by James Martin
In desperation I visited a host of holistic healers: massage therapists, chiropractors, acupuncturists, even a man who would be accurately called a Catholic faith healer, who prayed over me in his office. Nothing worked.
In time, I learned to manage the pain: stretching, exercise and massage, along with setting limits on typing, seemed to work. The pain continued through theology studies and beyond—in fact, I still have it and am limited in my daily writing.
A few years after theology studies, when I was working at America magazine, I started to grow increasingly frustrated about my admittedly minor but nonetheless painful condition. Why would God do this? What was the sense of a writer who couldn’t write? What was the point? One day I confessed my frustration to my spiritual director, named Jeff.
“Is God anywhere in this?” he asked.
“No!” I said. How I had grown to hate that question. I tried to find God in all things, but this seemed baffling. The pain prevented me from typing papers during theology studies and complicated my work as a writer and editor at the magazine. Why would God prevent the work that I was missioned to do? So I glumly admitted to Jeff that I couldn’t find God anywhere in this situation.
“Really?” he said. “Nowhere?”
Then, almost despite myself, I started to recount how the illness had changed me. Since I could only type for a short period of time each day, I told Jeff, I was more grateful for what I was able to write, because I knew that it was only thanks to God’s grace and the gift of health, even if temporary. I was more careful about what I wrote too. Perhaps I was becoming more patient, too, since I couldn’t do everything at once. And I was less likely to get a swelled head, since I couldn’t talk about the grandiose plans I had for future writing. And I was more aware of others with physical limitations and with far graver illnesses. Maybe I was becoming more compassionate.
Jeff smiled. “Anything else?”
“I’m more conscious of how much I rely on God,” I said, “since I can’t do anything on my own. I’m less likely to forget about my poverty of spirit.”
Jeff laughed. “But God isn’t anywhere in this?”
Suddenly I realized where God was. That’s not to say I was happy about my situation or would have chosen it, that I didn’t want it taken away, or even that I completely understood it.
But I did see some signs of God, many of which were part of the traditional Christian perspectives on suffering. That it was okay, and even healthy, for me to lament these things before God, as many of the psalms do. That it was indeed mysterious, something I might never understand, like Job’s questions in the Old Testament, but that I could still be in relationship with God. That I could try (but would sometimes fail) to emulate the patient way that Jesus faced suffering. That Jesus, who had suffered intensely in his life, could be, through my relationship with him, someone who understood my trials, small though they may be. That suffering could open up new ways of experiencing God. Most of all, that God had been with me in this, and small signs of resurrections became apparent only when I accepted Walter Ciszek’s “reality of the situation.”
In vulnerability, in poverty of spirit, in brokenness, we are often able to meet God in new ways—perhaps because our guard is down and we are more open to God’s presence. This is not the “why” of suffering, but it can sometimes be part of the overall experience.
But my suffering is very small. When I was in East Africa, I met refugees whose brothers and sisters had been murdered before their eyes. I knew a woman in Boston who had been confined to a hospital bed for over twenty years. And recently a close friend’s young wife was suddenly diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumor, and, after returning from the hospital, I wept at home for the two of them, and I saw in an instant how little I had ever suffered compared to them and others. My suffering is very small.
Moreover, my suffering is not yours. Nor is my own perspective of suffering. Just as every believer must find a personal path to God, so must he or she find a personal perspective on suffering. And while the collective wisdom of the religious community is a great resource, the platitudes and bromides offered by otherwise well-meaning believers as quick-fix answers are often unhelpful. Sometimes those easy answers short-circuit the process of deeper individual reflection.
Believers are rightly suspicious of easy answers to suffering. My mother once told me of an elderly nun who was living at a retirement home with my ninety-year-old grandmother. One day the woman’s religious superior came to visit. The elderly nun began to speak about how much pain she was enduring. “Think of Jesus on the cross,” said her superior. The elderly nun replied, “Jesus was only on the cross for three hours.” Easy answers can do more harm than good.
