On the Meaning of Suffering

     This is a perfect time to jump back into the story of how we got here in the first place, as the next step in the journey was a time of great hardship and suffering…and we just started another difficult phase like it, here in Houston.  After Don received his security clearance in January, 2022 there were only 2 steps left.  One was passing a physical readiness test, which he completed in February (after having barely recovered from COVID!), and the other was final approval by a suitability review board, which he received quickly afterwards.  Then came the information I was dreading…he was to report to Washington D.C. in early April for 7 months of training (it actually turned out to be 9 months!)…and the kids and I could not go with him.  This was the part of the job that had almost made me tell Don no when he originally wanted to pursue this career.  I honestly just wasn’t sure I was even capable of raising 4 children on my own for so long, especially when they were so young.  Our youngest wasn’t even 6 months old yet when he left.  Most of all, I was afraid of the suffering that I knew those long months alone would entail for me.   We all have a natural instinct to avoid suffering at all costs, and every time I thought of this phase of the journey, I just wanted to run.  Fast and far away.  But I couldn’t avoid this suffering.  I was going to have to walk (or crawl) straight through it.

     And come the suffering did, in much more intense waves than I ever could have anticipated.  Don left on April 9^th, 2021.  Less than 2 weeks later came the call from my mother, telling me that my little brother’s wife, my beautiful sister-in-law, had passed away extremely unexpectedly, at just 32 years old.  It’s been almost 2 years now and I am still bawling writing this just thinking about that day.  Grief.  What an indescribable pain.  And grieving alone…Dante didn’t cover that one in his Inferno, but I’m sure its gotta be in those circles of Hell somewhere.  My entire family was on the other side of the country, and Don could not come home.  It didn’t matter how much mental anguish I was in, I was the only person those kids had.  Curling up in the fetal position just wasn’t an option.  I wasn’t ready to tell my kids yet, nor did I know how to tell them…so I didn’t.  For days, I continued to drop them off and pick them up from school, help with homework, cook dinner, and tuck them into bed, fighting the lump in my throat and the tears threatening to take over.  All I could think about while nursing my 6 month old was that my sweet little 1 year old niece no longer had a mama.  Moms, do you know how strong you are?  That you have the ability to paint a picture of a normal day and a safe world for your kids while at the very same time you feel your own inner world collapsing?  That you can actually elicit happiness in your children through your small acts of love, while you feel absolutely nothing except pain, loneliness, and despair yourself?  How much mothers can still give of themselves, while enduring immense suffering, is truly an incredible thing.  Mary must have done that.  I can just see her comforting and encouraging those lost apostles while grieving her son’s suffering and death herself.  She knew how to love through suffering, perhaps more than anyone.

     By the grace of God, we managed to struggle through those first dark days.  Not all of those 9 months were difficult days.  There were many days of joy and happiness, especially those we got to spend visiting extended family.  But trials and suffering did rear their ugliness in a myriad of different ways, though thankfully none were as difficult as those first few weeks.  Right around the time of my sister-in-law’s passing, on Easter Day itself, my oven (which apparently confused the day for Good Friday), died in a blaze of flashing light and a horrendous noise that sounded like the buzzer in a game of Taboo, multiped by 10,000.  And I hadn’t a clue how to resurrect an oven.  On Labor Day weekend, I was rear ended with all 4 kids in the car (thankfully no one was hurt!).  In November, our barely 1 year old baby broke her arm (I knew going 9 months without an ER visit was too good to be true!).  And, as seems to happen to us every fall, the kids seemed to come down with a new illness every 1.5 weeks.  The 3 year old puking in the car all the way to pick up the 6 and 7 year old from school, ME puking all night and then somehow having to muster the energy to care for 4 kids the next day, kids waking up multiple times a night.  There were so many days of complete exhaustion and barely hanging on.  So much suffering.  How do we make it through suffering like that?

     If you’re Catholic, you’ve probably heard the saying “offer it up” a few times (or a few hundred times).  I know I heard it from my mom frequently growing up!  I used to roll my eyes at that phrase as a kid, and now I’m on the other end, watching my kids huff and puff when I tell them the same thing.  I want you to TAKE AWAY the suffering Mom, not tell me to do something with it!  So CAN we do something with our suffering?  WHY does suffering even exist? 

