Struggling with suffering… Part II of II

Q: Dear Father John, I really want to think of God as good but lately I have been struggling with all the suffering I see around me and in my own life. Where is God in all of this?

In our first post in this two part series we reflected on suffering from a number of conceptual angles to try to orient our hearts in the right direction. Now we will discuss a few practical matters.

Our faith is weak, and so the weight of life’s pain and suffering often obscures the light of hope.  What can we do to strengthen our faith? What can we do to learn to carry our crosses, and help others carry theirs, with elegance, with love, even with joy? There is a lot we can do. I would just like to mention three things.

Eliminate the Blind Side

First, we have to contemplate frequently Christ on the cross. We need to have crucifixes in our lives – on the bedroom wall, on the desk in the office, on the screen saver, and the smart-phone’s wallpaper… We have to pray the Stations of the Cross more often than just on Good Friday. In other words, we have to prepare ourselves on a regular basis to be soldiers of Christ’s cross.

As a priest, it is agonizing to see people blind-sided by suffering – because it is so unnecessary! We shouldn’t be surprised by suffering. Jesus made it clear, in his words and example, that no one is exempt from suffering. The Church makes it clear, year after year through the liturgical seasons and celebrations, that the cross is central to life in a fallen world and to our growth in holiness. And yet, so many people, in the face of an untimely death, a painful sickness, or some other real tragedy, are still blind-sided. Their initial reaction is surprise and anger at God. But did God promise us that we wouldn’t have to face suffering in life? We must regularly contemplate Christ on the cross, so that we prepare ourselves in times of consolation for the times of desolation that will surely come.

Taking the Initiative

Second, we must consciously, purposefully, and humbly help others carry their crosses. There is no better way to become soldiers of the cross and co-redeemers with Christ than to “Bear one another’s burdens, and thereby fulfill the law of Christ” (Galatians 6:2). This is the most potent antidote to the self-absorption and self-centeredness that make us vulnerable to temptation during our own sufferings. Reach out to people in need. Take the initiative to bring light to those who are stuck in darkness. Here is where the Church’s traditional works of mercy come in very handy – just looking over the list can give us new ideas of how we can build up the Kingdom of Christ by bearing one another’s burdens.

Never Walk Alone

Third, we have to keep cultivating our life of prayer. In the end, we can only have mature confidence in God’s Providence if we see all things from God’s perspective. For us fallen human beings, learning to see things from God’s perspective happens only through the gifts of the Holy Spirit. And the best way to give those gifts more room to maneuver in our hearts and minds is to give God time, every single day, to infuse his light and wisdom into our souls. That’s what mental prayer – Christian meditation – is all about. If you want some help to go deeper in your mental prayer, we recommend highly this book.

God is not distant from our sufferings. This is the message of Christ’s incarnation: he is with us all the time. This is the message of the Eucharist: he himself wants to be our strength in the midst of life’s troubles. So, remember, discouragement never comes from the Holy Spirit! It only comes when we try to save the world all by ourselves – a very bad idea: “The world will give you trouble, but take courage! I have overcome the world!” (John 14:1).

Struggling with suffering… Part I of II

Q: Dear Father John, I really want to think of God as good but lately I have been struggling with all the suffering I see around me and in my own life. Where is God in all of this?

A: Suffering and sorrow challenge our faith in God. They push us out of our spiritual comfort zone as we find ourselves asking: If God is all-powerful and all good, why doesn’t he just fix everything, why does he let so many bad and painful things happen – why doesn’t he just get rid of all the world’s evil and injustice? This was Job’s dilemma in the Old Testament. It was even a challenge faced by Jesus himself in the Garden of Gethsemane, and the Blessed Virgin Mary had to grapple with it as she watched her only Son being humiliated, unjustly condemned, tortured, and crucified on Calvary. So you are in good company. Every human person, in fact, has to face this question at some point or another. But we never have to face it alone. Although at times God seems distant in the midst of suffering and sorrow, he is not. He is right by our side, carrying us and supporting us and enlightening us, if we let him. Two reflections, one doctrinal and one practical, may help you find him and lean on him as you navigate these treacherous waters.

