suffering
Be Not Afraid suffering
Chapter 12
suffering
Whenever I think of suffering, Miriam comes to mind. Born with multiple physical handicaps, including the inability to swallow, she had to be fed by dropper for the first few weeks of her life and by feeding tube until she was one year old. But it was "brittle bone disease" that affected her most severely. As a toddler she would sometimes break a bone just by trying to pull her leg out from between the bars of her crib. Later, a bump into a door frame or a simple fall caused by tripping could mean a series of fractures in her arms or legs or both, often followed by hospitalization and surgery, and always accompanied by much pain, not to mention six weeks or more in a cast. By age eight, she had broken her legs sixteen times.
At ten, Miriam was suffering heart failure. As if that weren't enough, the curvature of her spine, which significantly reduced her lung capacity, left her
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continually short of breath. By the time she entered adolescence, she was wheelchair-bound.
Then came the biggest blow of all, when she was just fourteen: her mother's suicide. Miriam herself died at
twenty-eight, by which time she had undergone at least fifteen operations, been hospitalized more than forty times, and suffered hundreds of fractures.
Throughout her short life, Miriam's personality remained largely free of the burdens placed on her by her medical condition. In fact, she reminded one of a sparrow – small, spunky, cheerful. This was true at the end of her life, too: though she struggled for every breath, she was indomitable. When nothing more could be done for her medically, she said, through her oxygen mask, "Well, I think I'm ready. I only have a few more thank-you notes to write."
Can a lifetime of suffering like Miriam's, or a debilitating illness of any length, ever represent God's will? If we claim it cannot, we are faced with a certain tension. After all, the New Testament tells us of people like a man whose blindness was caused "so that God might be glorified," and that it was God's will that Jesus should suffer and die. On the other hand, because the Bible is so full of passages that speak of God's power to heal and save and give life, it seems incomprehensible that sickness and death should still exist at all.
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Writer Elisabeth Elliott points out that though we accept these things, at least on a certain level, as part of life, we find them harder to accept when they "strike down a child, an 'innocent' adult, or someone
else whose victimhood offends our notions of fairness. And so we rationalize and theologize and try to come up with answers." In my view, this is often a waste of time. Certainly it can be fruitful to explore the meaning of suffering, to grapple with the "big" questions, and to let them deepen us. At the same time, Elliott goes on, there is a price to be paid "every time we satisfy our need to rationalize such things as suffering. Once we think we have unlocked a mystery, we tend to close the books to further study. Unsolved, the problem captivated us with the challenge of discovery; shelved, it loses relevance and meaning."
Referring to the destruction of New York's Twin Towers on September 11, 2001, author Barbara Kingsolver says:
There are so many answers, and none: It is desperately
painful to see people die without having done anything
to deserve it, and yet this is how lives end nearly always.
We get old or we don't, we get cancer, we starve, we are
battered, we get on a plane thinking we're going home
but never make it. There are blessings and wonders and
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horrific bad luck and no guarantees. We like to pretend
life is different from that, more like a game we can
actually win with the right strategy, but it isn't.
Speaking of blessings, perhaps one of the greatest is the ability to find meaning in what appears to be meaningless suffering. I say "meaningless" because as long as pain serves an obvious purpose – the pangs of childbirth, the soreness of exercise, or the surgeon's scalpel –we are content to accept it. But when we cannot see a rhyme or reason to it, most of us will react like a cat on an operating table, which (as C. S. Lewis points out) cannot possibly know the difference between a vet and a vivisector, and will therefore scratch and bite the first just as vigorously as the second.
It is all the more remarkable, then, to discover someone like Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who not only submitted humbly to hardships he could not understand, but also let them change him. A famous survivor of Siberia's worst labor camps, Solzhenitsyn struggled for years to make sense of his imprisonment. If the state of his confinement was really a matter of fate, and indicated that he was evil, he reasoned, it should be easy enough to accept it. But then what about those who received even crueler punishments than imprisonment, those who were shot or burned
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at the stake? Were they some sort of super-evildoers? And yet, he noted, it is always the innocent who seem to be punished most zealously. What does that say about those who torture them? Why do they prosper,
instead of the good?
In agonizing over these questions at length, however, Solzhenitsyn stopped tangling himself up (as he put it) in the riddle of suffering, and began to make peace with the fact that whether or not he understood it, it would still exist. And with this acceptance came a new insight:
From then on I felt that the solution to suffering is this:
that the meaning of earthly existence lies not, as we
have grown used to thinking, in prospering, but in the
development of the soul. From that point of view our
torturers have been punished most horribly of all: they
are turning into swine; they are departing downward
from humanity. From that point of view punishment is
inflicted on those whose development…holds out hope.
