This is in response to Casey’s gracious request when I was asking for topics, as well as in response to the fact that a lot of people are asking this to themselves and getting dispirited about the answers they’re not finding. I’m not saying I’ve found them, but I have some thoughts.
All I can really offer are some thoughts, and I'm sorry to say, but I'm not sure if it's going to help a lot, for a variety of reasons. For instance, it's like when you're talking to someone... you know how sometimes it's really easy for you to see and understand something, but the other person just doesn't get it? And you wonder, because it seems so obvious and simple, but of course, like everything else in life, just isn't that obvious and simple. Except, this is worse, because this whole topic is something that *isn't* just so obvious and simple to me. It's something that I accept oftentimes more on the basis of faith than reason or even experience. And so maybe you'll read what I've written and be all, "That's great for her, she doesn't have any problems." Which, by the way, isn't true. But I can see how there might be a disconnect between what I'm saying and what you're feeling.
So, here we go.
1. God knows you're going to suffer and says that we have to suffer.I wish that I could sugar coat the whole deal and just say, "God hates to see his children in pain so just close your eyes real tight and think happy thoughts and when you open them it will be all better!" The problem is, that isn't the truth of it. I think the whole problem people have with God all the time is that they have this picture of Him in their mind, a gentle God who gives out lollipops to the people who believe in Him, thus making their lives a breeze. Or, they look at all the pain, and death, and suffering in the world and they ask if God cares, because their conception of God is so good that he would not allow such pain to come to his creatures.
The logical fallacy there is that we are comparing the state of the world with the God we have in our heads. A lot of people pick their religion based on what they think God
ought to be. My mom, for example, says that she cannot be a Catholic because, “My God would not institute…” blah, blah, blah. Quite frankly, the god that she comes up with, or the god that I come up with, or the god that anyone else comes up with is nothing more than a fairy tale that we keep in our heads to make us feel vaguely warm and fuzzy inside. But what happens is that we then pit that god up against all the big questions in life – such as, Why Does This Life Suck So Badly? – and we find that our god does not have the answers, because our god is a made-up charade of the real God, who is the God of Truth, not the God of Warm and Fuzzy Feelings.
It makes us feel depressed when our god doesn’t measure up to the challenge of life, because in many cases we don’t really know the real God, and so we just figure that God in general does not measure up. What we have to do is stop confusing the two, the god we want to be real, and the God who is real.
[Sidenote: I’m not saying here that everyone who does this does not actually
know the real God or isn’t sincerely trying to follow Him, just that in some ways, and not all, they are confused about who He is. I do this all the time. We all do this.]
So anyway, a lot of people have this god who says: “I will make everything easy for you and you’ll never feel badly again.” And then you have this other God who says something quite different: a God who tells us that not only are we going to suffer, but we have to suffer and suffer the right way if we’re going to be made holy.
2. It happens to everybody. It isn’t a result of our lack of faith, or because we aren’t praying hard enough. When God does not seem to answer our prayers just as we want Him to, it is because He has other plans in mind.St. Paul in 2 Corinthians tells of his hardships. “Five times at the hands of the Jews I received forty lashes minus one. Three times I was beaten with rods, once I was stoned, three times I was shipwrecked, I passed a night and a day on the deep; on frequent journeys, in dangers from rivers, dangers from robbers, dangers from my own race, dangers from Gentiles, dangers in the city, dangers in the wilderness, dangers at sea, dangers among false brothers, in toil and hardship, through many sleepless nights, through hunger and thirst, through frequent fastings, through cold and exposure. And apart from these things, there is the daily pressure upon me of my anxiety for all the churches” (11:24-28).
This from St. Paul, chosen by God himself to be an apostle, and yet met with such hardship. Certainly he prayed to be free from them, but he kept faith in God through it all even as he met with these trials.
Job is the classic example, and upright and God-fearing man who nonetheless is visited by terrible things, including the death of his family.
The most important example, of course, is Jesus himself, God’s own Son. In many verses it’s written not only that Jesus
will suffer, but that he
must suffer (Mark 8:31; 9:12, among many others). Throughout his ministry he suffers the abuse of others. He loses friends and followers. Judas betrays him and kills himself. Peter denies he ever knew him. And then he is expected to take responsibility for all the sin in the world and die a gruesome and terrible death for all of us. And he ain’t happy about it, either.
In what may be one of the most powerful passages in the entire Bible, the Agony in the Garden, Jesus prays to his father to “let this cup pass” (Matthew 26:39). He knows he is in pain and will know pain, he doesn’t want to, and he prays to His Father not to let him know pain. But then he adds the most important line in the passage: “yet, not as I will, but as you will.”
Jesus is our model for how we are supposed to pray. But, just like we like to follow a god who promises nothing but good to all his followers, we just like to pray the first bit when things get bad. “God,” we say, “let this cup pass from us,” forgetting that our will is not always His will.