God’s Answer to Evil

The Catechism – the systematic explanatory summary of God’s revelation in Christ – puts a spotlight on this question, and boldly gives us the doctrinal answer. Because this issue is so central to Christ’s message, and to our daily lives, I will quote the whole paragraph (#309 – the underlinings are mine):

If God the Father almighty, the Creator of the ordered and good world, cares for all his creatures, why does evil exist? To this question, as pressing as it is unavoidable and as painful as it is mysterious, no quick answer will suffice. Only Christian faith as a whole constitutes the answer to this question: the goodness of creation, the drama of sin and the patient love of God who comes to meet man by his covenants, the redemptive Incarnation of his Son, his gift of the Spirit, his gathering of the Church, the power of the sacraments and his call to a blessed life to which free creatures are invited to consent in advance, but from which, by a terrible mystery, they can also turn away in advance. There is not a single aspect of the Christian message that is not in part an answer to the question of evil.

You may have to read that paragraph more than once for it to sink in. Basically, God did not create evil and the suffering that evil causes, directly or indirectly. God created the world good, but he gave angels and humans free will. When the devil abused this freedom by rebelling against God, evil entered the universe. When the devil tempted Adam and Eve, and when they decided to follow him instead of God, that evil entered the human realm as well. Evil is not something positive, but negative. Just as cold is not something positive, but negative – it is the lack of heat. And darkness is not something positive, but negative – the lack of light. Just so, evil is the absence of some good that was part of God’s original design. When a free creature (an angel or a human) deviates from God’s plan, suffering is the logical result. And since we are all connected – we were created to be God’s family; the human race was created to be one human family, in which the actions of one person affect others, for good or ill – the sin of Adam had repercussions for all of us, just as the sin of an abusive dad or an over-possessive mom has repercussions for their children.

God Didn’t Create Robots

If God had created angels and humans without free will, he could have avoided all evil. But then you and I would be nothing more than robots. We would not be capable of love, which involves the free gift of self to another person. And if we were incapable of love, we would not be created in God’s image and likeness. And without that likeness, we would not be able to enter into heaven, the communion of life and love with God. So God took the risk.

Of course, in his omnipotence and omniscience, he is able to repair the damage done by sin and rebellion against his plan. The story of salvation, from the Garden of Eden to the Garden of Gethsemane to the New Jerusalem at the end of history, is the story of that reparation, the “redemption” of fallen humanity. In the life of every person who repents and returns to God, God shows his merciful and transforming love by mysteriously bringing forth good out of evil. This is hard for us to understand. But we get a glimpse of it by contemplating how God was able to work the most marvelous miracle in history, Christ’s resurrection, in the wake of the most horrific sin in history, the deicide of Christ’s crucifixion. This is the warp and woof of Christian life: Good Fridays followed by Easter Sundays.

Keeping the Whole Story in Mind

If we didn’t know this plan of redemption, there would be no option but despair in the face of the immense suffering and injustice of the world. But we do know the plan. We know the last scene of the story; we know that in the end “He will wipe away every tear from their eyes; and there will no longer be any death; there will no longer be any mourning, or crying, or pain; the first things have passed away” (Revelation 21:4).

The core Christian virtue of hope is what keeps this truth on our radar screen, so that we never allow ourselves to be drowned by frustration, discouragement, or cynicism. This why Pope Benedict XVI calls suffering a “setting for learning hope” in his Encyclical Letter In Hope We Are Saved (see #s 35-40 for a wild, shocking meditation on the meaning of suffering). This is also why he calls God’s Last Judgment a “setting for learning and practicing hope” (see #s 41-48). Our lives here on earth, in the flow of human history, are not the whole story. We are pilgrimages, and God has promised that if we trust and follow him, all the suffering and pain of this life will be transformed into glory: “And we know that God causes all things to work together for good to those who love God” (Romans 8:28).

In our next post on this topic (next Monday) we will talk about a practical approach to living in this reality.

Monsters vs. Monstrance – More Thoughts on Halloween

by Mark Shea Friday, October 29, 2010 Published with Permission National Catholic Register

Come Sunday, we all celebrate Halloween again, that strange night of the year when, with one accord, American civilization dredges up all its darkest fears of the supernatural and waffles between scaring itself and laughing at the whole thing—nervously.

It’s an odd thing really.  Halloween urges upon us a particular *kind* of fear.  Nobody associates fear of terrorism, or a rise in prices, or dogs, or bullies, or cancer with Halloween.  It’s ghosts, demons, witches, and all that sort of fear that our culture plays around with. We sense, somehow, that there are deeper terrors and evils in the world than just muggers or other workaday fears like unemployment.  We whistle past the graveyard 364 days a year and then, on this one night, we run up to the door of the crypt, ring the bell, and run away.  To be sure, much of the business is good clean fun, what with running around visiting the neighbors, getting candy and bobbing for apples.  But there’s also that other side of it, that makes people surf the web looking for creepy “Tales of the Unexplained” that are found, not on the fiction pages, but on those sites that relate some weird story of a haunting or other paranormal event with straight-faced “just the facts, ma’am” sobriety that insists the thing really happened.  It’s the night where people—even jolly happy godless secularists—take a moment and wonder if, really, after all, there might just be something to this whole “supernatural” thing.

