The Mystery of Suffering Read online

  Far from being a dead symbol, the cross poses live issues—goes on asking live questions that demand an answer. Leaving aside the rest of the world for a moment, I have to ask myself when I see the symbol: “What has this to do with me? How am I conforming to it? Do I know what it is all about? Have I ever related it to life, my life?” I can take Pilate’s words, which he addressed to the crowd, “What shall I do then with Jesus that is called Christ?” (Mt 27:22) and refer them to Christ crucified. If St. Paul preached Christ crucified, I as a follower of Christ must find out what he meant. For the routine Christian there is always the danger of relegating the cross to a place on the wall.

  Yet we have enough material in our lives, heaven knows, to enable us to relate ourselves in a practical way to Christ crucified. But notice that St. Paul preaches Christ crucified, not Christ dramatized. Our emotions being what they are, we mistake Christ crucified for Christ pathetic, Christ sad, Christ crushed. In order to correct this, and to learn of Christ as a man of spirit and even of towering angers, we may have to reread the gospels. We shall never understand either Christianity or Christ unless we understand something of the spirit in which the cross was borne.

  “We feel,” said one of the highest paid television script writers in the world, “that life contains a certain amount of pain.” When we consider the heartbreak of partings, the helplessness of witnessing the corruption of the young, the gnawing ache of homesickness and loneliness, the stab of sudden loss, the nervous apprehension of global disaster—this must be a gross understatement.

  But perhaps an overstatement would miss the point even more. This is where the existentialists, anyway those of the Sartre school, part company from us: they assume that life is so awful that there is nothing very much to be done about it. We hold that because life is occasionally just awful there is a great deal to be done about it. The evils of the world must be fought at every point. The cross symbolizes struggle just as much as it symbolizes suffering. Although the consequences of sin are evident on every side, to believe that they cannot be transformed by grace and human effort is to deny one of the primary implications of the cross. Until the end of the world, the effects of man’s malice will remain, but this is no reason why they should be tolerated.

  Just as without the figure of the cross we get our Christianity out of perspective, so also do we see falsely without the image of constant battle. The epistles are full of the warfare that is going on between the spirit and the flesh, between grace and the world. Even outwardly there has to be resistance, militancy, or the Church would sink back into a determinism that would result in apathy. “Defend us in the day of battle,” we pray to St. Michael. But every day is a day of battle. If we are not fully functioning Christians, the reason may be that there is not enough battle in our lives. We belong to the Church militant, not to the Church quiescent.

  But because our fighting is not against flesh and blood but against the powers of darkness we choose our weapons carefully. Violence will not help us, but the sword of the spirit will. We oppose force with love, and because love neither kills nor compels we never know for certain that we have won. So the struggle goes on—in faith and hope. So long as we have got love on our side, we have the absolute assurance of God that we can never be beaten.

  Allowing that love, and all that springs from love, must be the appropriate activity with which the Christian opposes the enemy in the world, how is it that we set so much store by material armament? If we are honest with ourselves, we probably have to admit that as each threat to our security comes along we start casting about for a material means of defense. Are we counting on love to get beyond iron curtains and cold wars? Of course we are not; we are counting on material weapons or the fear of them; we are counting on material policies.

  It is the same, though not so obviously, in our own lives. Our struggle is with economic necessity, with a domestic pressure, with a social injustice, with a racial prejudice. Are we drawing upon love to solve these difficulties? Are we leaving them to be solved by organizations that have the material means for dealing with them? Are we letting them take their course and doing nothing? Whatever we are doing, it is doubtful whether we even believe that love will be any use in this or that situation, let alone whether we are prepared to bring it into play.

  Love means not listening to such slick evasions as “bombs are the only language they understand . . . in business you have to play the other man’s game or you are reduced to poverty . . . birth-control may go against the Christian ethic, but here it is a question of logic and physical health . . . it is better for each party to take the offer of happiness than that they should stay together and make each other, and the children, miserable.” Love, in short, means living with the cross.