My friend Richard Leonard, an Australian Jesuit, recently wrote about his experience with such facile answers in his book Where the Hell Is God?
Richard’s family has been touched with great suffering. His father died of a massive stroke at the age of thirty-six, leaving his mother to care for Richard, then two, and his siblings. At dawn on Richard’s twenty-fifth birthday, his Jesuit superior woke him to summon him to the phone for an urgent call from his mother. His sister Tracey, a nurse working at a healthcare facility for aboriginal people, had been involved in a terrible car accident. When Richard and his mother reached the hospital, their worst fears were confirmed: Tracey was a quadriplegic. Through tears, Richard’s mother began to ask him questions about suffering that put his faith to the test. Richard called it “the most painful and important theological discussion I will ever have in my life.”
“Where the hell is God?” his mother asked.
Seedtime, Not Harvest
Alfred Delp, S.J., a German pastor and writer, was executed by the Nazis in 1945 for his opposition to Adolf Hitler. He was an unlikely martyr, headstrong in his youth, but now composed while facing death. In jail, he wrote this about his fate:
One thing is gradually becoming clear—I must surrender myself completely. This is seedtime, not harvest. God sows the seed and some time or other he will do the reaping. The one thing I must do is to make sure the seed falls on fertile ground. And I must arm myself against the pain and depression that sometimes almost defeat me. If this is the way God has chosen—and everything indicates that it is—then I must willingly and without rancor make it my way. May others at some future time find it possible to have a better and happier life because we died in this hour of trial.
Richard’s answer to his mother was, in essence, that God was with them in their suffering. “I think God is devastated,” said Richard. “Like the God who groans with loss in Isaiah, and like Jesus who weeps at his best friend’s tomb, God was not standing outside our pain, but was a companion within it, holding us in his arms, sharing our grief and pain.”
Besides the idea that suffering sometimes opens us to new ways of experiencing God, this is the theological insight that I find most helpful in times of pain: the image of the God who has suffered, the God who shares our grief, the God who understands. Much as you instinctively turn to a friend who has already gone through the same trial you are facing, you can more easily turn to Jesus, who suffered. “For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses,” as the Letter to the Hebrews says (4:15).
Richard takes a dim view of those who offer glib answers. “Some of the most appalling and frightening letters,” he writes, came from “some of the best Christians I knew.” Tracey must have done something to offend God, some said. Others suggested that her suffering was a “glorious building block . . . for her mansion [in heaven] when she dies.” Others wrote that his family was truly “blessed,” because “God only sends crosses to those who can bear them.” Or, more simply, that it is all a “mystery” that simply needed to be accepted, almost unthinkingly.
Richard rejected these answers in favor of a hard look at the reality of suffering, one that only comes with the long struggle to engage in an “intelligent discussion about the complexities of whe
re and how the Divine presence fits into our fragile and human world.”
When we are suffering, our friends will naturally want to help us make sense of our pain, and they will often offer answers like the ones Richard described. Some answers may work for us. Others may leave us cold or even be offensive. But, in the end, each of us must grapple with suffering for ourselves. And while our religious traditions provide us with important resources, ultimately, we must find an approach that enables us to confront pain and loss honestly with God.
Suffering is a mystery for most believers, but it is one that we should engage with all our minds, hearts, and souls. And the way of Ignatius can help us do so. Let me suggest how.
SOME IGNATIAN PERSPECTIVES ON SUFFERING
The Ignatian worldview accepts and highlights the traditional insights of Scripture and the Christian tradition. But it personalizes those insights by inviting you to meditate deeply on the life of Christ, to ponder how God might accompany you in your pain, and to develop new insights for yourself.
The reality of suffering is highlighted in one of the first sections of the Exercises, called the Principle and Foundation. Ignatius, after outlining the purpose of life for human beings (“to praise, reverence, and serve God our Lord, and by means of doing this to save their souls”), reminds us to strive for indifference to all created things. That means not shrinking from accepting sickness, poverty, dishonor, or even a short life. Through a variety of meditations, Ignatius reminds us that life will often present us with hardships: this is assumed in the Exercises, as it is assumed in the Christian tradition.
