Some people argue that it is impossible to find any meaning to suffering… it is a mystery. This session sets out to explore the mysteriousness of suffering. Some of the extracts mentioned chosen presume a belief in God, others do not.
The quest by some for meaning in the midst of suffering becomes a heartfelt cry:
“I do not beg You to reveal to me the secret of Your ways - I could not bear it. But show me one thing; show it to me more clearly and more deeply: show me what this, which is happening at this very moment, means to me, what it demands of me, what You, Lord of the world, are telling me by way of it. Ah, it is not why I suffer, that I wish to know, but only whether I suffer for Your sake.”
Levi Yitzchak of Berditchev, quoted in Cicely Saunders, “Beyond All Pain”
Peter Lippert wrote:
“There are some who know everything, who penetrate even your great thoughts and decrees and give a nice tidy explanation of them all. They explain and prove to me that it has to be just so and is best as it is. But I cannot endure these people who explain everything, who justify and find excuses for everything you do. I prefer to admit that I don't understand. That I cannot grasp why you created pain, why so much pain, such raging, crazy and meaningless pain. I bow down before your glory indeed; but I do not now venture to raise my eyes to you. There is too much grief and weeping in them. So I cannot look on you.”
Quoted in Ladislaus Boros, Pain and Providence
In the following extract, Margaret Spufford attempts to tease out why suffering is a mystery.
“I was surrounded on the metabolic wards by the failures & of creation, the drop-outs of natural selection. But the language of science, and of natural selection, and the language of theological belief in a loving, omnipotent Creator, have to be reconciled. Can they be? Here was the crux of my problem. These dropouts were human babies, with all the needs of normal babies. I am never going to be able to forget the sound of those screams.
I cannot reconcile the images of tiny, deformed children with old men's eyes, in great pain (children who shrank from human contact because so often it represented more pain, the stab of a therapeutic needle which they could not recognize as therapeutic) with what I am bound to believe of a loving, omnipotent Father. I will not assent to all this pain as anything but a manifest evil. One of the commonest Christian heresies is surely to glorify suffering as somehow 'good'.
In three successive generations- my mother's, my own and my daughter's - I have known physical evil. Two of those three times it was caused by fundamental metabolic defects, and of those two times one was caused by an error in the genetic coding itself. I have searched for a theological answer. I do not believe there is one. Would, or can, any theologian produce any answer other than that we are here in the presence of a mystery, insoluble in human terms?
Why is suffering stamped indelibly all through creation like this, endemic everywhere?”
A Jew responded to the atrocities of Auschwitz in these words;
“The executioner killed for nothing, the victim died for nothing. No God ordered the one to prepare the stake, nor the other to mount it. At Auschwitz the sacrifices were without point. If the suffering of one human being has any meaning, that of six million has none.”
While it is sometimes possible to see a cause for the suffering, it often seems to happen completely at random. For example, in the case of a plane crash killing 300 people, how can we account for the 301st passenger who missed the flight because of a flat tire?
Rabbi Harold Kushner, When bad things happen to good people, in a chapter entitled 'Sometimes there is no reason', paints the following picture of humanity being still in the on-going process of creation, the creative act being seen as the creating of order out of chaos (Genesis l: 1-3ff)
“Just suppose God didn't quite finish by closing time on the afternoon of the sixth day? Suppose that Creation, the process of replacing chaos with order, were still going on... In the biblical metaphor of the six days of Creation, we would find ourselves somewhere in the middle of Friday afternoon. Man was just created a few 'hours' ago. The world is mostly an orderly predictable place, showing ample evidence of God’s thoroughness and handiwork, but pockets of chaos remain.”
In Milton Steinberg's words, we live amongst 'the still unremoved scaffolding of the edifice of God's creativity'.
Summary
In this Chapter we have been looking at the idea that suffering is a mystery. Along the Way, Some important concepts and questions have been raised which will need to be considered later as we read other extracts:
- Is there any purpose to suffering?
- Is there such a thing as innocent suffering?
- If so, what does the existence of innocent suffering say about the nature of God?
Thinking it through
1.What do you think about the three observations?
'I cannot endure these people who explain everything, I prefer to admit that I don’t understand”
2. Why do you think explanations sometimes repulse the sufferer?
For Reflection
Rabbi Kushner wrote this tender postscript two years after his 14-year-old son, Aaron, died from progeria, a disease producing rapid ageing and death in children:
"I believe in God. But I do not believe the same things about Him that I did years ago... I recognize His limitations. He is limited in what He can do by laws of nature and human moral freedom. I no longer hold God responsible for illnesses, accidents and natural disasters, because I realize that I gain little and lose so much when I blame God for those things.
I can worship a God who hates suffering but cannot eliminate it, more easily than I can worship a God who chooses to make children suffer and die, for whatever exalted reasons. I guess my (car) bumper sticker reads 'My God is not cruel; sorry about yours'. God does not cause our misfortunes. Some are caused by bad luck, some are caused by bad people, and some are simply an inevitable consequence of our being human and being mortal, living in a world of inflexible natural laws.
The painful things that happen to us are not punishments for our misbehavior, nor are they in any way part of some grand design on God's part. Because the tragedy is not God's will, we need not feel hurt or betrayed by God when tragedy strikes. We can turn to Him for help in overcoming it, precisely because we can tell ourselves that God is as outraged by it as we are."
(When bad things happen to good people)