It’s not an unreasonable starting place, particularly if you don’t have the good fortune to have been raised in the Church.  I remember a girl in high school who was greatly troubled by whether or not God existed.  She had a dream in which she met a vampire and was greatly relieved because she realized that if supernatural evil existed, then the supernatural good who is God could too.  And when we look at our world and the sort of evil that can occur—piles of human ash as big as a house at Maidanek—the notion of supernatural evil doesn’t look all *that* outrageous, particularly when we look at the fascination the occult held for the people who were the architects of the Nazi project.  Not for nothing did Pius XII say that Hitler was “diabolical”.

Jesus confirms this intuition by confronting not mere sickness or sin, but the demonic powers behind such evils.  He does not simplistically state that a sick person had it coming due to sin (indeed, he goes out of his way to destroy such assumptions).  And he denies, with emphasis, that those to whom bad things happen are somehow extra sinful.  But he does affirm that evils in this world are aided and abetted by the devil, that Satan can hold us “bound” in sickness as in sin, and that there are such things as demons (i.e. supernatural intelligences called “angels” which have abused their freedom and set themselves as enmity with God and man).

The vast panoply of scary creatures the human imagination has concocted to express our fears reflects this awareness that there is some deeper and more ancient evil behind mere human evil.  Always at the shadowy edge of human evil is the awareness that it trails off into a darkness where something is breathing: something that hates us and wills our destruction.  We call such things “monsters” in our art, and the interesting thing is that “monster” is a word related to both “monstrance” and “demonstrate”.  That is, a “monster” is a thing that shows forth in visible form something Horrible for all to behold, just as the Monstrance shows forth in visible form something Beautiful for all to behold.

We make monsters because it is our nature as sub-creators in the image and likeness of God to do so.  We create, as He does, in our image and likeness and dredge up out of ourselves different faces to show us who we are.  When God made us, he made us innocent and without sin, pure as He is.  But when we fell and chose to trust the word of the Ancient Dragon, who is called the Devil and Satan, we allowed into our souls things that are the stuff of nightmares.  In our art, we give these things body in order to face our fears, not only of what we are, but of what lies behind our fall.  Through those stories we discover again our capacity for evil—and the possibility of resisting it by grace.

The Faith presents this to us in stark form in the form of what the Didache calls the Two Ways: the Way of Light and the Way of Darkness.  It’s what Jesus calls the broad and the narrow way and it boils down to this: the Monster or the Monstrance.

Art Credit: Painting by Jamie Wyeth entitled, “Pumpkins in the Library”

Do you have to know you are committing a sin in order to actually commit one?

Q: Dear Father John, Do you have to know you are committing a sin in order to actually commit one?

A: You would think this simple question has a simple answer. But it doesn’t. We have to get a little theological here to unravel it, but I’ll try to be brief anyhow.

First of all, we have to remember what sin is. Sin is rebellion against God. It is saying to God, “I don’t want to do what you want me to do.” (For more on the nature of sin, you can you seen the posts on scrupulosity and bad thoughts) Right away, then, we can see that every sin has two poles.

Evil Effects Follow Evil Actions

In the first place, there is the action itself. As human beings, our actions can be conscious thoughts, words, or deeds. (Digesting lunch isn’t really a human action, because we don’t do it consciously). So a sin is, in the first place, a (conscious) thought, word, or deed that goes against God’s will. Now, we know that God’s will is as full of wisdom as the ocean is full of water (see Psalm 36:6). And his wisdom is intrinsically connected to his limitless love, his overflowing goodness, and his absolute omnipotence. To go against his will, then, is not a smart thing to do. It’s like going against the manufacturer’s instructions – like putting sand in the gas tank of our car, or drying out a wet cell phone by putting it in a hot oven for a couple of hours. It does damage.

It’s important to have that clear. Any thought, word, or action that goes against God’s will (that violates the natural moral law, the Ten Commandments, the teachings of his Church…) will cause some kind of damage to one’s own person, and to the world around us. We may not always see it right away, but it is there, and it will show up, sooner or later. God doesn’t make up a random list of sins out of thin air. Disobedience to God is disobedience to God’s wise plan for human life, for our life; it’s trying to fly without wings. To describe this first aspect of sin, we can use the term “evil action.”