     The truth is, there IS a reason for suffering.  There IS actually a deep meaning to our suffering.  It is NOT just pure misery, pain for the sake of pain.  My suffering and yours…it has a purpose.  And I know maybe this sounds trite or “too good to be true” or like we’re trying to put a Band-Aid on a bullet hole. I hope it doesn’t.  I’m not trying to make light of anyone’s suffering, or say I have a magical formula to make it easy.  I know there are millions in the world whose suffering is so vast and deep, it makes my problems look like a scraped knee.  And of course, whenever we can alleviate anyone’s suffering in any way, we have an obligation to do so.  But for those sufferings in our lives, big or small, that can’t be “fixed”, that we just have to keep walking or crawling through, there is hope.  Hope that our pain can actually bring about some good for someone else.

     We need only look at Jesus’s example to know this.  Did His suffering have meaning?  Did it “do” anything?  If the answer to that question is no, then all of Christianity is a lie. But, if the answer to that question is yes, then, as brothers and sisters with Christ in his humanity, and as adopted sons and daughters of His Father through baptism, ours does too!  By far the greatest purpose of our suffering is to help save the souls of others.  As the Catechism of the Catholic Church (CCC, 1994) teaches “By his passion and death on the cross Christ has given a new meaning to suffering; it can henceforth configure us to him and unite us with his redemptive Passion.” (para. 1505)  “Suffering, a consequence of original sin, acquires a new meaning; it becomes a participation in the saving work of Jesus.” (para. 1521).  In other words, we are actually able to unite our suffering to that of Jesus on the cross, and in so doing, participate in his ultimate work of redemption!  St. Paul proclaimed this value of redemptive suffering in his letter to the Colossians, when he stated “Now I rejoice in my sufferings for your sake, and in my flesh I am filling up for what is lacking in the afflictions of Christ on behalf of his body, which is the church” (Colossians 1:24). 

     One of my favorite daily devotional books, called In Conversation With God, sums up these thoughts on suffering perfectly.  “The Passion of Christ…is the only satisfactory explanation for the mystery of human suffering, especially for the pain experienced by those who have done no wrong” (Fernandez 140).

     This is a deeply difficult theological concept to understand, at least for me.  I’ve been trying to wrap my head around it over and over as I write this post.  Here’s another way of explaining it that I found deeply moving.  As Christians, we are called to be “Christ-like”, of course.  Even more than that, we are called to conform ourselves as much as possible to Him.  As St. John said in his Gospel “He must increase; I must decrease.” (John 3:30).  We must grow smaller and smaller as Christ grows and grows in us.  Caryll Houselander describes this phenomenon better than I ever could in this excerpt from her book, The Reed of God (which I highly recommend):

     “If Christ is formed of our lives, it means that He will suffer in us.  Or more truly, we will suffer in Him….It is really difficult to realize that if He is formed in our life, we are not beside Him but in Him; and what He asks of us is to realize that it is actually in what we do that He wants to act and suffer.

     For example, if you are conscripted, it is Christ Who is saying good-bye and leaving His home; Christ Who is marching on the endless route march.  The blisters on the feet of the new recruit are bleeding on the feet of Christ….

     It really needs to be practiced to be understood.  We need to say to ourselves a thousand times a day: ‘Christ wants to do this’; ‘Christ wants to suffer this.’

     And we shall thus come to realize that when we resent our circumstances or try to spare ourselves what we should undergo, we are being like Peter when he tried to dissuade Our Lord from the Passion.” (Houselander 62-63).

     Christ wants to suffer this.  Wow.  I have whispered this phrase to myself many times, whispered it in the very midst of screaming, fighting kids and toddler tantrums, through days of deep exhaustion, through the endless monotony of household chores and entertaining children, and through quiet moments of loneliness.  Christ wants to suffer this. 

     Although participating in the redemptive suffering of Jesus is what can bring our suffering the most meaning, other good and beautiful things can spring from the dirt of our suffering too.  In my case, those 9 months of suffering gave me an opportunity to witness the love and kindness that humanity is capable of.  Every single time that I felt I had hit rock bottom, there was someone holding out a hand to help me up.  When my sister-in-law died, a dear friend immediately said, “Meet me at church.  I’ll watch your kids for you while you go to adoration.”  That was the most beautiful gift anyone could have given me at that moment.  I knelt in front of Jesus for an hour, sobbing, begging over and over and over for mercy, pleading for strength for my brother and niece, and just laying all the grief at his feet.  Another friend dropped a care package on my door step.  Others brought food.  Through the incredible kindness of my husband’s aunt and uncle, I was even able to make it to the funeral.  I loaded up all the kids, drove the 5 hours to where they lived, and dropped my 3 oldest kids off with their great aunt and uncle.  Those angels treated my kids to ice cream, took them on rides in the golf cart, took them swimming at the pool in their retirement community, and just made those kids’ lives heaven on earth for a couple days while I flew up to Washington with the baby. 

