The Mystery of Suffering Read online

  Man too has his antecedent and permissive will. Unlike God’s, man’s will is handicapped in any number of ways: it has limited knowledge to draw upon; fallible judgment; experience which is often misinterpreted; desires which are vitiated by passion, and of course nothing like enough love. But at least man has the power antecedently to will the good that God wills, and permissively to will what God permits. There is nothing passive about this. Far from letting things slide, it is working with God to build up. If Christian resignation means taking the line of least resistance, then the martyrs were not so much heroes as fatalists.

  Resignation here implies willingness to forego for the love of God some good, which is very much desired. The fact that you will have to forego it anyway is not so important as the fact that you are resigned to doing without it. Your emotions may rebel and your senses may run a mile; even your reason may have its doubts about the wisdom of the arrangement. But provided your will assents to what God has provided, you are not only acting meritoriously but are making the first step toward heroic sacrifice.

  Nor is there anything inferior about first steps. Steps have to begin somewhere. There is no better place to begin than in the will. What other reason can there be for our Lord’s exposure of his dread in the garden than that we should start with him—before going the rest of the way with him? His emotions and senses were against the ordeal: his will was “resigned.” “If it be possible let this cup pass from me; nevertheless not as I will but as You will” (Mt 26:39 NASB). We have no cause to sniff at resignation. For us to bow to the inevitable may not seem anything very special, but we can remember that Christ allowed to be inevitable the whole train of sufferings which, by exercising his divine prerogative, he could so easily have evaded. He who could have escaped made his sufferings inescapable. He whose human instincts shrank from resignation resigned himself to the Father’s will. We do not step down to resignation from some higher heroism; we mount up to it from our native cowardice.

  If the idea of Christian resignation were no more than to render the soul impervious to frustration, disappointment, mood, then there would be reason enough to rank it among the tougher pagan virtues. Resignation in the true sense does not make people impervious, indifferent; it makes them hopeful. It means that they have refused to be defeated by their sufferings, and as a result they come through with a deeper realization of what suffering is designed to do. Suffering has a cleansing effect on the soul, so that the man who has endured, however much against his wishes, emerges bruised, perhaps, but detached. Resignation makes a man free of the preoccupations that harass the man who is forever complaining about his trouble and looking everywhere for a way out. The man who aims at eliminating pain and sadness from his life is doomed to disillusion. Not so the man who aims at meeting these things head on, coming to terms with them, and refusing to be governed by them. The resigned soul rests on the text from Tobias: Because you were acceptable to God, it was necessary that these trials should prove you (Tob 12:6).

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  Willingness

  Generosity moves on from resignation to acceptance. Though resignation under suffering has involved an act of the will, acceptance assumes a more positive co-operation. The suffering is undergone not so much of necessity as in voluntary sacrifice. St. Paul outlines the disposition when he exhorts, “everyone as he has determined in his heart, not with sadness nor of compulsion”, and then he quotes Ecclesiasticus, “for God loves a cheerful giver” (2 Cor 9:7 NASB). St. Paul’s reference to the thirty-fifth chapter of Ecclesiasticus gives us our cue here, since the Old Testament writer has taken as his theme the dispositions that make for fruitful sacrifice before God.

  Our Lord shows us the perfection of willingness when he says, just before the Passion, “for this cause came I unto this hour” (Jn 12:27). All along our Lord knew what awaited him, and so perfect was his acceptance that he never for a moment stepped aside from the course decided upon. He came, not to do his own will but the will of his heavenly Father, and, having come, did not look for relief. His Passion happened to him but was willed by him. The clause “thy will be done” in the Our Father is meaningless unless we intend to reflect something of Christ’s readiness to accept the Father’s will.

  But do we really mean those words in the Our Father? If we do then the whole matter is settled, and we can close this book and get on with life without further self-examination. It would probably be more true to say of most of us that we mean the words in a general way, and that even in the particular case we do not want to stand apart from God’s will, but that it is not our plan to go looking for the trouble that we suspect God’s will must sooner or later involve. Understandable but not generous.

  Such was certainly not our Lady’s attitude when she said, “Be it done to me according to thy word” (Lk 1:38). Mary may have known nothing about the role she was to play as Mother of Sorrows, but there is no doubt that she knew how to open her heart to whatever might come. She accepted; she made no qualifications; there was nothing in fine print insuring her rights. Mary put herself at the disposal of God for better or for worse. She was not interested in consequences—God would take care of them—but was very much interested in dispositions. It was important that she should accept. Once she had taken on the word of God, once she had accepted literally the revelation of God’s will and had bowed to it, the Word was made incarnate in her womb. After that there was nothing more to worry about: God would carry her along and show her what to do and how to suffer. Hers was what might be called active receptivity, constructive acceptance.

  We saw in the last chapter that it was no good trying to change the world, and that anyway it was no good trying to change God. Why, we cannot even change a handful of other people. And it is as much as we can do, heaven knows, to change ourselves. So what do we do instead? We train ourselves to accept. By accepting the world around us, by accepting the unchangeableness of others, by accepting our own hideous limitations, we accept the will of God. This is not great wisdom, mystical insight, philosophical and psychological necessity; it is just plain common sense.

