Suffering in Culture - Part 1

My wife organizes a weekly presentation at our Parish every Tuesday evening, called Spirituality Tuesday. This is a major excerpt from the presentation called Our Experience of Suffering in Culture and in Faith by Sherry Cassedy, which I found to be a beautifully written thought provoking explanation, and exceptionally relevant to our lives. Although my life’s story is different I am grateful to have been present at this presentation, because it so strongly represents my understanding of suffering. Some of it has been edited and some of it hasn’t, but this is her work alone.

She began with a quote from Louis Lavelle, “Suffering gives us an extraordinary intimacy with ourselves; it produces a form of introspection in which the spirit penetrates to the very roots of life, where it seems that suffering itself will be taken away”. Her personal encounter with suffering began when she lost her youngest son, to a skateboarding accident, which propelled her into a deep spiritual questioning about the meaning of life, death, and suffering. She talked about how we encounter suffering in our culture, and how suffering is understood in the context of various faith traditions. C.S. Lewis, after the loss of his wife, wrote that “We each bring our own stories of grief and suffering, or our stories bring us. Each of our stories is different but also the same. Suffering is not a singular experience, but universal [even] though each grief is unique.

In a broad sense suffering is our experience of unpleasantness or aversion associated with harm or threat of harm. It may be physical or mental, emotional, and even psychic; it comes in varying levels of intensity, compounded by frequency and duration, from mild to intolerable. Our attitudes toward suffering take into account how much, in our opinion, it is avoidable or unavoidable, useful or useless, deserved or undeserved.  We live in a culture that avoids suffering, by seeking and celebrating pleasure. The tendency is to avoid suffering at all costs, and if it is not possible to avoid it altogether then to get past it as quickly as possible. When people encounter someone who is suffering they will either pull away completely, or they will want to be reassured that we are “getting over it”. To confront the reality that we may not be better, or over it, challenges their reality. It is threatening to the ideal of pleasure and happiness, and it is counter-cultural, which is for those who are suffering an alienating experience.

It is strenuous and tiresome to be with people who cannot acknowledge the pain of others, or even acknowledge their own pain. Being able to acknowledge the pain is hugely liberating, and it allows us to then move beyond it. To deny it, leaves us stuck and exhausted. It is important to face the reality that many of us do suffer, are suffering, and to find a place to reflect on that in community.  It may be easier to push the bad memories under the rug of consciousness and think only about the good things. But by doing so we keep ourselves from discovering the joy beneath the sorrow; the meaning to be coaxed out of even painful experiences and memories, finding the strength that becomes visible in our weakness. It is important to walk with sorrow and to seek a community with whom to explore it.

One of the extraordinary insights that Pope John Paul II shares in his letter On Human Suffering is this: “In itself human suffering constitutes as it were a specific world which exists together with man, which appears in him and passes, and sometimes does not pass, but which consolidates itself and becomes deeply rooted in him. This world of suffering, divided into many, very many subjects, exists as it were “in dispersion”. Every individual, through personal suffering, constitutes not only a small part of that world, but at the same time that world is present in him as a finite and unrepeatable entity. Parallel with this, however, is the inter-human and social dimension. The world of suffering possesses as it were its own solidarity. People who suffer become similar to one another through the analogy of their situation, the trial of their destiny, or through their need for understanding and care, and perhaps above all through the persistent question of the meaning of suffering. Thus, although the world of suffering exists “in dispersion”, at the same time it contains within itself a singular challenge to communion and solidarity.” His insight into suffering is so powerful because in contrast to the sense of alienation in our culture, in suffering we can find communion and solidarity.