He let His only Son suffer and die a terrible death. If we were in Jesus’ shoes/sandals, our response would probably be “What the heck, God? I prayed for you to spare me from this!” And God’s response would probably be a gentle, “And I decided not to.” Imagine if God had spared Jesus from the crucifixion. If he hadn’t died a sacrificial victim for our sake… What then? We’d have a world devoid of a Savior, and we’d all be lost and miserable. If God
had “answered” Jesus’ prayer, His plan would have gone awry.
So, just like it’s the fake god of your imagination versus the Real God, it’s also your own desires versus God’s desires. And just like the fake god is often a lot nicer to think about, your own desires often seem a lot nicer. But in the end, just like fantasy withers before the truth, your own desires do not really count for much before God’s desires. Instead, he calls us to know Him, the Real Him, so that we can mold our will to His.
That being said…
3. It’s a human response to wonder “Why is this happening?”Jeremiah 15:18 “Why is my pain continuous, my wound incurable, refusing to be healed? You have indeed become for me a treacherous brook, whose waters do not abide!”
And, again, most importantly:
“My God, my God… why have you abandoned me?” (Matthew 27:46). Here we have it from Jesus himself, wondering where His Father has gone while he is in agony. This does a couple of things: first, it reminds us how truly human Jesus was. Second, as Jesus is our example, it tells us that it is not a sin to ask “Why?” and to feel abandoned by God. Sin separates us from God, and Jesus had to take on the weight of sin to pay for us with His blood, so he felt this separation just like we do because of all the sin in us and in the world. However, this is not Jesus’ message. He did not come to earth to tell us it’s okay to feel broken and abandoned from time to time. He wants us to keep reading, so that we find out that despite all the pain, and all the suffering, and all the seemingly unanswered prayers… God has
not abandoned Him, and God has not abandoned us.
The line “My God, My God…” comes from Psalm 22, which is in many ways a foreshadowing psalm to the Crucifixion (if you read it, you’ll see references to his garments being split, being parched for thirst, etc, etc, etc). However, just like the agony of the Crucifixion is not the last word, the Psalm does not end with the despair of the author. Rather:
“For he hath not despised nor abhorred the affliction of the afflicted; neither hath he hid his face from him; but when he cried unto him, he heard.” (22:24).
God is telling us that it is okay to suffer and to feel badly and to wonder where God is. But then He tells us the good news: “I have not abandoned you. I have heard you crying out to me. You did not understand in your pain what I wanted from you and
for you, but you will know.”
4. God uses suffering to make us who he wants us to be.It’s what I was saying about His will… He knows what we could never know, and when He does something it might well seem like He is doing it to punish us or that He has just flat out abandoned us, but we see from a
very limited perspective. God knows where He wants us to be and He knows how to get us there, and it often uses suffering. Just like He used suffering for the salvation of the world, He uses suffering for our own personal salvation.
“The God of all grace who called you to his eternal glory through Christ [Jesus] will himself restore, confirm, strengthen, and establish you after you have suffered a little” (1 Peter 5:10). Here we see that suffering, which is temporary, sets us apart as God’s chosen – it confirms us.
It strengthens us – as we read on the back of the cross country team’s shirts, “Pain is just weakness leaving the body.” And it really is true… how do you get stronger physically, except by sweating and hurting for it? The same is true spiritually. If God takes away all of your pain and your trials and your tribulations… you might think yourself better off, but if you really think about it, you know it will just serve to keep you weak. In Job we learn that Satan says, “Is it for nothing that Job is God-fearing? Have you not surrounded him and his family and all that he has with protection?” (1:9). Job’s afflictions are to strengthen his faith, to prove that it is not “good weather” faith that flees at the first sign of hardship.
Other examples in Scripture tell us that if we want to reach salvation (which is where God wants us to be), we have to suffer in order to make ourselves holy like Jesus, who suffered for and with us, was holy.
“Whoever wishes to come after me must deny himself, take up his cross, and follow me” (Mark 8:34). We hear this all the time. It is basically Jesus saying to us, if you want to live in life with me, the Christ, you have to walk a long road with a heavy, painful cross on your back, even knowing that it might be leading to your death (or something similarly bad). Suffering leads to life.
For our situation, I can see a number of things that God might be trying to accomplish with us. For instance:
- He wants us to know Him as He truly is and stop following the fake gods of our fancy.
- He wants us to learn how to forgive one another as he commands us to do. He will use our suffering and the joy we will know when we finally can forgive each other to teach us the value of this virtue.
- He wants to strengthen us for the rest of life. We’ll be able to use what we have learned here to help us in the future.
- He is preparing us to be able to help others as Christ did. That’s our mission in life, to serve others, and here we are learning what that really takes and gaining the strength to be able to serve each other in our time of pain. “Because he himself was tested through what he suffered, he is able to help those who are being tested” (Hebrews 2:18).
