On Suffering

I was asked by a friend to respond to questions about suffering. Here is my response. "In all honesty, I've not suffered much myself. I have been around folks who are suffering deeply, many from being judged, labelled, dehumanized, isolated from family and friends, and warehoused for years and decades. Less than two weeks ago, a friend awoke on Saturday morning to find that her eleven-month-old baby boy had passed away in his sleep. I cannot imagine the degree to which she and her family are suffering.

Suffering, as our Buddhist friends teach us, is a reality of life, although some people clearly suffer more than others. Sometimes if we look deeply we can understand the root of our suffering. Sometimes it seems there is no why. In any event, I have found that it is not particularly helpful to try to explain to a suffering person why it is that they are suffering, though it is an understandable response and defense mechanism. It tends to come across as trite, contrived, even patronizing. Suffering people are not projects or problems for me to fix, and they do not need me to spoon feed them quick answers to age-old questions that confounded the very authors of the Bible. There are no easy answers, biblical or otherwise, and in my opinion, to presume that there are is simply shallow thinking. I believe it is more helpful to simply be present with our suffering friends. I want them to know that I am not afraid of or uncomfortable with their suffering. I want to be willing to bear it with them. I don't want to be too quick to try to get my idea of a good God off the hook. I want to listen to my friend without judgment, hear the questions and affirm that they are valid questions without offering some convenient platitude that might ease the tension and discomfort in my own mind, but will do little to alleviate the suffering of my friend. I should be willing to say I don't know and mean it. If I am willing to be present to my suffering friend and even enter into their suffering with them, then my presence and compassion may ease the suffering a bit.

If my friend insists on some kind of guidance from me, as it seems your friend may be, then I would encourage my friend to think about what good might come from the suffering. For example, it may be that my friend comes to recognize that we all suffer. Then my friend may grow in compassion for the suffering of prisoners, the homeless, the lonely, the hungry, the victims of violence, etc. When we feel compassion for other people, particularly people who are different from us, when we relate to them at a very basic level and see that we are all the same, that is a significant step towards truly loving our neighbor. And then my friend may be able to bring comfort to others who are suffering in a similar way. So I would encourage my friend to think about whether some good might come through the suffering. I think about the suffering that Mother Teresa saw, the steps she took to try to ease the suffering, and the way that the world was inspired. There are seeds of goodness in suffering, I think, if we are able to discern them.

Although I have not really suffered much, I have had and do have doubts. I have come to understand and accept that I do not know what God is. As your friend's questions demonstrate, it often does appear God, if God exists, has fled the field. As your friend points out, we should be careful how we talk about God. For every cured illness or job promotion that we claim represents an answered prayer, there is a corresponding dead child or innocent person executed that seems to indicate prayers are not working. Your friend's logic is sound and should give all believers serious pause. When I am confronted with the sheer number of children who die each day from malnutrition, preventable diseases, lack of access to medicine and clean water, I wonder where in the world God is. Of course, I recognize that many of these deaths are indirectly caused by the greed and excess and indifference of selfish Westerners like me who couldn't, for example, find the Congo on a map. But why would a good God allow an innocent child in sub-Saharan Africa to pay the price for my callous self-indulgence? Yet I do not believe that such doubts are indicative of a lack of faith. As I said earlier, I find your friend's questions much more faithful than the certainty I sometimes hear from professed Christians. As Thomas Merton wrote, "[D]oubt is by no means opposed to genuine faith, but it mercilessly examines and questions the spurious 'faith' of everyday life, the human faith which is nothing but the passive acceptance of conventional opinion." I commend your friend for her brave questions that many in the church dare not utter, though we find similar questions in our scriptures.

Lest you think I have stopped being a Christian, Clarissa, I will say this: In my mind, if the Christian story has any value whatsoever, it is in the claim that God suffers. I do not know what God is, and I tend to be suspicious of people who think they've got God figured out. But if God is love, and if that Love was revealed in Jesus, who showed such compassion for the suffering of mourning widows and unclean lepers and former prostitutes and people with deformed limbs and repentant tax collectors and crucified criminals and his own disloyal friends, and if he was willing to suffer death at the hands of sinful religious leaders and political tyrants in order to demonstrate this Love for all people, then I believe that this Love is present even and especially in the midst of our suffering."