The Problem of Suffering Melinda Selmys Originally published in Issues III and  IV of Vulgata, December and January, 2001-2002.

 This is one of the most asked, and most answered questions in all of philosophy and theology, but it is worth examining it again, if for no other reason than because it is one of the most fundamentally important questions that concerns us. Rarely are we inclined to ask why it is that Divine Providence gives us good things, why our children were put safely in their beds tonight, why our house continues to stand, why we have been welcomed and well received by our neighbours. Most of the time, we take it for granted that good things will happen to us, and that they should happen to us. Sometimes, if we remember to be, we are grateful. More often we simply allow the blessings of our life to slide by unnoticed and see them as a sort of minimum reasonable standard, expected and therefore not surprising. Suffering, on the other hand, never ceases to surprise us. Most of us face it, in some form or another, every day of our lives -- it might be as simple as a stubbed toe, or the death of one beloved -- but for some reason we seem never to get to the point where we expect it and take it as a matter of course. We stub our toe, and we are surprised. We  curse, and we look about for some sort of answer or explanation. Most likely, we will blame someone for having left a toy in the wrong place, or for having failed to fix the step coming in to our house. If nothing else, we are likely to blame the "stupid" chair for being in the wrong place, or, at best, to  blame ourselves for not looking where we were walking. But one way or the other there needs to be an explanation, an accounting for the pains that intrude upon our existence. We may be content to blame a cut finger on the baby who wouldn't let us concentrate while cooking, but when faced with more serious situations, we want something more. If a city is destroyed by a volcano, we are not content to blame continental drift. We want a person to be responsible -- in a sense we need someone to look at, someone of whom to ask "Why?" Continental drift is natural and inevitable, but it does not provide a context in which our sufferings have meaning. And we need a context in which suffering is meaningful, else all suffering, even the dull sufferings of boredom or depression, become unbearable.

There are only two ways that we can try to deal with this problem. The first is to say that there is a God in the heavens, and that He provides  meaning to our sufferings. The second is to say that suffering is innately meaningless, and must therefore, somehow, be eliminated. I will, in this article, deal with the first, with suffering from a theistic perspective, and next month I will deal with the ways in which atheism grapples with suffering, and with the problems that arise therefrom.

So we assume that there is a God -- but how can such an assumption give meaning to the existence of suffering? After all, is the existence of pain not the very reason that atheists reject the idea of a good God in the first place? If such a being existed, and loved us, why would He subject us to suffering?

The answer to this question relies upon two things. First we must  question our fundamental assumption: we must ask whether suffering is necessarily evil. If the answer is that it is not, we must show, not only that it is not necessarily evil, but that it can lead to greater good than we  would find if there were no suffering.

So is suffering necessarily evil? Subjectively, suffering almost always seems to be evil. It descends upon us, unexpected, and robs us of everything that seems to make our lives worth living. If destroys the happiness that we expected to enjoy -- or does it? What happiness do we really find in walking across our living room without having our toe accosted by the armchair? To be honest, I think we must admit that we do not find a lot. Indeed, we sort of  take it for granted -- so much so that it really doesn't bring us any happiness or joy at all. This applies, as well, to much larger things. Perhaps it is no great problem that we find little joy in being able to walk from here to there without being in great pain. But maybe it is a greater loss when we start to take it for granted that we live in a world full of beautiful things. Maybe it is an even greater loss still when we do not recognize how great a blessing are our friends and family. Indeed, the greatest tragedy of all is not the one who experiences the greatest bodily suffering, but the one who, though he has every temporal blessing, finds no joy in any of them.

Consider the effects of some great personal disaster. Perhaps a beloved grandmother dies, and her family gathers together to mourn her. All are grieving, suffering at the loss. But all are drawn together by their suffering. Suddenly they realize that each one is a gift, and that each will be in their lives only a limited amount of time.

Perhaps the dreaded family dinner that happens each Christmas is suddenly transformed from a chore to a delight by the recognition that such dinners will not go on eternally. Look at the effects of the attacks on September the Eleventh. News media across the continent reported that  families were drawing together. University students who had once made every possible excuse to avoid visiting their parents suddenly started calling and arranging visits home. Friends who had not spoken in years finally found the time to ring each other up. Parents looked down at their children and realized, once again, that these tiny people were not merely an emotional and financial burden, but that they were a great and beloved blessing.

True suffering is always unexpected because it entails the loss of something that we expected to have, the disappointment of some hope or expectation. The child born blind does not suffer particularly from his blindness. He wakes every morning expecting not to see, and his expectation is fulfilled. Perhaps he will suffer if he is rejected because of his blindness -- if he expects the love and companionship of others, and finds the he does not receive it. Perhaps he will suffer if he is unable to find work -- but only if he expected that there would be work in the first place. We do not suffer on account of being unable to fly, unless, for some reason, we start to develop a set of unrealistic expectations in that direction. But this unexpectedness is a necessary property of suffering, and contributes to its meaningfulness.

