Joy in Suffering

excellent reflection on Death as a mysterious alchemy of love and pain, from Katherine Bennett at Catholic Herald:

With life reduced to the material, and purpose replaced with comfort, one conclusion is to avoid the subject altogether. If there can be no value in suffering, or meaning in death, why would anyone want to talk about it, let alone see it? 

Why would anyone choose to give their life for a stranger as St Maximillian Kolbe did, choose to give birth to a disabled child, or to stay alive following a fatal diagnosis? The culture of death is the inevitable consequence of a society absent from Christ.

But as Catholics we know that life is not the result of blind chance, a bunch of cells hanging around waiting to return to the oblivion whence they arose.

We also know that death is an aberration, the result of the Fall; it was not meant to be this way. It is our recognition that God sent His Son into our brokenness – “by His wounds we are healed.” This means we can hold two things to be true at the same time. We experience the sadness of suffering and loss, but we do so with the joy of knowing that the battle has been won.

“O death, where is thy victory? O grave, where is thy sting?” (1 Cor 15:55-56). Christ’s death and resurrection gives  sense to the senselessness, brings hope in despair, joy in pain and life that will never end. Only Christians can truly understand that there is value in suffering and meaning in death, such that we can – in my best Dolly Parton – “laugh through the tears”.

“I do not wish you suffering” Peter Kreeft writes in a letter to his children – before adding an important caveat. “I wish you joy. But I wish you also the strange and beautiful sweetness of joy in suffering. It can come only from a suffering that comes from love and trust, a suffering that you know is God’s will for you and that you therefore accept in the simple trust that (1) He loves you and therefore wishes only your deepest joy, (2) that He knows exactly what He is doing and exactly what you need, and (3) that He is in control of every atom in the universe He created.

“When you know this, and when you turn to what you know, instead of ignoring it, God will sometimes give you the grace of a supernatural joy, a joy that seems to be irrational, a joy without a cause, an utterly unexpected and unexplainable gift.”

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In his apostolic letter Salvifici Doloris (1984) Pope St John Paul II explores the Christian meaning of human suffering. In it he writes:

“As a result of Christ’s salvific work, man exists on earth with the hope of eternal life and holiness. And even though the victory over sin and death achieved by Christ in His Cross and Resurrection does not abolish temporal suffering from human life, nor free from suffering the whole historical dimension of human existence, it nevertheless throws a new light upon this dimension and upon every suffering: the light of salvation.

“Man ‘perishes’ when he loses ‘eternal life’. The opposite of salvation is not, therefore, only temporal suffering, any kind of suffering, but the definitive suffering: the loss of eternal life, being rejected by God, damnation.

“The only-begotten Son was given to humanity primarily to protect man against this definitive evil and against definitive suffering. In His salvific mission, the Son must therefore strike evil right at its transcendental roots from which it develops in human history.

“These transcendental roots of evil are grounded in sin and death: for they are at the basis of the loss of eternal life.”