- He wants to bring us to the point where we can recognize Him in the midst of our pain, something that we all are realizing right now comes only with practice. But if we can learn now to trust entirely in Him, later when we are in pain we will be able to do the same.
- He wants us to recognize that His will is sovereign and to understand what prayer is and what it is not. He wants to remind us of the “yet, not my will but your will.” The fact that he uses suffering to make us realize his will is evident in Hebrews 5:8: “[Jesus] learned obedience from what he suffered.”
Anyone who’s a Catholic is going to have to get used to the idea of suffering, because it is so deeply ingrained in Catholic spirituality that there is just no getting around it. The saints have universally preached the efficacy of suffering to get us closer to God, because suffering, if we let it, is what can make us holy. St. Therese of Lisieux, who would suffer little indignities just to grow closer to God, said that “Sanctity consists in suffering.”
Then there’s the popular belief that goodness and suffering are so alien to one another that a good God cannot allow suffering to occur. But frankly, suffering does occur, so if you want anything to make sense, the answer is that this god is the false god that we’ve been talking about all along.
5. There is a right way to suffer.It doesn’t matter what we’re suffering from. In the NT, there is a lot of reference to suffering for the name of Christ and that sort of thing, so it could be religious persecution. But just like St. Paul and Job and Jeremiah, it could be just your “standard” suffering. However, if we are in the right state of mind about our suffering, it can become just as holy as strength in the face of religious persecution.
Countless saints have suffered from physical ills and offered these up to God as a way to gain holiness. Take, for instance, St. Therese of Lisieux who died at the age of 23 (or something like that) of a physical illness, but who suffered so beautifully and with such holiness that many people would almost be willing to call her a martyr. Or the late John Paul II, who suffered from the effects of aging with dignity and grace, as a testimony to the love of Jesus even in his pain.
I say this because some of the problems we’re facing today are physical. Depression is largely a chemical disorder that can be set right often with medicine. These things are no different than having diabetes or cancer, and as a result, are diseases that can be met with holiness and virtue. I say this because I can see you or someone saying, “Yeah, but deep dark despair and suicidal thought is
not suffering how God intended it”… but I’m just reminding that “deep dark despair” and “suicidal thoughts” are still a disease and it can be borne in the right way, which glorifies God, and in the wrong way.
So, first of all, we already know that it is okay and human to wonder about things when we suffer. But just as suffering is not the last word, and redemption is, so we should not let ourselves end with doubt, but rather:
“If you are patient when you suffer for doing what is good, this is a grace before God” (1 Peter 2:20). So here’s our first example. Peter goes on to say how Jesus suffered patiently by not trying to get revenge on those who did bad things to Him. In our world, I would say this would correspond to not doing the whole “Screw you, God!” spiel because misfortune comes our way. Not only does that misinterpret the origin of pain in general (living in a sinful, Fallen world), but it does not do much for us. Because frankly, we cannot operate apart from God, and as much as we might question Him and wonder about Him because we just cannot in this state understand Him as we’d like to (“My God, my God…”), to reject him is a whole different story. The questioning is a natural result of our incapacity at grasping the fullness of the mystery of God. The rejection is an unnatural turning from the God whom we are made to turn
to. It’s the difference between a rebellious teenager not understanding a rule set down by his parents, and a rebellious teenager saying “To hell with it!” and doing whatever he darn well pleases.
Worship and glorify God despite the pain. “But whoever is made to suffer as a Christian should not be ashamed but glorify God” (1 Peter 4:16). This is ultimately recognizing that God is our master and we are not. This ultimately recognizes that God, despite what we might think of some of His policies, ultimately is the one who made them and thus deserves to be worshipped. God does not deserve to be worshipped because He’s been nice to us, because we have become pretty nasty little creatures and He is nice to us only by His incredible mercy. He deserves to be worshipped because He is God and He created us. Nothing changes that, not even pain.
See the big picture and rejoice. “But rejoice to the extent that you share in the sufferings of Christ, so that when his glory is revealed you may also rejoice exultantly” (1 Peter 4:13). When we think about pain in the context of the world, no wonder we think it sucks so much. Because it doesn’t always get better. Sometimes we suffer right up to the end of our life. Sometimes bad people don’t suffer much. Sometimes good people suffer what we think is too much. But this life is just a little sliver of our life and the ultimate truth. We are shooting for a goal much greater than happiness in this life, and indeed, suffering in this life has the ability, done correctly, to get us to happiness where it really counts. We ought to rejoice when we suffer and lift our suffering up as an offering to God, because we can know that God, who is always leading us toward Himself though his ways are often mysterious and a bit crazy-seeming to us, is just trying to bring us closer to Him. “If we suffer, we shall also reign with him” (2 Timothy 2:12).
