By MARY BLACKLOCK
Suffering has a way of concentrating the mind. Anyone who has experienced a serious illness can attest to its life-changing implications. You learn that even when you are dealing with difficulties, life is comparatively easy when you feel well. When you are sick or in chronic pain, everything changes. You long for the pain-free difficult life; for the ability to whine about things while still being able to sleep at night.
Dealing with a prolonged illness is like being in sick school. The classes include “Why Are You Sick?”, “Coping with Pain,” “Why Me Exactly?”, “Where Are You God?”, and the most challenging class, “What to Do if There Is No Cure.” Regardless of the intellectual exercise of trying to make sense of it all, suffering is a mystery and a scandal for many and the question is always “how can a loving and benevolent God allow so much of it”? The answers are not always satisfactory, especially if you are in the middle of a prolonged or terminal illness.
You can learn spiritual realities in many ways throughout your life, but growing through suffering is like learning to swim by being thrown into the deep end. The best kind of growth concludes with a person developing a deeper love for God, and sometimes this can be accomplished through suffering. For Catholics, suffering can be a place of accompaniment with Christ where we begin to understand what it cost the Lord to save us. We know that the Lord did not abolish suffering but entered into it; every form of it. He experienced mental anguish in the Garden as His skin bled when He said, “Take this cup from me, but not my will but yours be done” (Luke 22:42). He also had the untold physical anguish of the scourging and brutal crucifixion. He experienced profound spiritual suffering in the words He uttered while hanging on the cross, “Father, why have you abandoned me?” (Matt. 27:46). We see that God’s love is such that He would willingly embrace the cruelest form of suffering if it meant He could be with us forever in Heaven as a result. And how do we realize this in our own suffering?
All we need to do is look at any crucifix. We see in our crucified Lord a God of love in action. There is an “aha” moment in our own pain when we realize the kind of love that it took for Christ to willingly embrace suffering to save us. He not only knew what would happen, He longed for it — even though He sweat blood at the thought of it. Few people would subject themselves to the kind of suffering Christ underwent just to help someone else: All we want when we suffer is for our suffering to end.
Like St. Paul though, we are to rejoice in our suffering and not just for what is lacking in Christ’s Mystical Body, but because our suffering can optimally serve as a means to understand the love of God in a more profound way; and in this understanding, our love for Him grows commensurately. With this in mind, Christ’s mandate to “Pick up your cross and follow me,” is not so much a one-off or meaningless mantra to get through tough times, it is part of the journey to Heaven by way of union with Christ.
Entering into the reality of His suffering through the experience of our own is the way this union transpires and a more complete understanding ensues. It is then that we can start to truly appreciate the love Jesus has for us through this heightened awareness of exactly what it took to save us.
The question then becomes “can we love God properly if we do not have a working understanding of how much He loves us?” An invisible God who loves from afar perhaps would evoke a different kind of love than a God who became one of His own creatures and then suffered a cruel death on their behalf. In the fifth of her Fifteen Prayers, St. Bridget of Sweden writes:
“From the crown of His head to the soles of His feet, there was not one spot on His body that was not in torment, and yet, forgetting all His sufferings, He did not cease to pray to His Heavenly Father for His enemies, saying: Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.”
For those who have experienced great suffering, the notion that Christ would ask forgiveness for His enemies while “every spot on His body was in torment” provides a meaningful glimpse into the extent of God’s love. We can hope for Heaven because of Christ’s Passion, but can we saunter in without understanding to a particular degree the divine love that got us there?
These ruminations are not an attempt to romanticize suffering. For most of us, serious suffering is an excruciating experience that we want no part of, and rightly so. But suffering is not for the few or the unlucky; even the Lord submitted to human suffering, and it is part of all of our lives to a greater or lesser degree, so we cannot escape it. For Christians, however, suffering can become a way to see Jesus in the most revelatory and love-inducing way, and it is a lesson that may be worth learning.
The other truth that suffering teaches is that sin is deadly. Sin necessitated the Lord’s suffering. Original sin caused disease and death, and actual sin causes much of our temporal suffering. Do not let anyone suggest that sin should be ignored, or that it is not a big deal. Sin is the cause of every public and private misery and people should take every pain to avoid it. The Lord did not suffer so that everyone could go about sinning and be saved anyway. He told us to cut off our hands and gouge out our eyes rather than sin and end up in Hell (Matt. 18:8-9). Each and every dysfunction and sadness, temporal and eternal, has its origins in sin.
This reflection started with the idea that “suffering concentrates the mind” and it does. It is a stop-gap: an unfortunately fortunate moment in life when you start to consider your mortality and ask consequential questions. The good news is that if you are a person of faith, you have the Lord to share it with by thinking of Him when He was in the Garden, or being whipped by the Roman soldiers, or up on the cross. And when you look at Him, the one who never complained, the one who could have exited every heinous moment of His Passion but refused, you see our standard-bearer, our Sweet Christ who dignified even the most mysterious and unwelcomed experience that we have as human beings. In our suffering, we learn about love in its purest form.
Suffering is humbling, it is helplessness, but the Lord turned it into something useful. It is an odd sort of grace, but when we are granted a reprieve, we cannot forget its lessons and return to the status quo. We have to cling to the Crucified whose passion should never be forgotten. In His suffering we are made whole, and in our suffering we are united with Him in his work of our sanctification and the sanctification of the world. Suffering does concentrate the mind, but we have to be careful about our focus. In the loneliness and darkness, a light does shine, it is the light of faith and trust; trust in God’s love and closeness. Just like Jesus in His Passion and death, His Father was with Him; silently, powerfully, and with full knowledge of what was to come of it in short order.
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