  If you ring for an elevator and it does not come, you ring again. Repeated ringing and waiting tells you that the elevator is not working. This may exasperate but it does not altogether defeat. Provided there are stairs, you can overcome the difficulty of moving from one floor to another. In other words, you accept the elevator for what it is, a fallible machine, and gratefully you adapt yourself to the existing alternative. If you are a cheerful sort of person you tell yourself, as you pound up those stairs, that the exercise is doing you good and that had you come up by elevator you would have missed some good views of the surrounding country which you can see by looking out of the windows while you get your breath.

  Voluntary surrender to God’s will is not only the spiritual problem, it is the sensible thing to do. This is not to reduce the whole thing to the level of expediency; it is to point the way to true peace of mind. Without such a willed cooperation with the providence of God, it is difficult to see how there can be any real serenity. Acceptance looks back and is undisturbed by what it sees because it trusts to the mercy of God; it looks ahead and again is undisturbed because it is ready to make the best of the horrors which await it; it looks at the present and is content to leave it in the hands of God where it belongs. This is not apathy; it is interior tranquility.

  Do not think that you will find here the magic formula which disposes of all your problems and stiffens your morale so that you can now meet all your sufferings. Problems, temptations, trials: these will still come along, and they will be as hard to bear as ever. But submitted to in a spirit of faith they will not carry with them the added worry of seeming to be unreasonable and purposeless. Acceptance does not concern itself with the reasonable. So long as the suffering comes from God, it is bound to be reasonable. That it should seem to be purposeless is part of the trial, and to be accepted along with the rest of it. Who are we, anyway, to judge how God’s purposes are worked o
ut? “I will bless the Lord at all times,” says the psalmist (Ps 34:1): not only on condition that things go well with me and that I understand what is happening. I will bless him when there seems to be no point about anything, and when all I do goes wrong. I will bless him not only with my lips but with my willingness. Lips can manage a song, and this is good, but willingness means sacrifice, and this is better

  Now, by way of winding up this section, we should go back to the prayer quoted on an earlier page. Note particularly the clauses: “Living one day at a time . . . accepting hardships as the path to peace . . . if I surrender to his will I can trust that he will make all things right.” We are such creatures of mood that there is no knowing how we shall feel tomorrow. So we must try to peg down our dispositions today. We may feel miles away from peace, we may have no inkling as to how the present situation can ever come right, but by voluntarily surrendering and by exercising trust, we know that we are not being left alone in our misery and that we can expect eventually to “be supremely happy with him in the next life.”

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  Choice

  Actually to welcome tribulation would seem to be rather beyond the ordinary person’s reach. Even allowing that one may do so without a trace of masochism, is there not something faintly morbid about a spirituality which deliberately chooses the cross? As if the trials we get are not enough, going out of our way to suffer is surely to risk being swallowed up. God cannot want us to be more wretched than we have to be.

  Now we must, before going any further, avoid a possible confusion here. Saving a special call of grace, it is not part of the Christian ideal to go looking for sufferings. There is all the difference between courting disasters which are none of our business and choosing the disasters which are. When a saint feels drawn to kiss a leper, he must be given the credit for acting on an impulse of divine love. Anyway that is his affair, and out of the ordinary. We are not, in these pages, attempting to account for the unusual processes by which God draws certain souls closer to himself. The usual ones are giving us trouble enough. The issue here is simply the corollary following the attitudes we have already considered. From resignation to willingness, from willingness to welcome. We are trying to show that receiving the cross with open arms is a laudable aspiration for any Christian. We are not trying to persuade all Christians to go out into the highways and byways in search of more and heavier crosses.

  In the Old Testament, the idea of meeting adversity with gladness is seen in the thirty-ninth psalm. Here the soul, finding that God has not asked for a burnt offering, comes forward with the sacrifice of self. “Behold I come. In the head of the book it is written of me that I should do thy will. O my God, I have desired it” (Heb 10:7–8). The psalm is messianic, foreshadowing the fuller doctrine of free choice exemplified in Christ. The Father’s will is all, assuming sacrifice, so the Messiah goes forth to take it up and make it his own. He has desired this. It is his whole life.

  In the New Testament, the same idea runs through not only all Christ’s teachings and examples but through the experience of the apostles, in their welcome of martyrdom, and in their writings. From Acts we learn how the apostles, after a scourging, came away from the council in Jerusalem “rejoicing that they were accounted worthy to suffer reproach for the name of Jesus” (Acts 5:41). With St. Paul it is a familiar theme. “I am glad of my sufferings,” he told the Colossians, “as in this mortal frame of mine I help to pay off the debt” (Col 1:24). To the Galatians he wrote: “God forbid that I should glory, save in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ” (Gal 6:14).

