God's gift of Suffering

Yesterday I watched a fill called Shadowlands, and I was quite impressed. The film told the story of CS Lewis and one great love in his life, a dying woman. I will not tell you the story, watch the movie or better still read the book, upon which it is based. I did want to discuss again the concept of suffering, which is central to the movie and has particular significance in the wake of the various natural disasters which have been visited upon us, and most like will continue to be visited upon us.

A member of the Anglican Hierarchy, such as it is, recently stated that he refuses to believe in the idea of a vengeful God—a God who would wrathfully deal with our sinfulness. Obviously this is a result of the Anglican abandonment of Revelation, in favor of erroneous but more democratic theological thinking. Clearly a vengeful God who repays man's disobedience with suffering is clearly biblical. In fact, I would venture to say that it is built into the system, sin results in evil in the world which results in suffering through one of several venues. Man's rejection of God's friendship in the garden would have led to suffering and death, whether or not God cast man out of the garden. The more I think about suffering the more I come to realize two things, first that, though not particularly pastorally sensitive to say to those enduring it, suffering is a gift from God, and secondly that it is a gift that often seems more like a curse, we don't like it and often reject it thus compounding the sin and bring upon ourselves greater suffering.

First the most difficult proposition, that suffering is a gift. Modern man declares that, suffering is evil, and that if God who is supposed to be good allows it to happen to “good” people then either He is not good or He is not (existent).

First things first, it seems that there is a fallacy in the proposition “good” people, since goodness is relative to the fallen depravity of man. I question whether in reality, there has ever been a man (male or female), other than God's gift of our Lord and His mother. Isn't this the meaning of the story of Job—who is supposedly a just man. Job in the end vindicates himself as a just man through his humble acceptance of evils from the God who had given him so many goods, but while Job may be just, he is not sinless. Only four humans were ever born sinless, two who sinned and brought suffering to the world, and two who did not sin and brought eternal life to the world. By this I am not seeking to say that because of original sin we are all deserving of punishment. Oh, if only this was our only sin! Original sin makes it harder for us to do what is right, and because of this all of us have actual personal sins weighing on our souls. In most cases these sins are abundant, and so in fact I think there is no such thing as “good” people. Its not that your evil and you deserve what you get, but rather that you are not good and the suffering you experience calls you to realize this and become better. I am not trying to insult the rest of humanity, but to point out that we all must put things in perspective, as even Jesus says, “why do you call me good, only the Father is Good.”

Only God, who gives us all things, is good, if we accept good things from him, ought we not accept what we perceive is evil. If one where truly good, I do not believe they would suffer, because for them even pain would be a joy. Suffering and pain are objectively not good, God, who is all good, does not will that his creatures suffer. However, he does permit it. While suffering may be objectively evil, in a particular case it can be a good. This is true both in the natural realm and the supernatural realm. Hold your hand over a lit match and you will see this demonstrated. Does it hurt, yes, is it objectively evil, yes, but the fact that you suffered for an instant, in the subjective sense is good, because it convinced you not to leave your hand in the flame. If you hadn't felt that pain you may have left your hand in the flame until it was completely burnt, and rather than having an instant of pain in your hand you would have had the rest of your life without the existence of your hand. Thus while evil in itself, its evil is not a moral evil but a physical evil, and thus as a means to an end it can be good.
Evil, that is suffering, both physical and emotional, is indeed useful to man's salvation because it alerts him to the reality that, just like the hand over the match, something is not right! A fundamentalist preacher recently declared that the recent eruptions and Tsunami in Southeast Asia are a sign of the impending end and a punishment of our sins. He is of course right, but not in the way he intended. Suffering, and the death it causes are the result of sin, however not being God, I would not venture a guess as to whose sin a natural disaster is targeted to redress. In fact, it is not necessarily the particular sin of the people impacted, it could be the sin of the whole world. Suffering serves to get our attention, and while the recent disasters happened to a particular group of people they got the whole world's attention. These disasters also point to the impending end of the world—this world is passing away—but I would not care to venture a guess as to the date and the time. I am sure after Pompey, or Mt. St. Helen's, or any of the plethora of natural, and man made, disasters of the past two thousand years people said, 'well its all over,' and in truth it is, but the day and hour of the end is known only to the Father, it may be tomorrow or a century of tomorrows from now.

Suffering reminds man that his destiny is not in this world, that attachment to this world hampers one's preparation for the next, and that the price of sin is death. Suffering of the physical sort reminds man not to make idols out of the things of this world. Augustine discusses this at length in his treatise On Christian Doctrine (De Doctrina Christiana, Book I). He says we enjoy things for two reasons, because they lead to an end or for their own sake. Things which we enjoy for the sake of something else are properly not enjoyed but used. Augustine says only God should be enjoyed, for if we enjoy things that are not God in the way that we enjoy God then we are committing idolatry. Emotional pain is also useful in the same way because it reminds us that while we are called to love our neighbors as ourselves, our first duty and ultimate end is to love God. Emotional suffering and death helps us to stay detached, in a loving way, from those we love. If we love the other and wish the best for them then to become attached to the point which we wish that they did not leave us to enter the eternal kingdom is both uncharitable to them and idolatrous.

