By Kari Bergmann
Suffering can be a challenging concept to grapple with. It’s something that each of us experiences throughout our lives. The everyday challenges of life present small sufferings in things like our labor, physical injuries, hurt feelings, and arguments, but most of us have also experienced much deeper suffering in the loss of a loved one, unemployment, profound loneliness, betrayals, or even having to face our own mortality with terminal illness. I doubt any of us have been able to avoid the suffering that has been part and parcel of the pandemic that is sweeping across the globe. Yet, in some ways, the fact that we suffer seems contrary to what we know about God. Why does a God who is love and goodness itself, allow for something like the coronavirus? How can he permit our suffering? Pope John Paul II’s (JPII) apostolic letter Salvifici Doloris gives us some insights into these questions.
In Salvifici Doloris, JPII highlights the fact that suffering is a universal, even an ‘essential,’ human experience. It is something that we all must struggle with at various points in our lives and it leads us to ask why we are going through a painful experience. We find part of the meaning of suffering in the Old Testament in which suffering was administered as the just punishment of sin. However, the figure of Job, the righteous man, causes us to realize the mysterious nature of suffering: the innocent also suffer. It is only in the New Testament, through the death and Resurrection of Christ on the Cross, that we gain a fuller understanding of the meaning of suffering.
Suffering will always retain some mystery in this life, however, if our lens for understanding it becomes the Crucified Christ, we can gain more insight into its purpose. Suffering is something that can help man draw closer to Christ and something that can enable his conversion. In his death on the Cross, Christ frees man from his bondage to sin and opens the way, and is himself the way, to eternal life. Although Christ conquered death, suffering is not abolished from human life but it gains new meaning because “Christ has also raised human suffering to the level of the Redemption. Thus each man, in his suffering, can also become a sharer in the redemptive suffering of Christ.” Christ is the model for human suffering, he embraced the whole of human suffering out of love for the Father and submission to his will. Since Christ has enabled us to join our suffering with his ultimate sacrifice, suffering can become a source of hope and even joy. If, like Christ, we are able to respond to suffering with love then it can become an occasion for spiritual growth and maturity. God can act through our suffering and use it through the redemptive work of the Church.
Finding some kind of purpose for our suffering can help to ease some of its intensity. The work of Viktor Frankl, who himself suffered tremendously in a concentration camp, also reveals the psychological importance of making sense of suffering. He found that those in the concentration camp who were able to find meaning and purpose to their pain were better able to endure it. “In some ways suffering ceases to be suffering at the moment it finds a meaning, such as the meaning of a sacrifice.” While we may not be able to understand the specific meaning of various instances of suffering, we can appreciate its deeper meaning. Suffering presents us with a calling to respond in love, to draw near to Christ, and to find hope and consolation in doing so. We need to draw near Christ by meditating on his Passion, through regular prayer, reflecting on Sacred Scripture, and asking Mary (who apart from Christ, is our highest model of holy suffering) and the saints for their aid.
Christ is especially close to us when we are hurting, lost, and weakened. For he said “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.” Our need is what allows God to act through us, it is not something that we should ever be ashamed of. We should seek the support of our families, friends, and parish communities. Our need allows others to respond to them in love, to become the Good Samaritan. Sufferers are not a burden to their community but “the suffering person ‘completes what is lacking in Christ's afflictions’; the certainty that in the spiritual dimension of the work of Redemption he is serving, like Christ, the salvation of his brothers and sisters.” Human suffering, when united to Christ, is for both sufferer and supporters, an opportunity for love and growth in virtue.
Suffering often involves a humble submission to the will of God but beyond that it must move us to action, “it is above all a call. It is a vocation.” We are called respond to our own suffering and the suffering of others with Christ-like love.