Indeed, two of the most famous meditations in the Exercises incorporate some traditional Christian approaches on suffering. At the beginning of the Second Week, which focuses on the life of Christ, Ignatius asks retreatants to meditate on what he terms the Call of the King. In this meditation we are asked to imagine a charismatic leader asking us to follow him or her.
First we are asked to imagine “a human king” calling us to work alongside him. These days monarchical imagery can leave some people cold. The idea of following, say, Richard the Lion-Hearted into battle may not be as appealing today as it was in the time of Ignatius. As a result, many spiritual directors suggest imagining something closer to a modern hero or heroine: I chose Thomas Merton on my first long retreat and Mother Teresa on the second.
Imagine, suggests Ignatius, your hero asking you to follow him or her. Imagine how exciting it would be to receive a personal call from your hero inviting you to join in a great adventure. Most people, were they actually called personally by their heroes—Martin Luther King, Jr., Mahatma Gandhi, Dorothy Day, Mother Teresa, Pope John Paul II, the Dalai Lama—would immediately say yes. But your hero reminds you that you need to do exactly what he does, eat the same food, wear what he wears, work where he works, no matter how difficult.
Next Ignatius invites us to imagine Jesus calling us to work beside him. If we were excited by the prospect of a hero calling us, “how much more” would we want to follow Jesus. But, says Ignatius, we need to be content to experience what Jesus experiences. “Therefore, whoever wishes to come with me must labor with me, so that through following me in the pain he or she may follow me also in the glory.”
The Call of the King reminds you, as the Gospels do, that the Christian life will always involve some suffering—something that Ignatius, Walter Ciszek, and all the saints understood.
It also implicitly highlights the image of aJesus who fully understands what human suffering is, and this image can help us feel less alone when faced with pain.
Jesus’ suffering, by the way, does not simply mean his Passion. During his life in Nazareth, he would have fallen ill like any person of his time, endured poverty, and felt sorrow over the death of friends and family—particularly Joseph, his foster father, who most likely died before Jesus’ crucifixion. During his ministry, he endured physical hardships as he traveled around the countryside, encountered rejection from religious authorities, and probably felt a loneliness about a mission that, after all, no one else could fathom. Jesus understood the human condition. These are new insights that one gains by imaginatively meditating on his life.
Later in the Second Week, Ignatius presents the Two Standards, which we mentioned in Chapter Eight, in our discussion of “riches to honors to pride.” Here are two sides of a titanic battle between good and evil arrayed against each other. “The supreme commander of the good people is Christ our Lord . . . the leader of the enemy is Lucifer.” In the Ignatian worldview, there is a battle raging within ourselves between the attractions to do good and to do evil. But Ignatius trusts in the Christian belief that the forces of good will ultimately overpower those of evil.
Moreover, the Two Standards reminds you that while the life-giving choice is clear—choosing Christ—it will involve some suffering, specifically “poverty,” “reproaches,” and “contempt.” Ignatius says that if you want to emulate Christ, you will want to be more like him and will therefore choose a more difficult path.
The notion of choosing a harder path appears several times in the Exercises. The logic goes like this: If I want to followJesus, then I will choose to become like him. And if becoming like Jesus means accepting hardships, then I will seek those things, assuming that this is not against God’s will.
Like the rest of the Exercises, none of this makes sense without understanding the goal of following God. The person who hopes to emulate Christ in his suffering (remember the Third Degree of Humility) does so not because he desires suffering for its own sake or because suffering is a good or because he wishes to punish himself, but rather to be more like his hero, Jesus, who chose to accept the suffering that was placed before him.
