If you have read the last two issues of RLN, you will be unsurprised that when asked to discuss how faith helps us to manage suffering, my first response is to ask what we mean by faith and suffering. Especially where these words encompass not only what we believe, but how we enact our beliefs and use them to interpret our experience (and vice versa).
Of the two, suffering is probably less fraught, but just in case, for the purposes of this discussion, I mean every type of physical and psychological distress we can experience that is not immediately within our power to resolve and that impacts how we function in the world. This is a very broad definition that only really excludes things like paper cuts and stubbed toes (though if the cut becomes infected or the toe turns out to be broken, one may enter into suffering), but in my experience, each person draws the line at a slightly different point. Put another way, suffering involves some loss of agency and some alteration in behaviour and/or perception due to the cause of suffering. At any rate, I don’t intend offense to anyone who experiences paper cuts as suffering.
More important to what follows is faith. According to the writer of Hebrews, “Faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.”[1] As I wrote in January’s issue of RLN, I understand this to mean that faith is the verb that accompanies hope. Hope is what you expect and desire to happen, what you believe about the world and what the future brings, both before and after death. To live in faith is to make choices about how you live in light of that hope; thus, much like our beliefs about what happens after death inform how we live prior to death, what we believe about suffering impacts how we experience suffering. For instance, if my hope is that suffering ends eventually, to live in faith means I might be able to hold a little tighter until this too shall pass. If I believe, as many Christian martyrs and mystics through the ages have, that suffering in Christ’s name in this life brings greater glory in the life to come, I may embrace periods of distress more enthusiastically or even seek greater suffering.
In the January issue of RLN, my argument, in short, was that as Christians, we look forward to a final resurrection of all the faithful into transformed bodies in a transformed world. This emphasizes the redeemed but not yet renewed nature of the present creation in which the power of sin and death, though broken, has not yet been thoroughly vanquished. Using this hope as the framework into which we live in faith, there are several things that can be said about suffering.
First, God in Christ has promised that suffering will be no more, but that every human will, at the very least, need to suffer bodily death before that happens. Paul explores this idea in detail in 1 Corinthians 15, and again, less formally, in 1 Thessalonians 4. This follows on the prophecies of Isaiah we hear in church during Advent (see especially Isaiah 25:8 and 65:19-20), rephrased by St. John as “Behold, the dwelling place of God is with man… He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning nor crying, nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away.”[2] When taken together, we have the promise of full transformation and renewal that comes through the purging of all that is not of God, which takes the form of suffering and death in this life.
Second, if we understand the present creation as being in the process of becoming something radically new, rather than something that will ultimately be discarded, suffering is necessarily formative. Scripture frequently uses the image of labour pains: giving birth is preceded by increasingly painful contractions that do not let up until the child has passed through the birth canal. Similarly, we and the rest of creation are feeling the increasingly urgent and painful convulsions that precede the joy of new birth and the redemptive transformation of all creation.
And third, suffering is inevitable. It’s vital to remember that the one in whom all our hope rests, Jesus Christ, suffered and promised that the path of his followers would likewise be the way of the cross (see Matthew 16:24-27 and Luke 9:23-26). Many of Jesus’s most intimate friends and followers were persecuted and martyred specifically because they lived so fully into their Christian hope. Until the redemption of the world is fully realized, living into the promise of a remade and transformed heaven and earth will necessarily create friction between old and new.
We’ve been promised in Scripture (see again Revelation 21) that God will remake the world without the pain points, so our role in the present is therefore not to work out how to eliminate suffering entirely. Yes, we need to love our neighbours and mitigate their suffering however we can, but Jesus promises that even if—perhaps especially if—we’re doing all the right things, we will still suffer. Before his death, Jesus says to his disciples, “If the world hates you, know that it has hated me before it has hated you … if they persecuted me, they will also persecute you.”[3] One has only to skim the history of the church to see that suffering has been a feature of faithful living since the very beginning.
Lots of ink has been spilled over the centuries in debates over the reason for suffering and what God’s relationship to suffering and evil is (the book of Job being one of the earliest Jewish responses to the question, and Augustine’s //City of God// being one of the most famous early Christian responses in its development of the concept of “just war”). While an interesting theological question, I feel this is a red herring that distracts us from the real experience of suffering and does nothing to address suffering’s inevitability. I’m of the opinion that suffering happens for all sorts of reasons: sometimes God teaches us through suffering, sometimes it’s sin acting in the world, sometimes it’s someone enacting their free will in a way that conflicts with mine, and sometimes it’s all of the above and more. But no matter the reasons we dream up, the truth will always be a mystery to us.
A spiritual director once told me that “imagination is always harder than reality because in imagination there is no grace. In reality, there is grace.” As an extremely anxious person who lives mostly in “what ifs”, I found and continue to find profound wisdom in this. It’s hard to imagine how we might respond to suffering when we are not in the midst of it because our imaginations cannot account for the wildcard that is God’s grace.
It has indeed been my experience that suffering can be a deep, deep well of grace. This negates none of the sadness, pain, fear, or anxiety of suffering, but rather gives shape to the hope that sustains us through it. When I was in my early twenties, my father was diagnosed with terminal cancer; for the next three years, he was only ever given three to six months to live. That’s a difficult place to live, and I wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy. And yet, through those three years, grace abounded. Old wounds and fractured relationships were healed, new revelations were had, and I remember moments of pure joy coming unbidden and unannounced at the most unexpected times. I don’t know how someone with a different sense of hope and faith than I have would have read those moments of grace, so I can only really speak for my own experience of (and reflection on) those events.
That being said, I have also experienced long periods of depression where nothing good ever seemed to happen, and God seemed to be, at best, silent, and at worst, absent. But finding myself on this side of those deserts, I can say that there was at least enough grace at work to keep me moving forward.
I have reflected often on the beatitudes of Matthew 5:1-12, especially “blessed are those who mourn.”[4] I’m always intrigued by the use of the present tense, and I think this stands over and against the way we speak of blessing in wider society. Blessings are associated with receiving good things—a new job, the presence of family members in a time of need, and so on. I doubt there has ever been a post on social media that “Grandma just died #blessed.” And yet, Jesus promises not that those who mourn will be blessed when the mourning is over, but rather that they are blessed, simply because God has made them a promise (in this case, that they will be comforted). In all the beatitudes, promises are made, but the recipients of those promises are already blessed in their unchanged, unimproved state. As Christians living in the hope of the Resurrection, God has given us a promise, therefore we are already blessed. To say this does not necessitate a list of rules or guidelines for how God might enact that blessing. In this, I think C.S. Lewis said it best in //The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe//, that Aslan (who is in many ways a Christ figure) “…isn’t safe. But he’s good.”
To illustrate this another way, St. Paul endures mocking, beatings, humiliation, and imprisonment cheerfully in the sure and certain hope of Christ’s Lordship (see 2 Corinthians 11:16-12:10). St. John of the Cross speaks of the “dark night of the soul,” which is ultimately a period of purification and instruction by God, but which at the time is painful and lonely. At the moment when she is nearest death, St. Julian of Norwich discovers the immensity of the love of God. If there is a pithy lesson that can be taken from the whole of Christian experience, it may only be that suffering is, and so is God. And if we believe that God is good and faithful and loving, then that is enough to keep walking.
[1] Hebrews 11:1, ESV.
[2] Revelation 21:3-4.
[3] John 15:18, 20.
[4] Matthew 5:4.
