Category Archives: Suffering

“Offer it up!” -Redemptive Suffering

October 30, 2015 techdecisions

God’s Infinite Wisdom, Love, & Plan for Mercy for Whole World: Christ on the Cross! There is no other way!! There is nothing more necessary, nothing more sufficient!!! Nothing more pleasing to the Father-God; the Creator of Heaven & Earth, the Great I AM!!! The Author of all Life!!! Yes, Jesus!!! Yes, Jesus!!! I say: Yes, Lord!!! Amen. Amen.

However elegantly constructed, something seems missing in our explanations of suffering. That missing thing is Someone.

Excerpted from “The Truth of Catholicism” with permission of HarperCollins.

“Offer it up to God, for the souls in purgatory or in reparation for your own sins.” That stock answer (which is almost never heard these days) strikes many Catholics today as lying somewhere between quaint and cruel. Perhaps there was something more going on here, though. For that answer attempted to link our suffering here and now to the redemptive suffering of Christ, and to the purification that the grace of Christ can work in our own lives and the lives of our dead friends and relatives. That is no small thing. Besides, as a famous Catholic writer of liberal disposition once said in criticizing the contemporary Catholic loss of a sense of redemptive suffering, “What else are you going to tell the kid as the dentist comes at him with that drill?”

Suffering, in the Catholic view of things, is a mystery. By “mystery,” Catholic theology means not a puzzle to be solved as Sherlock Holmes would do, but a reality that can only be grasped and comprehended in an act of love. There is no “answer” to the problem of suffering in the sense that there are answers to questions like “Was Alger Hiss guilty?” or “What is two plus two?” The Church has always believed and taught that there is a different kind of answer to the question “Why do we suffer?” That answer takes us directly into the heart of the Church, which is Jesus Christ.

That Jesus Christ is a suffering redeemer has been a shock and an offense since the first days of Christianity. The challenge of belief in a redeemer whose victorious strength is displayed in his weakness may be greater today than at any other time in the past two thousand years, given our culture’s resistance to the idea that suffering is the necessary path to beatitude or human flourishing.

But that is the mystery — the profoundly human mystery — of suffering. Dogs and cats and pandas feel pain. Only human beings suffer. That fact should suggest that there is a link between suffering and the essence of our humanity. Pondering that link is an opening into the entire Catholic story about the world and about us. In that story we meet an even more astonishing proposal. God’s answer to suffering is not to avoid it, or deny it, or blame it on human folly. God’s answer to suffering is to embrace it — to enter the world in the person of His Son, to redeem suffering through suffering.

Redemptive Suffering

The Bible, Pope John Paul II notes in his apostolic letter Salvifici Doloris, is a “great book about suffering.” In it we encounter many instances of that “pain of the soul” which is the worst form of human suffering: the death of one’s children, one’s spouse, loved ones, the fear of annihilation, barrenness, exile, persecution and mockery, loneliness and betrayal, the prosperity of the wicked amid the misery of the just, unfaithfulness and ingratitude. Suffering, in the biblical world, clearly has to do with evil. We suffer when we experience evil.

Still, the Christian conviction, drawn from the first chapter of the Hebrew Bible, is that creation is essentially good. Evil is not a coprinciple of creation, as in other ancient religious systems. If the world God created is essentially good and yet there is evil in the world, evil and good must be somehow related. Evil, John Paul writes, “is a certain lack, limitation, or distortion of good.” Illness is a deprivation of health; a lie is a distortion of the truth. We suffer, the Pope suggests, because of evil, but that very suffering points us toward a good. Suffering is caught up in the interplay of good and evil in the world. Suffering is enmeshed in the mystery of human freedom.

The Bible sometimes describes suffering as a punishment for the evil we do, but that punishment, the Pope suggests, is also linked to good. The punishment “creates the possibility of rebuilding goodness” in the person who suffers. This, John Paul underlines, “is an extremely important aspect of suffering.” Suffering opens up possibilities for the breakthrough of good, for “conversion,” for our becoming the kind of people who can enjoy beatitude with God, because we “recognize the divine mercy in this call to repentance.” AMEN!!! AMEN!!! AMEN!!!! Praise Him!!! Praise Him, Church!!! Praise Him!!!!! Let the Earth resound with the Glory of God!!!! AMEN!!! AMEN!!!! AMEN!!!