Looking back, I saw that for my whole conscious life I
had not understood either myself or my strivings. What
had seemed for so long to be beneficial now turned out
in actuality to be fatal, and I had been striving to go in
the opposite direction to that which was truly necessary
for me. But just as the waves of the sea knock the
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inexperienced swimmer off his feet and keep tossing
him back onto the shore, so also was I painfully tossed
back on dry land by the blows of misfortune. And it was
only because of this that I was able to travel the path
which I had always really wanted to travel.
It was granted to me to carry away from my prison
years on my bent back, which nearly broke beneath
its load, this essential experience: how a human being
becomes evil and how good. In the intoxication of
youthful successes I had felt myself to be infallible, and
I was therefore cruel. In the surfeit of power I was a
murderer and an oppressor. In my most evil moments
I was convinced that I was doing good, and I was well
supplied with systematic arguments. It was only when
I lay there on rotting prison straw that I sensed within
myself the first stirrings of good.
What does suffering mean for someone who is not granted such a recognition – or who could not accept it, even if he were? Chuck, a fellow pastor, says that for his family and circle of friends, the method of choice was gritting one's teeth and pretending it didn't matter:
I grew up in a typical middle-class home, where the
subject of death – like illness, grief, heartache, or other
sources of anxiety – was assiduously avoided. It's not
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that a conscious taboo existed. But "negative" life
experiences were rarely, if ever, discussed outside the
family. We simply didn't "go there," conversation-wise.
As a working adult, I found the same silence, the
same walls carefully constructed around each personal
life. When the wife of an engineer at my firm – a kindly
man I regarded as a mentor – came down with cancer,
he brushed off every expression of sympathy. It seemed
as though he was obeying some unspoken code whereby
vulnerability is seen as instability, and pain as weakness.
Obviously he couldn't afford to be associated with either.
He had to remain strong.
I know Ed loved his wife dearly, but to this day I am
amazed at the lengths he went to detach himself from
her suffering, at least on the job. One day he told me
rather matter-of-factly that his wife's tumor had burst; a
few days later he walked into the office and announced
that his wife had died that morning. I was incredulous
that he had come to work – though it's possible there
was no one at home for him to talk to. On the other
hand, the way he dealt with losing his spouse was hardly
out of sync with the way everything else was dealt with
in our workaday world. There was never any lack of
camaraderie, but it was only a façade. When the chips
were down, you kept a lid on things – no matter how
much you were hurting.
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For many people, the belief that pain can be overcome by biting your lip and riding out the storm is coupled with the fear that it is the only thing they can do, short of letting down their guard and exposing their true
feelings. They refuse to do this, because they feel the mask of invincibility provides at least some protection. But far from shielding them against pain, this mask only hurts them: in hiding their pain from others, it forces them to carry it silently and alone.
Others try to deal with suffering by wishing it away, or pretending it isn't there. But as Fran, who lost a son to cancer, points out, this is strenuous (if not impossible) in the long run:
Suffering cannot be put off forever, and when it comes,
there is no way around the pain. Maybe that knowledge
only comes with age and experience. But if I ever have
to go through it again in my life, I hope I have grasped
it. Life is hard, and there are some things that hurt – no
matter how much you try to smooth them over or make
them nicer. You might as well hit suffering head on when
it comes your way, because it won't just disappear.
For Fran's husband, who dragged himself through the first months of their son's illness trying to keep a game face, meeting suffering head on entails utmost
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honesty –and the willingness to open up about one's deepest fears:
I kept my concerns about our son's situation bottled up
because I was concerned that my wife wasn't handling
things. The fact that I didn't allow her to fully share her
worries with me created a lot of tension. She needed
someone to confide in, someone who could identify with
her fears. She needed me.
Then came a breakthrough, when I finally stopped
keeping a wall up between us. I allowed myself to become
vulnerable. I realized that drawing into a shell could rip
our marriage apart. We both knew of marriages where
the pain and struggle that should draw husband and wife
closer together actually did the opposite. Couples were
driven apart by holding their feelings inside, distancing
themselves from one another, and speculating about
what the other one thought or felt.
A big part of the challenge was simply dealing with
our emotions: the same thing that could make us laugh
one day would make us totally fall apart the next. But
to admit that you're just a plain, ordinary, weak person,
and that you aren't coping, and that it's okay – that is a
tremendous relief. If you can do that, you no longer feel
the need to deny or suppress your emotions, or to worry
if they are abnormal or wrong. If you need to cry, cry.