This may be the hardest part of Ignatian spirituality to understand—choosing the more difficult route. But for many believers it is freeing, for in doing so, they can emulate their leader and follow him along the same road he trod and experience freedom and joy: the freedom that comes with being detached from excessive self-interest and the joy that comes with following your hero.
Where Ignatius helps us to understand suffering in a unique way lies in his invitation to imagine the suffering of Christ through imaginative prayer. This constitutes the bulk of the meditations for the Third Week of the Spiritual Exercises. Suffering is a mystery to be pondered within the context of a relationship between God and you, and some of this can be done in prayer, especially by meditating on the experiences of Jesus of Nazareth.
In the Third Week the retreatants imagine themselves following Jesus of Nazareth through the Last Supper, to his trials in the garden of Gethsemane, his arrest and beating, the rejection by Peter, his crucifixion, his suffering on the cross, and his death. “Consider what Christ our Lord suffers,“ Ignatius writes, ”or desires to suffer, according to the passage being contemplated.”
The retreatant tries to accept the invitation to be with Christ in these meditations. We ask for empathy with the suffering Christ. At one point Ignatius asks us to pray for “sorrow with Christ in sorrow; a broken spirit with Christ so broken; tears; and interior suffering.” We are to be present with Jesus as he suffers, something that is difficult for most of us who find it difficult to face suffering that we cannot fix or take away.
David Fleming writes that it is as if Jesus is saying to us, “Let me tell you what it was like, what I saw, and what I felt. . . . Just stay with me and listen.”
A Willing Acceptance
Because of their intense desire to follow and identify with Christ, while some Jesuit saints did not actively seek out martyrdom for its own sake, they welcomed it when it was inevitable. They saw it as the ultimate offering of themselves to God, their ultimate obedience. While this spirituality may be difficult to understand, it was the chief way that the martyrs approached the dangers they faced. In the seventeenth century, St. Isaac Jogues and his companions were martyred by the Iroquois during their work among them. This notion of acceptance appears again and again in many
of their letters written home. Here is Isaac recounting the last day of René Goupil, who was a lay companion of the Jesuit.
Upon the road he was always occupied with God. His words and the discourses that he held were all expressive of submission to the commands of Divine Providence, and showed a willing acceptance of the death which God was sending him. He gave himself as a sacrifice, to be reduced to ashes by the fires of the Iroquois. . . . He sought the means to please [God] in all things, and everywhere.
Before his death in 1642 René Goupil took vows as a Jesuit. A few days later he was killed, gruesomely. His body was hidden by the Iroquois in a deep ravine, and Isaac was only able to locate his skull and a few bones. Jogues himself was martyred four years later. At the National Shrine of the North American Martyrs in Auriesville, New York, the ravine is untouched, overgrown with grass, St. René’s body still lost.
Christ is the example par excellence of the one who “surrendered to the future” that God had in store, as Sister Janice said; who accepted the “reality of the situation,” as Walter Ciszek said; who was “obedient to the point of death,” as St. Paul said. By meditating imaginatively on his life, we can gain insights into what it means to “accept” and what happens when we do and how God can bring new life out of even the darkest situations.
Moreover, by entering into the scene, you often gain a highly personal perspective on suffering, one that even the greatest theologians cannot offer. As David Fleming notes in What Is Ignatian Spirituality? this kind of prayer “makes the Jesus of the Gospel our Jesus.” It helps us to understand better Jesus’ sufferings and our own.
Here is Fleming on what people may learn during these meditations:
Our third week meditations also teach us how difficult acceptance is. When we cannot change a situation, we are tempted to walk away from it. We might literally walk away; we are too busy to sit with a suffering friend. Or we walk away emotionally; we harden ourselves and maintain an emotional distance. We might react to the Gospel accounts of Jesus’ passion and death this way. They describe something terrible and horribly painful, yet we might shield ourselves from the pain. We know the story of the Passion. Ignatius wants us to experience it as something fresh and immediate. We learn to suffer with Jesus, and thus learn to suffer with the people in our lives.