Still, the Pope suggests, the mystery of suffering is not ultimately susceptible to rational explanation. However elegantly constructed, our explanations leave us dissatisfied. Something seems missing. That missing something, the Pope suggests, is in fact someone: Jesus Christ.

God’s love, which was so great that it burst the boundaries of God’s inner life and poured itself forth in creation, is “the ultimate source of the meaning of everything that exists,” including, of course, the meaning of suffering. Learning that “love is…the fullest source of the answer to the question of the meaning of suffering” requires not a rational argument, but a demonstration. That is what God has “given…in the cross of Jesus Christ.”

The entire life of Christ points inexorably toward the cross. Jesus’ human life is a growth into the world of suffering to which he responds by his healings. Those healings, both physical and psychological, are signs that the Kingdom of God, a world beyond suffering, is breaking into this world. Yet even as he heals the suffering, Christ suffers. He experiences exhaustion, homelessness, the misunderstanding of those closest to Him. When Peter rebukes Jesus for saying that he must go to Jerusalem and suffer, Jesus turns on the fisherman and calls him “Satan” (Matthew 16.23). Slowly, relentlessly, the net of hostility closes around Jesus, and the crux of the matter is at hand: the moment in which to link suffering to love in the passion of the cross.

Christ’s was an “incomparable depth and intensity of suffering.” Christ suffers as a man, but “insofar as the man who suffers is in person the only begotten Son Himself,” John Paul writes, Christ’s suffering has a cosmic and divine density that is “capable of embracing the measure of evil” contained in the whole of human history. As the Swiss theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar puts it in almost frightening language, we cannot imagine what agonies that entailed. What it would mean to “bear the burden of the world’s guilt, to experience in oneself the inner perversion of a humankind that refuses any sort of service, any sort of respect, to God” is beyond our comprehension. We cannot imagine the suffering involved when the Son takes on Himself all that the Father finds abominable. Yet that is what Christ suffers on the cross.

In Christ on the cross, we meet the triune God’s “eternal…plan…to clear out all the refuse of the world’s sin by burning it in the fire of suffering love.” Christ’s passion is the embodiment in history of “the fire that has burned eternally in God as [a] blazing passion,” the passion of resolute and radical love. God burns for the world to enter into this divine passion. For that to happen, the burning love of God in Himself must reach out to the world and redeem it by consuming everything in the world that is incapable of love, including evil and suffering.

That is what happens on the cross when, in obedience to the Father and in the most profound act of self-giving love, the Son takes all the world’s evil upon Himself, including the evil of death. On the cross, Balthasar writes, two eternal realities meet: “God’s fury, which will make no compromises with sin but can only reject it and burn it to ashes, and God’s love, which begins to reveal itself precisely at the place of this inexorable confrontation.” The cross is not the end of the story. On the cross, evil and death are overcome through redemptive suffering. Christ conquers suffering by his “obedience unto death,” which the Father vindicates in the resurrection.

In the mystery of God’s love, burning its way through the world and through history, the moment of catastrophe is, in truth, the moment of liberation.”