I am not sure that God wants us to be comfortable and happy in this world. He has tried that before and time and time again every time people are prosperous and happy they see to forget God en masse. It is not that God is a party killer, but that God is and knows the Truth!! He knows the truth about man, the truth which we ourselves often forget. Man is and always has been, from the beginning of time destined for communion with God, for heaven. I honestly believe that even original man, before sin, was destined to “die,” if in the most pleasant of ways, possibly along the lines of the Dormition and Assumption of the Virgin Mother of God. All men have always been called to be with God forever, but in the state of original sin we forget this and and choose to live in this world as if it is the only. St. Paul states it well when he says, if Christ was not raised from the dead then we shall not rise, and if we do not rise eat, drink, and be merry for tomorrow we die. But God knows what we forget, that man is destined to rise, with Christ, that man has been destined since his creation to be with the One in whose image and likeness he was fashioned.

For man to live life for today, when in reality he is destined for tomorrow, i.e. for Heaven not Earth, is then a state of denial. It is a state of denial that will have eternal ramifications. Soren Kierkegaard calls this despair: despair over being what we do not want to be, not being what we want to be, and over not knowing what we are. We are in despair because we are not omnipotent, eternal, and omniscient—we are not God. We are in despair because we are subsistent, we are man a radically subsistent being. And, we are in despair because we don't know what being man really is!! Suffering lays open our state of despair and provides us with a moment in which we can embrace our destiny eternity. If we reject the moment then it is just that a lost chance, however if we utilize it the we embrace the eternal consciousness. Man doesn't like this! He doesn't like being forced to see himself as he is. He prefers to live in his pretend world of dillusion, in which he is an island, independent of the rest of humanity and more importantly independent of God.

Man is quite happy to live in the despair that is not realizing that one is in despair, the despair that is not knowing your telos (Greek for end or purpose) and not caring because you think you don't have one. It is for this reason that man throughout the ages has taken offense at God. When nature, which man holds (and rightly so) as an agent of God, forces man to ask the basic questions that are basic life tasks for man, but which often man forgets to ask (or ignores the answer), man takes offense at God. In the Papal encyclical Fides et Ratio, John Paul II notes:
a cursory glance at ancient history shows clearly how in different parts of the world, with their different cultures, there arise at the same time the fundamental questions which pervade human life: Who am I? Where have I come from and where am I going? Why is there evil? What is there after this life? (Fides et Ratio, 1)

These questions have over the ages, the Pontiff points out, resulted in the various religions of the world—which are man's natural desire to reach toward the transcendent. While man searched for God in the world religions he was limited by his own capabilities and fallen nature, and so in his mercy, God, who had been rejected by man, revealed himself to man through the children of Abraham, and later through his own Son, through his own being, his own word, that he sent into the world. The Word became flesh, and dwelt among us, revealing to us in himself the Father who sent him. This is the center of history, i.e. in the conception, birth, life, death, and resurrection of Jesus; this is the moment of import to all mankind, because at this moment God answered all our questions And yet though man had an innate desire for God, man rejected Him when He revealed himself to Man. Man prefered to live a lie, he prefered to fashion God according to his own likings, he wanted to know God, but when he hear him man didn't like what he said.

Here we arrive at my second point, percisely that man rejects the gift of suffering, and thus increases the the quantitative amount of suffering in the world. The gift of suffering is first and foremost the gift of God, who can not suffer, suffering for us. God sanctified the physical evil of suffering in and through the Passion of his Son. In living the human life, complete in all senses, Jesus redeems man, and in suffering with man he makes our suffering redeeming. Suffering is an essential part of Christianity. Paul speaks of uniting his sufferings to those of Christ to fill up what was lacking in his sufferings. I am not sure there was anything lacking in the sufferings of Christ, who suffered more than any man, but this sentiment points to the fundamental truth that in humbly accepting sufferings, God grant us bountiful graces. However, knowing God, man has chosen to reject the sufferings that befall him as a curse of God. They have taken offense at the thought that God knows best. They take offense of the fact that God asks them to deny themselves and take up their cross, following Him. They wanted to know God, and now that they do they resent Him. For, of course, it is essential to know a person to resent Him. But rejecting God is a sin, and so if the first premise is true, that suffering is the result of sin, then in rejecting suffering we sin and call down further sufferings upon ourselves. Sin multiplies the sufferings of man, we see this in the great sinners of the twentieth century, Lenon, Stalin, Hitler, Moa, etc. If we choose to ignore suffering, if we choose to ignore the fact that our hand is in the fire and it hurts, whose fault is that. Man can never advance until he realizes that he is helpless without God. Man will never move beyond barbarity until he is civilized by God.
And this is the world we live in, a world which damns God for suffering, thus calling down all the more suffering. It is a sad state, will we ever learn? I don't know, but what I do know is that this suffering isn't the worst part of our situation. The worst part of the contemporary existential problem is that in the end, when we die, we will be faced with an eternity to reap what we soe. I think of a famous quote from one of our founding fathers, “I shudder to think that God is Just.”