     When we got rear ended, the angels even showed up at Enterprise Rent-A-Car.  The lady behind the counter took one look at me hauling kids and car seats out of our minivan, and without saying a word, gave me a free upgrade from whatever they had been about to give us, to a minivan.  Another customer there also immediately jumped up, grabbing car seats in each hand to help me.  When our youngest broke her arm, all it took was one SOS phone call and I was able to throw my older 3 kids into a neighbor’s house so I could dash off to the ER with the baby. 

     I remember one rough night in November in particular.  I had signed up to bring a meal to another mom who was also in a single parenting situation and who was in need of help even more than I at the time.  My dad had given me a piece of advice as a teenager that has stuck with me till this day.  He said “when you are having a rough time, look for someone else to help.”  It takes your mind off your own pain, while at the same time helping someone with theirs.  So that is what I had been attempting to do.  (NOT to toot my own horn, this piece of advice has just helped me over the years and I’m hoping it can help others too).  Well, I had signed up to bring this mama dinner a couple weeks prior, BEFORE my baby had broken her arm and BEFORE my kids had come down with illness number 347 for the year.  I didn’t want to break my commitment to her, so there I was that night, loading all the kids in the car to take her dinner, buckling in the baby with a fresh pink cast on her arm (she’d broken it 5 days before), half of my kids crying and snotting all over the place.  I was 7 months into this single parenting thing, and I was tired.  So very tired.  The memory of that night is burned so vividly into my brain…I distinctly remember thinking that I wanted to just sit in that van and cry right along with the kids.  Well, we dropped off dinner and I somehow managed to get my own crew fed and into bed.  The next morning, I went to my mailbox.  In it, I found gift cards to a restaurant along with an anonymous note just saying how much I was loved.  Sometime the day before, maybe at the very moment I was trying to cook the dinner while holding the broken baby and wiping snotty noses, or maybe as I was about to cry in the van full of sick, crying kids, He had seen me.  He wanted me to know that I was seen. That I was loved.  So He’d sent one of my friends (who hadn’t even known the kind of day I was having) to tell me. 

     During those 9 months, I saw the hands and feet of Jesus in action.  Jesus commanded us to “love one another.  As I have loved you, so you should also love one another.” (John 13: 34).  Jesus loved others through serving the suffering.  When we ourselves suffer, this actually gives our fellow brothers and sisters in Christ the opportunity to BE Christ to us.  If there was no one in our lives who needed our help, how could we fulfill this commandment of Jesus?  How else are we to practice the virtues of charity, kindness, generosity, and humility?  Therefore, suffering not only allows us to participate in the redemptive work of Christ by saving souls, it also allows those near us a chance to form Christ in their own lives as well.

     Now, in all honesty, there were many, many days when I did not suffer well.  When I did not “offer it up”, but instead complained or even fostered resentment.  Just like Peter, there were many times I took my eyes off of Jesus, focused on the waves…and sank.  I actually laughed as I sat down to write this post, because the thought popped into my head that maybe God is giving me another long period of suffering because I didn’t do so hot with the first stretch.  God is so good, he’s giving me a do-over!  All this beauty of suffering talk sounds so good on paper, but man is it hard to live out in the daily grind. 

     Don left again exactly 13 days ago.  This time, he will be gone for about 4 and a half months, with just a 2 week break in the middle.  Right now, with over 100 days left to go, the end of May seems like an eternity away. Some days are overwhelming. Other days I just feel despair at the long road ahead, threatening to drag my soul down with it. Some days I call my husband in tears. Again I just want to run far and fast from these next few months.  But already, on some days, angels have shown up in full force. If you are reading this, and going through a period of suffering yourself, know that you are not alone.  He sees you.  Right now, He sees you.  You are so loved. In every hard day to come, He is already there.  I hope you remember that you can help Him save souls with this suffering.  I hope I remember it too.  I hope you keep your eyes locked on Jesus, not on the waves. I hope family, friends, and strangers rush in to help you carry your cross.  And I hope you remember to hope. ❤️

“The great Christian revolution has been to convert pain into fruitful suffering and to turn a bad thing into something good.  We have deprived the devil of this weapon; and with it, we can conquer eternity” (Escriva, para. 887).

References:

Fernandez, Francis. “The Christian Meaning of Suffering.” In Conversation With God, vol. 5, Scepter Publishers, 2021, pp.138-143.

Houselander, Caryll. “Et Homo Factus Est.” The Reed of God, Ave Maria Press, Inc., 2020, pp. 57-63.

Escrica, Josemaria. “Furrow.” Scepter Publishers, 1992.