Love,
Matthew

Summa Catechetica, "Neque enim quaero intelligere ut credam, sed credo ut intelligam." – St Anselm, "“Si comprehendus, non est Deus.” -St Augustine, "Let your religion be less of a theory, and more of a love affair." -G.K. Chesterton, “When we pray we speak to God; but when we read, God speaks to us.” -St Jerome, "As the reading of bad books fills the mind with worldly and poisonous sentiments; so, on the other hand, the reading of pious works fills the soul with holy thoughts and good desires." -St. Alphonsus Liguori, "And above all, be on your guard not to want to get anything done by force, because God has given free will to everyone and wants to force no one, but only proposes, invites and counsels." –St. Angela Merici, “Yet such are the pity and compassion of this Lord of ours, so desirous is He that we should seek Him and enjoy His company, that in one way or another He never ceases calling us to Him . . . God here speaks to souls through words uttered by pious people, by sermons or good books, and in many other such ways.” —St. Teresa of Avila, "I want a laity, not arrogant, not rash in speech, not disputatious, but men and women who know their religion, who enter into it, who know just where they stand, who know what they hold and what they do not, and who know their creed so well that they can give an account of it, who know so much of history that they can defend it. I want an intelligent, well-instructed laity… I wish you to enlarge your knowledge, to cultivate your reason, to get an insight into the relation of truth to truth, to learn to view things as they are, to understand how faith and reason stand to each other, what are the bases and principles of Catholicism, and where lie the main inconsistences and absurdities of the Protestant theory.” (St. John Henry Newman, “Duties of Catholics Towards the Protestant View,” Lectures on the Present Position of Catholics in England), "We cannot always have access to a spiritual Father for counsel in our actions and in our doubts, but reading will abundantly supply his place by giving us directions to escape the illusions of the devil and of our own self-love, and at the same time to submit to the divine will.” —St. Alphonsus Ligouri, "The harm that comes to souls from the lack of reading holy books makes me shudder . . . What power spiritual reading has to lead to a change of course, and to make even worldly people enter into the way of perfection." –St. Padre Pio, "Screens may grab our attention, but books change our lives!" – Word on Fire, "Reading has made many saints!" -St Josemaría Escrivá, "Do you pray? You speak to the Bridegroom. Do you read? He speaks to you." —St. Jerome, from his Letter 22 to Eustochium, "Encounter, not confrontation; attraction, not promotion; dialogue, not debate." -cf Pope Francis, "God here speaks to souls through…good books“ – St Teresa of Avila, Interior Castle, "You will not see anyone who is really striving after his advancement who is not given to spiritual reading. And as to him who neglects it, the fact will soon be observed by his progress.” -St Athanasius, "To convert someone, go and take them by the hand and guide them." -St Thomas Aquinas, OP. 1 saint ruins ALL the cynicism in Hell & on Earth. “When we pray we talk to God; when we read God talks to us…All spiritual growth comes from reading and reflection.” -St Isidore of Seville, “Also in some meditations today I earnestly asked our Lord to watch over my compositions that they might do me no harm through the enmity or imprudence of any man or my own; that He would have them as His own and employ or not employ them as He should see fit. And this I believe is heard.” -GM Hopkins, SJ, "Only God knows the good that can come about by reading one good Catholic book." — St. John Bosco, "Why don't you try explaining it to them?" – cf St Peter Canisius, SJ, Doctor of the Church, Doctor of the Catechism, "Already I was coming to appreciate that often apologetics consists of offering theological eye glasses of varying prescriptions to an inquirer. Only one prescription will give him clear sight; all the others will give him at best indistinct sight. What you want him to see—some particular truth of the Faith—will remain fuzzy to him until you come across theological eye glasses that precisely compensate for his particular defect of vision." -Karl Keating, "The more perfectly we know God, the more perfectly we love Him." -St Thomas Aquinas, OP, ST, I-II,67,6 ad 3, “But always when I was without a book, my soul would at once become disturbed, and my thoughts wandered." —St. Teresa of Avila, "Let those who think I have said too little and those who think I have said too much, forgive me; and let those who think I have said just enough thank God with me." –St. Augustine, "Without good books and spiritual reading, it will be morally impossible to save our souls." —St. Alphonsus Liguori "Never read books you aren't sure about. . . even supposing that these bad books are very well written from a literary point of view. Let me ask you this: Would you drink something you knew was poisoned just because it was offered to you in a golden cup?" -St. John Bosco " To teach in order to lead others to faith is the task of every preacher and of each believer." —St. Thomas Aquinas, OP. "Prayer purifies us, reading instructs us. Both are good when both are possible. Otherwise, prayer is better than reading." –St. Isidore of Seville “The aid of spiritual books is for you a necessity.… You, who are in the midst of battle, must protect yourself with the buckler of holy thoughts drawn from good books.” -St. John Chrysostom