Anglicans in Melbourne and Geelong

Suffering - the eternal problem

by Christopher Bantick

The Anniversary of ‘Black Saturday’ – 7 February 2009 – and the recent earthquake in Haiti, continue to focus our attention on the difficult theological issue of suffering. Christopher Bantick reflects.

The walk of faith is inexorably linked to suffering. Few of us would disagree with Michael Casey when he writes: “I have never met a man or woman or child without the experience of suffering.” (Towards God: The Western Tradition of Contemplation.)

Last month I felt collective suffering in a darkened cinema. In Jane Campion’s film, Bright Star, Fanny Brawn throws herself at the feet of the dying John Keats as he prepares to leave for Italy. Many people around me wept softly as they felt her unspeakable suffering.

It is in moments like this, when there seems to be no reason for the intensity of human pain that, as Simon Wiestenthal notes in his arresting book: The Sunflower: On the Possibilities and Limits of Forgiveness, it is easy to assume that “God was on leave.”

Even so, suffering as I have observed it, and felt it personally, does challenge our faith deeply. It is arguably the formidable stumbling block for non Christians to seriously consider making a step in faith. Whether we see suffering as Casey believes being a: “door in the wall that daily routines erect around our hearts”, or “the constant companion of man in his journey through life,” as Michel Quoist suggests in The Christian Response, we all inevitably will face it.

For some time I questioned if there was ever dignity in suffering. Like many others, I have sat by bedsides and watched men and women, some who have lived fine Christian lives, be slowly diminished by the ravages of illness or the appalling punctuation mark on life that an accident can bring. If I am honest, I have asked, like countless others, if God is a loving God, then why does he allow such pain?

I can see clearly how my friend Royce, a great barrel-chested farmer from Western Victoria, was reduced to child like dependency as I fed him mashed pumpkin in Bellarine hospital. His suffering was twofold: his incapacity to return to his farm and his inability to feed himself through the residue of a stroke. I suffered with him as I remembered that here was someone who in robust health would lift sheep in full wool over fences suddenly had become a dying husk of a man.

Against feelings of utter helplessness, even anger, William Barclay pithily summarises the inappropriateness, indeed futility, of asking such questions about the why we suffer.

Barclay notes In the Hands of God, “We can say that Christianity has never pretended to explain sorrow and suffering. It may often be that in any tragedy there is traceable an element of human fault, human sin; in any disaster the reason may well lie in human error. Yet when all such cases are taken into account, there remains much that is sheerly inexplicable.”

In my own meetings with suffering, I have, over the years, waited on God to see what He is teaching me through the sufferings of others, let alone my own. I have come to see that what Nicky Gumbel says in Searching Issues is true: “Suffering is never good in itself, but God is able to use it for good in a number of different ways.”

My own suffering has been largely created by myself. Given James warns against the entire versatility or wilfulness of one’s tongue, “But the tongue can no man tame,” (James 3:8) I have agonised over what I have said to people. Shame sticks to us like a “mangy dog: as Quoist says. I have suffered for my own rashness, selfishness and impetuosity. And I have suffered over the lonely death of my mother.

She was the kind of woman who was never a trouble to anyone. She died alone and when my brother and I went to clean out her retirement unit, we found that she had been incontinent but had managed to conceal this from us. Her small, tragic secretive life of much private personal suffering has left me with a deep well of sorrow.

The eternal problem of suffering, one may argue, began when man exercised his free will and sinned in the Garden of Eden. What is undeniable is where suffering is complete and given as an exemplar, not to mention source of comfort, is the cross. A reality that prompted John Stott to say: “I could never myself believe in God if it were not for the cross.”

A painting that continues to challenge my sense of rightness, fairness and justice is Marthias Grunewald’s, (c1460-1528) The Crucifixion. Here Christ is nailed on his cross in agony while the slow suffocation of death moves across his suffering tortured face. It is as unlovely as it is magisterial.

So what good can come of suffering? It is something I have asked myself as the ashes of grief continue to fall a year since Black Saturday. The question I posed when I first encountered inexplicable suffering as a young Christian with Royce: “How could God allow this?” resonated in the hearts of minds of Christians and non-Christians after Black Saturday.

Earlier, after the 1983 Ash Wednesday fires, Sir James Darling wrote aptly in his Saturday Reflection column in The Age, “The deeper questions, philosophical and theological remain unanswered.”

We need to look no further for answers let alone comfort in how we cope with suffering than see how Christ responded. His life was distinguished by his striving to lessen suffering. He gave eyesight to the blind, healed the sick, fed the hungry and raised the dead. Suffering was not the preferred state of man. It is this that Darling sees as being the reality we like Christ face each day:

“Without fear there could be no courage: without pain no fortitude; without grief no compassion. All these are the agents of growth. It is not the kind of world that we live in which matters it is the way in which we deal with it.”

Or in another way, as Quoist says: “When out of love for others, you enlist in the struggle against suffering, you can be sure that you are entering into the plan of God.”

On Black Saturday, I like so many lost someone I knew. Just recently, I found a sheaf of our correspondence. It was a poignant reminder of the sudden conflagration which took his life and I pondered: “Did he suffer?”

To this there is no answer. I simply do not know. Meanwhile there is a profound reassurance that when I face my own suffering or have the privilege of sharing in that of others, I hold on to the words of St Paul: “For I reckon that the sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory which shall be revealed in us.” (Romans 8:18)

No one likes to suffer, even Christ looked for a way out. There seems little virtue in pain and debilitation never mind the many emotional agonies of this present age. Christ in the garden at Gethsemane foresaw what suffering lay ahead and said:

“O my Father, if it is possible, let this cup pass form me: nevertheless not as I will, but as thou wilt.” (Mathew 26:39)

But while this, at least for me, is a touchstone of faith when I face suffering, there is always the hope found in the Revelation of St John the Devine:

“And God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes; and there will be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain: for the former things are passed away.” (Revelation 21:4).

What then can be the meaning of suffering? What can we glean from our own or participating in another’s suffering, be it glimpsed through the blackened tree trunks of Black Saturday or the news grab suffering our television screens beam into our living rooms each day? Maybe we need to look at what the Greek Bishop Polycarp wrote to the Philippians about the example of Jesus.

“Let us then be imitators of his endurance, and, if we suffer for his name’s sake let us glorify him. For this is the example which he gave us in himself, and this is what we have believed.”

I still wrestle with the personal experience of suffering and the awareness of it in others’ lives. A young couple I know who recently lost their only child to leukaemia are inconsolable. I do not have a pat answer nor do I have a simplistic solution.

But what I do know to be true is that out of adversity, pain and loss there can be fullness. When Church leader David Watson died at fifty, he had already established a clear eyed sense of the purpose of suffering:

“When you crush lavender, you find its full fragrance, when you squeeze an orange, you extract its sweet juice. In the same way it is often through pains and hurts that we develop the fragrance and sweetness of Jesus in our lives.”

Before we know this, one must suffer.

Christopher Bantick is Anglican layman.