 The loss of the things that we wanted or expected, or even merely hoped to find, should make us more grateful for the things that we do find. I read the story, once, of a man whose wife and three children were brutally attacked by someone they did not know. His wife and two of his children died. The other survived. Afterwards, the surviving child became the source of his joy. He woke every day to recognize what a blessing she was, what a gift he had been given in her existence. I know, within my own life, that sufferings like hunger make me far more grateful for the food that is set before me. When my daughter drives me to the brink of insanity by staying up until three in the morning, the moment when she finally falls asleep becomes a moment of great joy. And the more we suffer, and the more we learn from those sufferings, the more of our life becomes an occasion for joy. Imagine that we were to get to the point where walking across the room without stubbing our toe was, rather than being taken for granted, an occasion of great rejoicing? Then we would be constantly joyful, constantly happy -- for happiness lies not in the having of many great things, but in being joyful about whatever you have.

Can this alone account for suffering? After all, are there not many cases where we do not become more grateful as the result of our sufferings? Are there not times when suffering, far from leading us to be thankful and joyful for what we have, simply leads us to despair and hopelessness? There are, but this is our fault and not God's. We are called, by all suffering, to recognize our own weakness, to recognize that we have not created the beautiful things around us, that we are not able to provide for ourselves all that is good and desirable. But, just as we can ignore the call of the gospel, or the Baptist's cry to repent, we can ignore God when He calls into our hearts in our sufferings. Every time that we suffer, we face a choice. We must either accept each suffering as a necessity, and flee towards God as a hurt child flees to her mother. Or we must reject the suffering and become angry with God for subjecting us to pain which is, in our not-so-humble estimation, unnecessary. In other words, every time that we suffer we are called to Calvary, we are asked if we truly mean it when we say "Thy kingdom come, thy will be done," or if we are only willing to follow Christ to the gates of Jerusalem and no further. If we embrace the suffering, we embrace the Cross, and with it we embrace the inestimable consolation of knowing that God is suffering with us, and that we are united to the greatest possible wellspring of love and joy. If we reject the Cross, we reject Christ with it, we assert our own vision for our life in contradiction to the vision of God, and having thus turned away from God we are left only with a pool of bitterness from which to drink in our trial.

This is why some suffering is destructive -- because we have free will, and our free will makes it necessary that we should be able to choose both for and against God, both Heaven and Hell. If we choose Heaven, even though we suffer the agonies of the Cross in order to reach our Lord and Saviour, there will be no more wonderful, no more joyful, and no more rewarding journey in all the world. If we choose Hell, then God will not force us to turn to Him. He is a suitor, not a rapist -- He woos us all, but if we refuse Him He will not force us to come to Him, even though He knows that the only way we can be happy is by being wed to Him. There is no such thing as suffering so great that it necessarily breaks our spirit. There is no such thing as suffering that can only lead us away from God. The greatest horrors will bring the faithful soul only nearer to Christ. The smallest inconvenience will bring bitterness and despair upon those who do not trust God. Suffering is the crucible which separates the former from the latter, it is like a little death that allows us to see how we are likely to react when death finally ceases us. For the unrepentant it is a wake up call. For those who love God, it is a spiritual thermometer that prevents us from having delusions of holiness fostered by too great ease.

Part II

When dealing with suffering we, as Christians, have a number of things to fall back upon. We know that we have a God who came down and suffered with us. We know that by our suffering, by the Mystery of the Mystical Body of Christ we are able to atone for the sins of others and to relieve their sufferings. In short, we have a context in which to put our sufferings such that we are able, at least with the eyes of the intellect, to see that they enrich our lives rather than demeaning them, and that they are ultimately purposeful, no matter how meaningless they may seem at the time. But what can be made of the problem of suffering by someone who has no such belief?

The “Problem of Suffering” or “The Problem of Evil,” as it is commonly called, are too of the most commonly offered philosophical excuses for atheism. Many people who don’t believe in God say that “If there really were a good God, he wouldn’t allow all of this suffering,” or, “If God is all good, then where does evil come from?” (Sadly, most of them don’t seem to have read either Augustine or Aquinas’s brilliant refutations of this objection.) However, in trying to get rid of the philosophical problem of evil by simply throwing out the idea of good God, they make it more difficult to solve the practical problem of evil: the question of how to make sense of the suffering that invades our own lives.