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Once we were able to do this, and to see our stress
mirrored in each other, we could share it openly
together. We held each other and wept for as long as we
needed to. And then we could say, "Well, that's enough
for now, let's go on."
In our therapized culture it takes no great leap of faith to believe that "sharing one's pain" like this is the best way to deal with it. But given the number of people I know who have not only coped with enormous suffering in their lives, but come through it stronger than before, I have come to feel that maybe we ought to stop approaching pain as something purely negative. If we allow it, pain can be an occasion for redemption – a crucible of sorts that may refine and renew us. In his novel Crime and Punishment, Dostoevsky, no stranger to hardship himself, goes even further, and makes this audacious claim: "You don't believe my words now, but you'll come to it yourself…Suffering is a great thing." Because only someone who has suffered has the right to speak this way, such a statement is best applied to ourselves, not recited to others. In any case, it is rare that someone is given the strength to bear their burdens nobly. Most end up weighed down, if not embittered. All the same, there is a ring of truth to Dostoevsky's words, as the next story shows.
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Deb grew up in a comfortable home, attended private schools, toured Europe, and vacationed on Martha's Vineyard. After high school, she attended Smith, an exclusive college for women near Boston. But if her
childhood was synonymous with privilege, her adult life was not.
At forty-three, Deb, who was by now married with six children, began to experience numbness in her hands and feet. No medical explanation could be found. Not one to complain, she quietly bore the bothersome problem as it slowly worsened. Soon she began to grow weak and unsteady as well. "Mom can't even help me zipper my jacket," her son Tommy told a classmate. Nor was she able to lift a milk carton off the table without great effort, by clasping it with both hands. Still, she bravely insisted on fulfilling her motherly tasks.
Early in 1969 a lump was found in the back of Deb's neck, and she was hospitalized. An emergency operation removed the tumor, but the surgery left her totally paralyzed below the neck. Almost completely helpless, she could communicate only with her eyes.
But where others saw a ruined body as the main outcome of her ordeal, Deb concentrated on the fact that her life had been spared. Adamant that she would learn to become fully functional again, she saw a physical therapist several times a week, and at home she strained daily to re-teach her muscles to do what she
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wanted them to do. Part of it was her personality – she had always been a fighter – but there was also another incentive for regaining strength and mobility: she was expecting a child.
Six months after her operation, Deb gave birth to a boy. Miraculously, Mark was strong and healthy, despite all his mother had been through in the previous months. Deb, for her part, was too weak to care for him, or even to hold him for any length of time. But she did what little she could: by propping her arms up with pillows, she fed him by tipping his bottle toward him sideways.
When Mark was six weeks old, Deb entered a rehab program to re-learn the daily activities and skills she had taken for granted all her life, but could no longer perform: walking, writing, tying her shoes, buttoning her blouse, combing her hair, cracking an egg. Despite the tremendous efforts she made, her recovery was only partial: walking proved difficult, her hands shook so that her writing scrawled all over the page, and she remained extremely frail.
For the next several years Deb courageously fought her way back toward normalcy, one painful step after the next. Then, almost imperceptibly, she began to lose ground. Surgery was advised, and she underwent two operations, but neither helped in the long run. For the last five years of her life she was confined to a
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reclining wheelchair, her body so weak that she could not support the weight of her own head and arms.
Even then, however, she refused to give up. Debilitated as she was physically, she remained
mentally and spiritually alert. Refusing to play the part of a helpless invalid, she insisted instead on contributing something in return for the nursing care she received, and put in several hours a day – until a week before her death in 1982 – proofreading manuscripts for a local publishing house.
Coming from a large family and a close-knit community, Deb enjoyed a security and comfort that many do not have – especially nowadays, when loneliness, neglect, and poverty make untold numbers of the disabled and elderly feel that they are a burden, and the once unthinkable idea of a "right to die" has become an attractive, if morbid, dream for thousands of them.
But quite apart from everything that was done for Deb, there was her own attitude: her resilience in the face of infirmity, her awareness of others who didn't have the care she received, and last but not least, her humble acceptance of her dependence on others – which did not come without struggle.
Deb's view of her suffering is summed up in her reply to a well-meaning visitor who told her, near the end of her life, "If you ask Jesus, he can make you well again."
Be Not Afraid suffering
"I know," Deb said. "But he has given me something much more wonderful – my family, and the love of brothers and sisters." At her memorial service, her neurosurgeon said that of all his thousands of patients,
he felt most privileged to care for Deb. He always felt as if he was ministering to Christ, because Christ lived in her so visibly.