  People who readily admit in principle the doctrine of the cross are often prevented, because of the restrictions which they make, from benefiting by it. So far and no farther; the line must be drawn somewhere; as human beings we have our rights; God cannot mean us to be unhappy indefinitely. Thus it is that their crosses, designed by God for their sanctification, are missed. Good religious souls will tell you, and with some truth, that they are so blinded in their suffering as to be incapable of serving God in true perfection. But there is a fallacy here because they are blinded not by their suffering, which God has sent for their enlightenment, but by the conditions which they have attached to their sufferings.

  And this, goodness knows, is understandable enough. Most of us can see the cross in a broken leg or an uncongenial work. We know that the leg will heal and the work will come to an end (and that if they do not, we shall get used to them). Unconsciously we have attached a time limit. It is as though Simon of Cyrene were to say, “another hundred yards, and someone else can take on.”

  But one of the main features of the cross is its unpredictable duration. You have to part from those you love, and you do not know when you will be able to see them again. The anguish is not only in the act of separation; it is in the not knowing. You learn of someone falling from grace. The anguish is not only in the disappointment; it is in the fear, which has to be lived with indefinitely, that there may be no return. You are cut off from an apostolate to which you feel yourself suited by nature and grace. The unhappiness lies not in the immediate wrench so much as in the sense of lasting waste. Not being able to see an end to one’s suffering is the very stuff of trial. What would the trials of Job have amounted to if he had known all along that everything would be restored to him? How would Tobias have been tested had he been given an assurance that all would come right in the end?

  If inability to look forward with any sort of confidence is an integral part of the cross, so also is the inability to look back except with regret. We see in retrospect what a success life might have been if we had gone about it more sensibly. Not only could we have achieved happiness but holiness too. Instead, looking squarely at ourselves as we are now, we see nothing but muddle and mediocrity. Let me quote from a letter received while working at the present chapter. “There is neither light nor darkness now,” writes someone whom I have never met but whose experience can be taken as representative, “but just nothing. Not even suffering. Complete vacuum. I suppose it is the desire to know that you are pleasing to God while at the same time being unable to take a step towards him that is the most frustrating part. The humiliation of seeing one’s tepidity ought to do something for the soul, but it does not seem to.”

  The feeling of having lost hold of what was once so confidently held is a trial that must be faced by anyone who aspires to serve God in any perfection. With it goes the added trial of expecting never to regain the good. This is failure, and failure is the cross.

  The lines of the cross trace the boundaries of our Christian enclosure, within which we find our peace, our sanctification, our likeness to Christ. But we are not given to watch the process or take comfort in the thought of it. It would not be a cross if we were. Always we have to assume that in this life we see only by faith
the things which matter most. Sense and emotion are uncertain guides. “Blessed are they that have not seen,” our Lord told St. Thomas, “and have believed” (Jn 20:29). The cross matters supremely, so of course we have only the general conception of it to go by. But this is quite enough.

  The gospel tells us what we have to do. We have to watch and pray: these are the only activities which prepare for the Passion. From then on, the work of grace takes over. Passio means “I suffer,” not “I do.” In all our cross-bearing, as indeed in the whole Christian life, there has to be that grace-adjusted balance between effort and acquiescence, between aiming and accepting, between claiming faith and admitting failure. Human wisdom does not enable us to strike this balance; grace alone can do it for us. The detachment which is born of cross-bearing does not mean, to quote from St. Francis de Sales, that we must “care for nothing and should abandon our affairs to the mercy of events.” This would be a quietist exaggeration. “On the contrary,” said the same authority, “we should omit nothing which is requisite to bring the work which God has put into our hands to a happy issue, yet upon condition that if the event be contrary we should lovingly and peaceably embrace it.”

  So whatever the event, according to St. Francis de Sales, the soul “will love God’s good-pleasure not in consolations only but in afflictions also; indeed the soul loves it better upon the cross in pains and difficulties, because the principal effect of love is to make the lover suffer for the thing beloved.” The thing beloved here is Christ: not the cross only, but on the cross the Crucified.