The most common varieties of atheism, Secular Humanism, Post-Modernism, Nihilism, and New Age pseudo-theism demand some context in which to make sense of suffering. They have only two choices. The first is to fall back on the simplest form of the refutation of the problem of evil (the existence of evil is justifiable if it serves some greater good,) by claiming that our present sufferings are just the birth pangs of a greater and perfected humanity, or that suffering and death exist in order to perfect and purify the species through evolution. Unfortunately, this cuts the ground out from under their feet philosophically – having rejected God on the basis that good excludes evil, they then claim that evil can work towards an ultimate greater good. If this is true, then, of course, the problem of evil does not stand as an argument against God.

The second, and currently more popular approach, however, is to claim that suffering is ultimately meaningless, that wherever it invades human life it brings meaningless trailing along behind it and that death, the ultimate suffering, is the final and complete invasion of meaninglessness. Whate evolves from this is a philosophy which judges the quality of a human life based on the lack of suffering therein. Divorcing itself from traditional systems, all of which claim that the quality of a life is based on its conformity with the greater good, it suggests that life’s value hangs upon a balance of pleasure and of pain. Unfortunately, this suggests that the life of someone like Mahatma Ghandi is of a lower quality than that of a self-indulgent hedonist living in Hollywood. It also suggests that those who are presumably incapable of experiencing pleasure or pain (the unborn and some of those who are severely disabled) or those who are incapable of deciding for themselves which way the balance swings (the disabled, the newborn, those who are mentally incapacitated due to illness) may be judged to have valueless lives. These lives becomes especially vulnerable if they somehow impinge upon another person’s ability to have a “quality” life. If, by existing, they somehow cause another person to suffer, then their existence (which is presumed worthless in and of itself) may be sacrificed for the convenience or pleasure of the other. What this means, is that those whose lives we deem meaningless have their fate placed in the hands of those who have the most personally vested interest in eliminating them.

What this means, on a practical level, is that the problems of abortion, euthanasia, and even of atheism are not going to be solved unless we can reform people’s understanding of suffering. We are usually afraid to talk about it – we think that we will win more hearts with honey than with vinegar, and to a certain extent we have bought into the sort of modern taboo against the discussion of suffering and death. What we tend to forget is that the Christian message about suffering is not actually vinegar. We know that in our own lives, and in our own hearts, we would not want to suffer without God, yet we feel that when people are suffering it is the least appropriate time to bring God up. We feel that if we talk about it to a group of teen-agers they’ll think that Christianity is all doom and gloom and they’ll turn away. What we forget is that these people already know the bad news. Someone in trouble knows that suffering exists. Modern teen-agers know it – just listen to their music or read some of their poetry if you want to be reminded. They may not want to discuss it, but they know it and it’s something that they deal with just as often as you and I. What they don’t know is that good news – that suffering has a purpose, that life can continue meaningfully even during times of trial, that by embracing the cross Christians don’t bring sufferings down upon themselves, they mearly make them bearable.

 Fortunately, there are a couple of things that can help us. The first is the fact that everyone, on some level, knows that suffering can lead to greater good. Everyone, (even the most pretentious “existentialist” adolescent) wants the story to have a happy ending, and no one would bother reading it if there weren’t some tough times along the way. Everyone knows that sometimes great gains can only be won through suffering and hard work. Everyone knows that relationships are often strengthened by shared trials. But many people forget that these things apply to their own sufferings. They think that some outside force determines whether their sufferings work for good or for ill, and so they feel that suffering renders them fundamentally powerless. They need to be told, reminded, that they can decide how they respond when faced with pain. This fact, that pain does not eliminate free choice, is essential to realizing that it doesn’t render life meaningless. It means that we are able to take our sufferings and make of them something good – that the only difference between “meaningful” and “meaningless” suffering is the attitude of the one who suffers.

The second is the fact that everyone knows that half the pain of suffering is the thought that it’s all for nothing. A woman does not suffer the same pain in labour as she does in miscarriage. Physically, they are both the same kind of pain, only the latter is less intense. Psychologically, though, the former is willingly endured because it has an obvious and beautiful purpose, while the latter seems a terrible burden loaded on top of the already terrible burden of having lost a child. A man may walk 5 miles in the rain to see the woman that he loves, but curse and swear if he has to walk a hundred metres to use a payphone when his cell phone battery dies. Atheism has no answer for all of the millions of minor sufferings and inconveniences that so often build up to stress and frayed nerves. Minor malfunctions, failures and misfortunes do not advance the great cause of human destiny, nor do they particularly effect evolution, or any other great human or natural cause. Christianity, while it will not take away all suffering, will take away the fear that suffering is useless, or that it will be unbearable – in Christianity, even the most minor suffering is part of the cross, and so everyone can be redeemed.