A Thought on Suffering

Although my Christian heritage was in the pentecostal/charismatic movement, and our spirituality was often one of joining the Bless Me Club- the ideology of the Prosperity Doctrine and Name-it-and-claim-it group, I soon discovered this kind of spirituality was not for me. Perhaps, I am just a melancholy personality; but the scriptures and the Church Fathers often speak of suffering. And not merely about suffering; but our Call, as it were, to Suffer.

Fr. Eugene C. Kennedy wrote an interesting book on the problem of suffering, "The Pain of Being Human." His introduction begins with a brief description of the sufferings of humanity, even mans inhumanity against man- of concentration camp victims and gas chambers. But then he goes on to say,

"There is, however, another kind of pain in life that has nothing to do with sickness or our sometime savagery. This is the suffering of the healthy person, as undramatic as it is inevitable, as commonplace as it is uncomforted. It is the pain with a thousand different faces, the pain that comes from just being human. No man is inoculated against the ache of his struggle to become himself as a human and a child of God...Man cannot run away from this pain without running away from himself....He is sometimes ashamed of it...He can narcotisize himself in a hundred different ways against it but at the high price of numbing himself to the very deepest meaning of life. Man can only face and deal with it honestly. Indeed, his manner of responding to its challenge becomes the best measure of his maturity."

As Christ has taught us, each one of us has been given a cross to carry. Too often, instead of picking up our own cross and "responding to its challenge," we look at the green grass on the other side of the fence and covet someone else's cross. But we have no idea, really, how heavy their cross really is. Perhaps it looks smaller, lighter. Perhaps, their cross looks more beautiful, one of stained and polished oak! But a cross is a cross, and that by its very nature, implies suffering. If Mel Gibsons' movie has taught us nothing else, it has reminded us of the torture and passion of Jesus Christ. And His Passion began in a Garden, probably a very lovely place at any other time than this one. It was here that He said, "Let this Cup pass from me...Nevertheless let Thy will be done." And he embraced his cross, his passion, his suffering. Can we do less than The Master.