To Blame or Not To Blame

In the second place, sin involves the conscious choice to perform such a rebellious action. This is why, for example, someone who is driving drunk and causes a fatal accident is not necessarily guilty of the sin of murder (they didn’t consciously intend to kill), but they are guilty of the sin of drunkenness (they chose to abuse alcohol). This is also why a criminal who forces a banker at gunpoint to unlock a safe doesn’t make the banker guilty of the sin of theft – the banker opened the safe against his will. Where there is no free choice, there can be no moral responsibility.

But our distinctions don’t end there. The conscious choice to perform an evil action can itself be culpable or not culpable. In other words, we can be responsible for the evil choice or not responsible for it. If I am responsible for it, then I become morally guilty for the evil committed and its consequences. If I am not responsible for it, then I am morally innocent.

For example, if a little boy grows up with parents who are thieves and who teach him to follow in their footsteps, that child may grow up convinced that stealing from non-family members is not an evil action. In that case, whenever he steals from non-family members, although he is freely committing an objectively evil action, he is not aware that it is evil (he doesn’t know that it is a sin). So, the damage is done, both to his soul (he deepens his habits of deception and dishonesty) and to the world around him (the pain and suffering caused by injustice), but he is not morally culpable for it – not guilty.

On the other hand, if a little boy grows up in a normal family environment, his natural, God-given sense of right and wrong will be nourished by the words and example of his parents and education. In this case, he will know that he shouldn’t take anything that doesn’t belong to him. And so, when he goes off to summer camp for the first time and discovers that his roommate has a collection of candy bars, he knows that taking one of them without permission is an evil action. And so, if he takes one anyway, he is responsible for the evil – guilty.

The Hazy Days of Sinners

This all seems obvious. But in real life the line between culpability and non-culpability often gets hazy. As the first little boy grows up, for example, at some point he will realize that other people don’t live like thieves. At some point his natural, God-given sense of right and wrong will flash a thought into his mind: “What is this person going to do if I steal their credit card and max it out at the cash machine?” It may be a very quiet qualm of conscience, but at some point, unless he has become psychopathic or sociopathic, the qualm will surface. At that point, doesn’t he become culpable, even though he had such a twisted upbringing?

A classic example of this haziness in the realm of moral responsibility is the case of the guards in charge of exterminating prisoners during the Nazi holocaust. Was it truly possible that they didn’t realize, at some level of consciousness, that they were destroying fellow human beings? Are the guards morally innocent because they were simply following orders?… When we start to wrestle with tangled cases like that, it is relief to remember that God is the perfect judge.

Here is an example of haziness (uncertainty about what’s right or wrong in a specific situation) that’s a little closer to home. Imagine that the government makes a mistake in my favor and sends me an extra $1000 on a tax rebate. That money really doesn’t belong to me, which means it belongs to someone else. So, shouldn’t I send it back to the government? But wait, doesn’t the government charge too much money in taxes anyway, and wasn’t it their mistake? Is taking that extra rebate (which I may really need) stealing? Some good Catholics would keep that money without batting an eye, thanking God for it. Others would send it back immediately, convinced that it was a temptation from the Devil. On rare occasions, then, knowing right and wrong is tricky business, business that keeps moral theologians busy.

Getting Down to Brass Tacks

Now we are ready to answer your question. To be guilty of an evil action, I must be aware that it is evil, that it is morally wrong. That awareness may be clear or fuzzy. The clearer it is, the more guilty I am. To be guilty of an evil action, I also have to freely make the evil choice. The greater the degree of freedom, the great the culpability. If I commit an evil action without awareness of the evil or when my freedom is impaired, however, the evil is still committed; damage is done. This is why ignorance is NOT bliss. Fornication still wounds souls and societies, even if the fornicators have never been taught that fornication is wrong.

The spiritual consequences of this long answer to your very short question are pretty obvious. We need to make a decent effort not only to do what’s good and avoid what’s evil, but also, to know what’s right and wrong – it’s much easier to walk quickly and surely in the daylight than in the dark. We have to inform ourselves about what the Church teaches and why, going beyond the Google News sound bites about the Pope’s latest encyclical. That’s why you are reading this Q&A, and that’s why faithful Catholic resources like www.ncregister.com and www.faithandfamilylive.com are so invaluable to us.

Yours in Christ, Father John Bartunek, LC