Remember St. Paul’s words: “I consider that the sufferings of this present time are as nothing compared with the glory to be revealed for us” (Romans 8:18).
Since our goal is to be made perfect, we suffer like Christ: “For it was fitting that he, for whom and through whom all things exist, in bringing many children to glory, should make the leader to their salvation perfect through suffering” (Hebrews 2:10).
Remember the saints who have called suffering a
blessing and who sought to undergo as much as possible for their souls and to glorify God. Not that you have to go seeking it out, or anything…
And again, St. Peter: “As a result, those who suffer in accord with God’s will hand their souls over to a faithful creator as they do” (1 Peter 4:19).
6. God is with us in our suffering.He doesn’t give us more than we can handle. Sure, our sufferings are more than we can handle by ourselves, but we, luckily, have His strength, working through us and working through our friends and others around us, and this keeps us going. “No trial has come to you but what is human. God is faithful and will not let you be tried beyond your strength; but with the trial he will also provide a way out, so that you may be able to bear it” (1 Corinthians 10:13).
God protects us from evil that is too severe. He would not let the devil actually touch the person of Job and afflict him. He will not let us be overtaken by what we cannot combat.
And, if it is in accord to God’s will, He will deliver us from our suffering. Jesus knew it was possible, or else He would not have asked for it in the garden. In the book of Psalms, there are plenty of examples of God delivering his servant from the hands of evil. And many times in our own life God does come through and release us from certain evils, though certainly not all of them. I will tell you that I personally know that God has answered my prayer for deliverance, often not in the way I’d expect. I know, other people’s stories are seldom any use to you personally, but I will attest to and swear that I have seen the hand of God in my own life. If you need proof, you can talk to me privately, though.
Do you remember what I wrote that one night about how we have to be careful not to expect chariots on fire from heaven when we expect God? Try and see the hand of God in your life in little gestures, in phone calls, in other people who support you and keep you going. If you manage to keep a friend going… couldn’t that be God helping the both of you? Giving his grace to the two of you to do His work? Everything we do we do by the grace of God who loves us; we are incapable of any good work without Him. So we have to be careful to recognize Him in others and realize that He loves us even when he doesn’t send angels from the sky. Chances are He is there in other ways, but we just choose not to see Him because in fact, He helps us so much that we don’t even realize how much He helps us anymore. We wonder where He is, and He’s all around us.
Father Weitzel gave a really amazing sermon a while ago, after that gigantic tsunami hit and killed all those thousands of people, because there were a
lot of people asking, “Where was God in this?” And instead of trying to do everything I’ve just done about how suffering is good for us and so on and so forth… he said, quite simply, “He was there. He was there among the suffering and He was suffering with us, just like He suffered sin with us on the cross even though He didn’t have to.” He allows suffering because He is there suffering with us, crying over our pain and longing for us to let Him wipe our tears away.
We can say He’s a cruel God because He lets us suffer… but what if He suffers with us? How can we call Him cruel then, if He’s right there beside us? He loves us more than we can imagine and He knows how to make us happy, but it isn’t how we think we’ll be happy. Because face it… all those things that we chase, looking to be happy – do they ever work? We go after them, the grades and the looks and the whatever else and we’re still miserable. It’s about time that we just admit we have no freaking idea how to make ourselves happy and give into God’s sovereign will which does know. We have to admit we’re clueless and let God guide us, which means no “Erm, I don’t think this is the right way to go about this,” because we’ve already proved we don’t really know which is the right way. Trust in God because you cannot trust in yourself.
7. There is an end to suffering.God promises it to us, and our God is a “faithful creator.” Suffering is made bearable through faith, hope, and love. Faith in God’s love for us, hope in our salvation and the end to suffering, and love for God and for the rest of the world.
In summary…Only by following the Real God who doesn’t just preach things that make us happy can we ever find true joy and true meaning to our suffering.
We want our lives to make sense, and by following a made up deity who “feels” right nothing is ever going to make sense, because you’re stuck with the ultimate paradox of a God who is supposed to eradicate suffering and a world that is full of it.
Suffering is ordered by God, happens to everybody, produces questioning in everybody, and is ordered towards our spiritual growth and our coming to God.
We have to admit that we’ve failed miserably at figuring out how this life works, and that we just have to let God do what He will with us. Submission of our will to God’s is the only way we will be able to find true happiness and understand the meaning of suffering.
We should strive to make our suffering an offering to God and thus draw nearer to Him.
God is with us, suffering with and for us, and He will give us the strength to go on, through personal grace and the grace of friends, family, and strangers.
This isn’t forever, and someday our tears will be dried and we will understand the craziness and the beauty that was God’s Plan.
The Cathedral of the Savior on the Spilled Blood, St. Petersburg
St. Isaac's Cathedral, St. Petersburg
