there is conflict, love where there is hate, happiness where there is misery. Man simply cannot get along on his own, scraping what happiness he can from the dry earth. Even in misery there has to be some idea of God or there will be despair. Misery without God is hell. But pleasure, too, without God is hell. Life has no meaning, no direction, no object when man tries to live it independently of God.

  Which brings us to the title of this chapter. The prodigal son has to be persuaded that life at home with the father is better than satisfying the appetites away from him. The world can come to be convinced of this only when there are enough people in it who believe the doctrine and show it. Though unhappiness and strife are inherent in human experience, there is no reason why they should be given a free hand. There is every reason, on the contrary, to assume that these evils can be curbed. In a civilization that is going downhill, the people who make it up will be found to use its discoveries against one another. Whether directly by mutual destruction, or indirectly by competition and cheating, the benefits turn to harm: the good changes into evil.

  If this can happen by the malice of man, the reverse can happen by the goodwill of man. But it has to be each man—you and I. We can fail almost as much by not contributing to the good as by contributing to the evil. This is perhaps the prevailing weakness among Christians of today, that they allow their effectiveness to be reduced by the apparent hopelessness of the existing situation. To allow this is to fail not only in hope and charity but to leave out of account
the whole question of grace—and therefore to fail in faith as well.

  Let us not be fanciful here or superstitious. We do not, by studying the encyclicals and trying to rule our lives by the Sermon on the Mount, immediately affect unemployment, the question of racial discrimination, moral and physical problems arising from nuclear science. Not immediately. But surely if there is any truth at all in the doctrine of vicarious suffering, vicarious merit, prayer offered to God altruistically for mankind, there is bound to be an effect. Otherwise why bother? But we are meant to bother. And if we bother enough, and if enough people bother, good will inevitably triumph over evil. Evil is only a negation; good exists in its own right. Good has been planted by God; it comes from him. Charity is stronger than uncharity. Uncharity may look stronger, and may seem to spread more rapidly, but in fact charity is supremely strong because it is God himself.

  So by spreading the charity which is in us by grace we spread God. In this activity we are helped more effectively than if we were trying to spread sin. Goodness, says St. Thomas, is of its nature diffusive, communicating. But it asks for our cooperation nevertheless. Goodness, save by miracle, does not work on its own. It did in the Garden of Eden, but it does not now. Leave a good clean glass of good clean water in the good clean open air, and unless you take pains to keep it clean the water will become dirty. Civilization can deteriorate, indeed it possesses a principle of corruption within itself, but there must always be people who come along to substitute charity for evil.

  From this rather general concept to the more particular one of individual expiation. According to Plato, expiation is a good thing in itself: it redresses the balance. The guilt-laden past is brought up to date and reconditioned, rehabilitated. But as Christians we must go further than this. We must believe that Christ’s atonement for sin not only wiped out the old debt but provided against piling up new debts. For the Platonist the equilibrium was reestablished by the satisfaction of justice; for the Christian a new platform is built for the promulgation of charity. It is in this propagation of charity that the individual Christian takes part.

  Like Christ, the Christian is the sower: he holds the seed of God’s grace in his hand and can distribute it all around him. The ground may not be properly prepared; it may not receive the seed evenly; the sower may not live to reap. But something is bound to happen. Sin and suffering will go madly on, and the seed will seem to have been trampled on past all fruitfulness, but at least God will have been served in a way that he would not have been served if the sower had simply shrugged his shoulders, said it was hopeless, and left the seed to rot in a shed. This is the whole burden of the parable of the talents. All the human agent has to do is to supply the token offering and the goodwill: God does the rest. God gave the increase (see 1 Cor 3:6).

  The weight of evil in the world seems overwhelming. We feel it everywhere and our effort to resist is smothered. But God does not see things in this way. God must still see the world as good or he would not allow it to continue its existence. He prefers, so St. Augustine tells us, to draw good out of evil rather than not to permit any evil at all.

  Now this is a thing we must get right if we would view suffering, particularly vicarious suffering, in proper perspective. God became man, not only to atone for sin but also to get man to see life as God sees it. Christ taught us the life of faith, and this is nothing else than the substitution of the supernatural viewpoint for the natural. We are to judge spiritually, according to God’s point of view, and not materially, according to fallen man’s point of view. So in spite of evidence to the contrary—evidence which shows up man as avaricious, lustful, ruthless, revengeful, and the rest—the human race gives glory to God by its very existence alone, and gives even more glory by deliberately serving him in the manner chosen by his Son.

