Posted by The WORD in other words (2016) by Fr. Joey Miras, SVD – Toronto, Canada
3rd Sunday of Lent – C
During the his visit to the Philippines, the Pope Francis celebrated mass for the youth in the University of Santo Tomas, a Catholic university in the Philippines run by the Dominicans. One of the highlights of the mass was that several representatives from the different sectors of the youth group were given the opportunity to approach the Pope to say something and to offer a token of appreciation to the Pope for his visit. One of the children chosen was a 12 year old girl, Glyzelle Palomar, a victim of the super typhoon Haiyan in 2013, and she asked the Pope why innocent children suffer and why people do not help them. The Pope, as reported, remained silent and could not give any answer or explanation. Cardinal Antonio Tagle, the archbishop of Manila, accordingly, asked the Pope if he had something to say to the girl. As a response to the Cardinal, the Pope asked the Cardinal in return, what was there to say.
The silence of the Pope speaks for all of us when we are faced with the mystery of suffering. There is really nothing we can say and there is really nothing we should say. We say this because words are not the proper responses to suffering. Human words can comfort us, but they will not be enough. Words can ease the pain but they will not remove the pain. Words can inspire but they will never bring back what was lost, and the situation will never be the same again.
What then is the human response or reaction to pain and suffering?
Although silence is not the answer, silence helps us find the proper clue to how to deal and face suffering. Secondly, silence also helps us find the strength we need to keep ourselves afloat in the sea of pain.
First of all silence as a response to suffering gives us the opportunity to step back and consider our finitude. Although it is a fact that all of creation is not yet finished, most often, we assume that it is already completed and nothing more is to come.
We behave and react as if what we have and see NOW is almost everything. We become so focused only on what is at hand. No wonder we mirror the saying, “What you see is what you get.” It is as if NOW is the only moment.
Though it is not obvious, and we do not easily notice, creation is an ongoing process. As another adage goes, “…life is a series of beginnings, not endings, much like the fact that graduations are not terminations but commencements. Creation is an ongoing process…” God is not done yet with God’s work. St. Paul echoes this thought much earlier when he says, “We know that the whole creation has been groaning in labor pains until now;” (Rom 8:22) as if straining to reach its perfection or completion.
Although we do not belittle the experience of pain and suffering, we neither surrender the conviction that there is a much bigger picture than what we see and experience at the moment.
What we see and experience at the moment is part of our being alive. Job’s lamentations are no different from ours. But he did not give up. In fact he survived all his losses and was happy in the end. “To live is to suffer,” says Friedrich Nietzsche, and “to survive is to find some meaning in the suffering.”
But how much or to what extent can we bear and endure pain and suffering? How much suffering can we take?
This leads us to the second point – that as we take in suffering (or when suffering actually sucks us into its vortex), in our solitary moment, we will find our way out by simply facing it. As the saying goes, “we take the bull (in this case, suffering) by its horns”. Whether we resist, fight, surrender, or accept suffering, these are all ways and means of facing suffering. When we face suffering with dignity and courage we have won already half of the battle.
In her autobiography, The Doctor Will Not See You Now, the blind physician Dr. Jane Poulson, who died of complications from her diabetes and blindness wrote, “I hate having diabetes and being blind. I rail against my body , which is constantly failing me and severely limiting my activities…My covenant (with God at the time of my birth) has required that I repeatedly let go of my images and desires, and that I acknowledge that they are not realities in my current journey. In letting go I have learned about the richness of being alive.”
As regards letting go, the same thought is expressed in Carly Simon’s 1974 hit “Haven’t Got Time for the Pain”. It sounds so similar to the thought of focusing not on ourselves. We actually find the sense of self-worth by not looking at ourselves. The second stanza of the song goes:
“You showed me how,
how to leave myself behind
How to turn down the noise in my mind
Now I haven’t got time for the pain
I haven’t got room for the pain
I haven’t the need for the pain
Not since I’ve known you.”
There is also another axiom that goes “scarred people are beautiful people.”
This particular truism is put into different words by Elizabeth Kübler-Ross,the Swiss- American psychiatrist and pioneer in near death studies and well known for her book on Death and Dying. She says that “the most beautiful people we have known are those who have known defeat, known suffering, known struggle, known loss, and found their way out of those depths.”
Most often our silence leads us to look beside us, or around us, and even beyond us. Though self-absorption is the rule, when in pain, the outward gaze allows us to discover a different view. Nelson Mandela once said that “human compassion binds us the one to the other – not in pity or patronizingly, but as human beings who have learnt how to turn our common suffering into hope for the future.”
In prayer, let us hope that the seed scattered on the ground grows and produces fruit. May the earth do God’s work while we sleep. (Mk 4:26-28)
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