  When you consider the choices offered by other religions and philosophies in regard to suffering, it is astonishing that we do not make more of ours. The stoic and spartan believes in grim uncomplaining endurance of suffering for its own sake. The Buddhist says that evasion is to be sought in the state of apathy. The Humanist advocates gradual elimination of suffering by the cultivation of natural faculties. The Christian Scientist denies its existence. The Existentialist says it is inherent and nothing is to be done about it. Against these we have the Hebraic-Christian tradition, which acknowledges suffering, traces it to its source, puts it into the channel of divine love, voluntarily cooperates with it, and directs it toward God. It is a curious fact that love, the most powerful force in the world, has not drawn every faith toward itself. Sacrifice, which is love’s expression, has proved the stumbling block. But if even within our Faith suffering has been so misunderstood, perhaps we should not be altogether surprised that men of other creeds and ideologies have been enabled to accept our view of it.

  The mistake we all make, whether in the Church or outside it, is to deify happiness. If we did not worship happiness so much, we would see suffering more in proportion. But making human happiness our goal we cannot abide what we consider to be incompatible with happiness. But happiness and suffering are not mutually exclusive. On the contrary, the only way to true happiness is to combine them. This was what Christ taught and this was how he lived, showing how those things man instinctively thinks of as opposites can be made into a synthesis. By loving happiness too much, we inevitably come to hate suffering too much. So our lives are spent more or less in a state of dread, insecurity, self-pity.

  When our Lady said to Bernadette, “I have not promised that you will be happy in this life” she meant far more than if she had said, “I have not promised that you will be without suffering in this life.” Our Lady was thinking about the next life, not about this, and the happiness she was reserving for Bernadette was more important than any suffering that might be spared her on earth.

  But even though, as we are bound to do, we get the order of those things wrong—failing, with these human minds of ours, to see the pattern as it is in the sight of God—we can still trust that the light of grace will keep us on the right lines. If even the apostles, Christ’s closest friends, could not understand the mystery of the Passion while it was going on, but had to have it explained to them later, will not the same allowance be made for us? True, we have had it explained. Yet (as it was with the apostles) suffering, while it is going on, robs us of our presence of mind, of our securities. Blinded by disappointment, loneliness, temptation, fear—experienced to a degree they would never have known had they not become our Lord’s disciples—they could not see this central element of the new dispensation. These men who were to preach the gospel and die for it were unable to grasp the idea of suffering. Why was this? It was because they were human, and human nature recoils automatically in the presence of suffering. We too are human and we do the same.

  It is not until we have become tried servants of the spirit that we shall be able to get full value out of our sufferings. In the meantime, we can learn from our limitations the virtue of humility. We are creatures, earthly and material in our conceptions, and as such we qualify for God’s indulgence. A spirituality that claims to be emancipated from creatureliness is no Christian spirituality. We do not escape from our nature, but by means of Christ’s Passion we transcend it. We take suffering, accordingly, in our stride. I may shrink from prayer and detest pain, but at least I know that these are the most worthwhile things of life. They express, if I have read the Christian argument right, love.

  Hubert van Zeller (1905–1984) was a Benedictine monk who lived at the Downside Abbey in Bath, England. A gifted sculptor, his work can be found in churches in both Great Britain and the United States. Van Zeller is the author of many books on Catholic spirituality, including: Holiness: A Guide for Beginners, Prayer and the Will of God, and Spirit of Penance, Path to God. He was a friend of Catholic writers Msgr. Ronald Knox and Evelyn Waugh.

  Al Kresta is president of Ave Maria Radio and host of Kresta in the Afternoon, which is heard on 220 radio stations and SiriusXM Radio. A former Protestant pastor who converted to Catholicism, he is the author of four books. Kresta’s ministry was deeply impacted by Hubert van Zeller’s book The Mystery of Suffering, which he read while recovering from a serious illness.

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