  Your objection may be that this is all very well for apostles, but that there is nothing to show that the same standard is proposed to us. It is one thing for an apostle to “glory in tribulations” as he told the Romans that he did, but quite another for us. Turning then from the apostle’s personal experience, which in any case he would never have recounted had he not expected his public to follow him in his bearing under suffering, we can turn to passages addressed in exhortation to all. “In all things let us exhibit ourselves as the ministers of God, in much patience, in tribulation, in necessities, in distresses . . . in sweetness in the Holy Ghost, in love unfeigned . . . as sorrowful yet always rejoicing” (2 Cor 6:4–10). Under the cross is to be found a sweetness that only the choice of cross-bearing can produce; love shows up undisguised, in its clearest colours, when the cross is accepted gratefully; joy is compatible with sorrow where the sorrow is welcomed as an expression of God’s will. The apostle’s doctrine, preached not merely to the elect but to all who aim at serving God, is that we “present ourselves as living sacrifices with Christ” (Rom 12:1)—which does not mean that we allow ourselves to be dragged reluctantly to the altar.

  One of the early Fathers has said that the Christian’s outlook under trial can be given in three words: libenter, freely—the will agreeing despite the emotions; confidenter, trusting to make, with God’s grace, a worthwhile offering of it; suaviter, gently (or, to use St. Paul’s term, sweetly), which rules out the element of bitterness. Again we see a progressive sequence: the soul mounts from one disposition to another, pushing the motive a little bit higher each time.

  Suffering then is to be valued not by its own nature but by the nature that is brought to bear upon it. If we can so dispose our cowardly natures to take suffering as part of our faith, and therefore as part of our love, we are fulfilling the conditions. To see it without relation to the loving providence of God is to see it inside out. When the apostles admitted to our Lord that the question of suffering puzzled them, asking him whether the man born blind was suffering for his parent’s sins or for his own, they were at once directed from the idea of punishment to the idea of God’s providence. “Neither has this man sinned, nor his parents; but that the works of God should be made manifest in him” (Jn 9:3). We do not have to look beyond this. The principle of suffering is not to be found apart from its divine purpose: it comes from God and goes back to God. How we handle it on the way—not avoiding it as the absolute evil but seeing it as “the work of God”—will make or break our characters.

  This is the place where, with apology, a personal note must be introduced. In writing what I believe to be the truth about suffering I have come to feel increasingly embarrassed. It shames me to think that here and there a reader may exist who fancies that I can practice what I preach. In the matter of facing trials, we are all much alike, and if the reader will look into his own heart he will see what is in mine. If there is a drawback to writing books on prayer and pain, it is that an image of the author is created that is entirely false. Let me say openly and finally that I find prayer the most tedious of duties and that I loathe suffering. What I am trying to do in these books is to present the principle. My purpose is to praise God and help souls, and if I create a mistaken impression along the line I must ask the reader to forget about the man at the typewriter and instead to search the subject matter for something which may bring him closer to God.

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  The Cross: Symbol and Reality

  Without the symbol of the cross, with its joint implication of suffering and parting of the ways, the composition of the Christian life would be incomplete. It is a true symbol in that the things symbolized are more important than the sign, and in that the sign helps them to be better understood. Understanding of the cross leads on to a deeper understanding of the Crucified. We do not worship the wood of the cross as wood; we worship because of what happened on it. What Constantine understood by the words “In this sign you shall conquer” was something quite beyond their immediate application. The words had a universal application, comprising a whole philosophy as well as expressing a prophecy which will go on finding verification until the end of the world. Only when the final climax comes, with the triumph of good over evil, will the words be perfectly fulfilled.

  Or take the text incorporated into the emblem of the Carthusian Order: Stat crux dum volvitur orbis, the cross remains fixed while the world revolves. The ideas sugg
ested are endless: the Crucifixion as the only source of security; suffering as the one constant in an ever-changing world; Christ’s truth as an absolute which stands out uncompromising where everything else goes round and round in circles. You could go on looking for new meanings, but always you would find yourself coming back to the same theme. The Redemption is the focus-point of human history. Resurrection depends on atonement, atonement involves the cross.

  Where other symbols are seen to have a literary or topical or local significance, the symbol of the cross has a meaning that is directly personal to every Christian of every race or place or time. Accordingly to think of “the sign of the cross” merely as a ritual gesture would be to restrict its function. To think of it merely as a figurative device—able to hold its own for instance against the hammer and sickle—would be to miss the whole point. The whole point is that Christ’s cross is here, in the world, and that we are supposed to be sharing it with him.

  It is a commonplace to observe that Christ is being crucified all round us in the contemporary world, that wherever there is sin or cruelty or misery we see what St. Paul meant when he said “Jesus Christ yesterday, today, and the same for ever” (Heb 13:8). But like so many commonplace observations, it very often fails to register. The cross, which from its shape should be the easiest thing in the world to see, is also the easiest thing to miss. Particularly in our own lives we can miss it. If we miss it in our own lives, stopping short at mere sorrow without going on to the Man of Sorrows, we are not likely to see it in the lives of others.