  In the measure, then, that we come to re-live the life of Christ, we come to see more deeply into the mystery of his Passion. In the measure that we come to see into his Passion, we come to appreciate the implications of charity. In the measure that we rule our lives by charity, we come to long for the salvation of mankind. Mankind not thought of anymore as a vague mass of anonymous humanity, but as this soul, and the next one, and the next. True, we may be spiritually unequal to the role of victim, but most of us ought to be able to manage vicarious suffering of some sort—even if it amounts to no more than offering for the salvation of mankind some of the sufferings that we cannot anyway get out of.

  Yes, of course, Christ expiated “once for all”; his atonement was adequate, perfectly satisfying for the sins of man and perfectly pleasing to the Father. But even when the slate is wiped clean there is a certain solidarity about us who dwell in Christ which challenges to sacrifice. God in his wisdom has made us members not only of his Son’s body but of a particular nation. Not only do we belong to our Lord’s life but we belong too to a particular period in history, to a particular generation. Not perhaps strictly but in a sense we are severally and collectively answerable for the group and for the age. We may not be responsible for the sins of others—or at least not for many—but we surely are contributors to their guilt.

  And anyway there is no such thing as mass guilt, as we discover in the years that follow every large-scale war, but only a lot of individual guilts strung together. If this is so, it is for those guilty ones who see alike their shame and their opportunity to help the others on the string. It does not always work—witness the failure of the martyrs in Tudor times to win England back to the faith, the failure of the forty legionaries of Sebaste to Christianize the Roman Empire, the failure of the crusades—but who except God is to tell whether it is working or not. At the level where grace is communicated, at the spiritual level known only in faith, suffering endured for others is bound to have its effect. Like prayers offered for others, which bring grace to the souls of those for whom they are offered even if the grace never penetrates but is rejected, sufferings accepted on behalf of others can never be wasted. In suffering there is waste only where there is nothing to suffer for—where the sufferer resents his trials and has no intention of offering them either as punishment for his own sins or anyone else’s. Herein lies the tragedy of so much that is endured in the world: it is pain without destination.

  If experience of attending the sick at Lourdes is anything to go by, the idea of vicarious suffering is strongly implanted by grace in the souls of those who most need to know about it. In a Church that has always called for heroism, this is a sign of health. If they do nothing else with their lives, the sick, the sorrowful, the poor, the lonely, the unsettled, the tempted—in other words the unfortunate and unhappy generally—they have at least this to give to the world: their likeness to Christ, their example.

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  Resignation

  The approach to suffering rises in an ascending scale of love: resignation to the will of God in this existing circumstance, acceptance of whatever God may send, a choice of the cross when it comes. Since these attitudes determine to a large extent the soul’s advance in spirituality, a short chapter will be devoted to each. Though not strictly stages, because in the concrete case they may overlap or merge, they point to conditions of mind that, from the point of view of generosity, the Christian should try to develop.

  First, then, resignation in the experience of a particular trial. Now if as a subject it is man’s first duty to submit himself to the authority of God, the consequences of that submission must be looked upon as a good. Simply because he is a creature and God is his Creator, man bows to the divine decree in the knowledge that such an obedience is good. But there is more to it than this. Man must also know that every time he wills to exercise this obedience, he gives glory to God and furthers his own sanctification. The obedience, moreover, brings him the happiness God intends for him.

  Nor is this surprising when you consider how this obedience is one with the obedience the Son gave to the Father. By voluntarily surrendering himself to this filial obligation, man steps into the perfect frame of se
rvice established by Christ. The relationship between the soul and God is there, the suffering comes along as a sacrifice to be undertaken or rejected, the precedent is provided in the person of Christ. What use will be made of the obedience? We are talking now of sufferings that cannot be avoided: those which demand endurance anyway but which issue a challenge to the spirit of sacrifice.

  A man, for example, is afflicted with cancer. He has to be obedient to the forces of nature whether he likes it or not. Is his attitude one of resentment and struggle, or does he resign himself gracefully to the inevitable? And if the latter—how gracefully? In such circumstances, the sufferer can make Reinhold Niebuhr’s prayer his own: “God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference. Living one day at a time; enjoying one moment at a time; accepting the hardships as the pathway to peace; taking, as he did, this sinful world as it is, not as I would have it; trusting that he will make all things right if I surrender to his will. That I may be reasonably happy in this life, and supremely happy with him for ever in the next. Amen.”

  The whole of that prayer deserves the closest study. The points particularly to be noted in connection with our subject are these: the need for clear-eyed submission to the inescapable, readiness to take the world as it is, trust in the wisdom and power of God to bring order out of confusion. (Some of the other points will be dealt with later.) The disposition supposed here might appear to be somewhat passive. Is this not a negation of the human will? No, because there is all the difference between not willing, which means letting things slide, and willing not to interfere with God’s appointed plan.