Gerry O’Hanlon SJ writes some consoling words to a family member who has undergone much suffering.
Recently, some terrible things have happened to my family and friends; there has been a suicide, abortion, drug addiction and a serious illness. I prayed that nothing like this should happen. Now I’m angry with God. If God does not answer my prayers is it any wonder I am loosing my faith?
Yours is a story of extreme personal suffering. Events like these raise the deepest questions about the meaning of life, to which there are no easy answers. A great temptation for religious people in such situations is to bottle up their feelings of confusion, grief and anger for fear of offending God.
The innocent suffer. Job in the Old Testament complained that God was wearing him out and that the Almighty had made his soul bitter; Jeremiah the prophet moans from his heart to God; the psalmist complains that his own prayers go unheeded while wicked people prosper. Perhaps you may find in these examples some encouragement to voice your own feelings of anger to God: given your situation this would be an appropriate form of prayer, indispensable to any true ongoing relationship to God.
This encouragement to frank expression of feelings is by far the most important way forward for anyone in such a situation. It is also possible to offer some pointers towards an understanding of why such situations occur. But pointers is all we can offer: a great temptation for religious people is to imaging that they have all the answers. The ‘why’ question that echoes in your letter and through the long history of humanity can never be fully answered
The example of Christ
The first pointer towards understanding would be the reminder that all Christian prayer is grounded in Christ’s prayer to his Father that ‘”thy will be done”. This is the bottom line which we can lose sight of in a too strident pursuit of our own projects when they are viewed in isolation from the plan of God.
Christ himself experienced this gap between his own desires at one level and his deeper desire to do what the Father willed. In his agony in the garden this conflict showed in his prayer: “Let this cup pass me by. Nevertheless, let it be as you, not I, would have it.” The Father’s will in these cases ought not be be imagined as imposed or alien: ultimately it is what Jesus wants to do.
The example of Christ is crucial in this whole issue. We put God in the dock for not alleviating our suffering, while forgetting that God in Christ also suffers. We can be afraid that a suffering God is a weak God, forgetting that the full meaning of the cross comes to light only in the resurrection.
Evil and suffering
But why does God’s will include in it suffering? When we are suffering it is little consolation to know that God too shares in this suffering or that love in the end is victorious? Here we can draw a distinction between what God permits and what God positively wants. In a world which is evolving physically, and in which human freedom is respected, evil and suffering are permitted by God. It is part of the divine plan to enlist our human efforts to combat suffering and evil.
Some evil and suffering will persists despite our efforts. But arguably it is a greater good to suffer in a loving way than to avoid suffering altogether through a non-loving flight from the real world. Sometimes we can see the good that can come out of evil or suffering – it did in the case of Christ; it can in the case of the cancer patient who realises now what is truly important in life. At other times we may simply join ourselves to the suffering of Christ in the belief that the seemingly senseless suffering which we and others endure does have meaning, a meaning that centres on the drawing of the sting of death and evil.
Close to the broken-hearted
In the end nothing, not even death or intense suffering or evil, can keep us from God. (see Romans 1:31-39). In the meantime people whose suffering makes prayer difficult might for a time usefully rely on the prayers of others. They might also draw on the clear message of the Gospels that God is closest of all to the broken-hearted, that God is faithful and reliable and that endurance in time of suffering can give birth to that hope which is the fruit of God’s love poured into our hearts.
Very often pilgrims to Lourdes remark on their return that while they have not been cured of their illness, they have experienced great peace. This divine peace beyond all understanding is the result of the sort of prayer which is open-eyed about the real and awful experiences of evil and suffering in our lives. It is a peace which is only possible because such experiences are already part of the mystery of God’s own life. It is God’s suffering love which is the guarantor of both the meaning of our suffering and the ultimate overcoming of all evil.
This article first appeared in the Messenger, a publication of the Irish Jesuits.
