The Jesuit Guide To (Almost) Everything - James Martin [133]
Moreover, my suffering is not yours. Nor is my own perspective of suffering. Just as every believer must find a personal path to God, so must he or she find a personal perspective on suffering. And while the collective wisdom of the religious community is a great resource, the platitudes and bromides offered by otherwise well-meaning believers as quick-fix answers are often unhelpful. Sometimes those easy answers short-circuit the process of deeper individual reflection.
Believers are rightly suspicious of easy answers to suffering. My mother once told me of an elderly nun who was living at a retirement home with my ninety-year-old grandmother. One day the woman’s religious superior came to visit. The elderly nun began to speak about how much pain she was enduring. “Think of Jesus on the cross,” said her superior. The elderly nun replied, “Jesus was only on the cross for three hours.” Easy answers can do more harm than good.
My friend Richard Leonard, an Australian Jesuit, recently wrote about his experience with such facile answers in his book Where the Hell Is God?
Richard’s family has been touched with great suffering. His father died of a massive stroke at the age of thirty-six, leaving his mother to care for Richard, then two, and his siblings. At dawn on Richard’s twenty-fifth birthday, his Jesuit superior woke him to summon him to the phone for an urgent call from his mother. His sister Tracey, a nurse working at a healthcare facility for aboriginal people, had been involved in a terrible car accident. When Richard and his mother reached the hospital, their worst fears were confirmed: Tracey was a quadriplegic. Through tears, Richard’s mother began to ask him questions about suffering that put his faith to the test. Richard called it “the most painful and important theological discussion I will ever have in my life.”
“Where the hell is God?” his mother asked.
Seedtime, Not Harvest
Alfred Delp, S.J., a German pastor and writer, was executed by the Nazis in 1945 for his opposition to Adolf Hitler. He was an unlikely martyr, headstrong in his youth, but now composed while facing death. In jail, he wrote this about his fate:
One thing is gradually becoming clear—I must surrender myself completely. This is seedtime, not harvest. God sows the seed and some time or other he will do the reaping. The one thing I must do is to make sure the seed falls on fertile ground. And I must arm myself against the pain and depression that sometimes almost defeat me. If this is the way God has chosen—and everything indicates that it is—then I must willingly and without rancor make it my way. May others at some future time find it possible to have a better and happier life because we died in this hour of trial.
Richard’s answer to his mother was, in essence, that God was with them in their suffering. “I think God is devastated,” said Richard. “Like the God who groans with loss in Isaiah, and like Jesus who weeps at his best friend’s tomb, God was not standing outside our pain, but was a companion within it, holding us in his arms, sharing our grief and pain.”
Besides the idea that suffering sometimes opens us to new ways of experiencing God, this is the theological insight that I find most helpful in times of pain: the image of the God who has suffered, the God who shares our grief, the God who understands. Much as you instinctively turn to a friend who has already gone through the same trial you are facing, you can more easily turn to Jesus, who suffered. “For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses,” as the Letter to the Hebrews says (4:15).
Richard takes a dim view of those who offer glib answers. “Some of the most appalling and frightening letters,” he writes, came from “some of the best Christians I knew.” Tracey must have done something to offend God, some said. Others suggested that her suffering was a “glorious building