“My son, when you come to serve the Lord, prepare yourself for trials.” (Sirach 2:1) “If anyone wishes to come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me.” (Luke 9:23)
Sacred Scripture is full of exhortations to be prepared for suffering, in the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus even speaks of the blessedness of those who suffer for the sake of righteousness. Often, we interpret these words as referring to martyrdom or to persecution: suffering explicitly for our faith and in the name of Jesus.
But what if we live in a time and place where we are free to practice our faith publicly? The culture may be at odds with teaching of the Church but (at least currently) I will not suffer specifically because I am a Christian. I will not suffer, that is, if I think of suffering exclusively in terms of classic persecution: imprisonment, deprivation, torture. I am not threatened by any of that, and my life is in fact pretty comfortable. However, does that mean that I and my fellow modern-day Christians are exempt from Christ’s command to carry our cross?
No, it simply means that our cross will look different. It might be in the form of saying no to the fun, popular thing everyone else seems to be enjoying so much. Suffering might come in the form of being misunderstood by your family or colleagues. It might not be tied specifically to the practice of your faith, maybe it is illness, a wounded relationship, the normal afflictions of human life. And, let me stress this reality – affliction is in fact a part of normal human life. It is inevitable.
We have become a soft people, unaccustomed to suffering. We are used to convenience, to saying yes to ourselves, to our desires. This is a dangerous reality. Pope Benedict XVI said, “the world will offer you comfort, but you are not made for comfort. You are made for greatness.” Greatness has a cost. It involves discipline, sacrifice, it means being willing to deny oneself, being willing to suffer.
In his letter to the Romans, St. Paul tells us, “affliction produces endurance, and endurance, proven character, and proven character, hope, and hope does not disappoint, because the love of God has been poured out into our hearts through the Holy Spirit.” (Romans 5: 3-5) People like to jump ahead to the pleasant-sounding part about hope and the love of God, but the process begins with affliction. The letter to the Hebrews has a similar message, exhorting us to “Endure your trials as ‘discipline’” which though “it seems a cause not for joy but for pain, yet later it brings the peaceful fruit of righteousness to those who are trained by it.”(Hebrews 12: 7, 12) Discipline is an interesting word, it has the same root as disciple, and so at its heart, it is about the way we learn or, as the passage says, the way we are trained.
Why do we need to be trained? What is it that we need to learn through enduring our sufferings, and why must it be learned in this way? I don’t know all the answers to these questions. God is infinite and my comprehension not only finite but poor as well. St. Francis de Sales tells us not to question God’s will, saying, “The human spirit is so weak that when it would look too curiously into the causes and reasons of God’s will it embarrasses and entangles itself in the meshes of a thousand difficulties, out of which it has much to do to deliver itself…In striving to raise our reasonings too high in divine thing by curiosity we grow vain or empty in our thoughts, and instead of arriving at the knowledge of truth, we fall into the folly of our vanity.” (Treatise on the Love of God, p. 183) Nevertheless, I do have some thoughts, limited though they are, about the good of our suffering.
This world is not our home and suffering reminds us of that, it jolts us out of the comfortable illusion that we are in control of our life and are able to plan it according to our design. Additionally, we have an enemy, one who wants us to reject our faith. Suffering, especially if we are not used it, can cause us to do that. We know of those who have apostatized under torture but there are countless others who rejected God in the face of personal suffering such as painful illness or the loss of a loved one. When we see suffering as meaningless evil, we cannot reconcile it with a loving God. And when we have become so unaccustomed to suffering it is hard to see it as anything other than meaningless. The world, deceived by the evil one, tells us we should not have to suffer.
But when we know and accept it to be a normal part of this pilgrim journey than we can receive it as the discipline it truly is. We can liken it the pain endured when beginning to exercise, or the exertion used in learning a new skill. We are strengthened by our suffering. And, in an age growing increasingly hostile to Christian faith and morals, such strengthening is vital. How will we able to stand firm in the faith under the severe suffering of persecution, if we cannot yet stand firm in the face of inconvenience or the more painful but common suffering of our human life?
Ultimately afflictions lead us to God, makes us acutely aware of our need for him. We cannot bear the weight on our own, we are not meant to do so. We need each other, but most deeply we need the Lord. We need to sit with Him in our suffering, not so much asking “why” but rather “where are You in this Lord?” In our weakness He is strong, and as we meet him there, we become strong as well, strong in our hope, in our trust, in our love for Him who has proved himself willing to suffer with us for love of us. This, I think, is the ultimate gift of suffering: when we experience it deeply and call to mind Jesus willingly taking it on for us, we glimpse how much we are loved. It leads us to exclaim in awe, “this much Lord? You love me this much? That you would bear even this pain for me?” The greater the pain, the closer we get to understanding the depth of His love. He willingly made himself vulnerable to our most extreme misery, did not let even having to endure the depths of our sorrow deter him from becoming man, all that we might know his love.
Prose for the sake of Poetry 