The Dignity of Suffering

Have you ever had the negative realization that, if someone is talking to you about someone else behind their back, then it’s likely that they also talk about you behind your back?

Or, positively, have you found yourself being confident that someone would treat you well who has consistently treated others well?

It is how a person speaks about other people, or how one acts in various situations, that sometimes says more about that person and who they are than what they were actually talking about or doing.

Similarly, how we grieve in the face of suffering and death tells us something significant about ourselves as the one left bereft, as well as about what the death of our beloved means to us.

Who are we in grief?

A Basic Religious Vision

The writer, Flannery O’Connor wrote that in the past, if people were generally less focused on their feelings than today, they were certainly better able than us to contextualize the meaning of their sufferings. Theirs was a “basic religious vision” in which the sufferings of life and death could acquire meaning. Suffering may often have been quite terrible, but it was not meaningless.[i]

Today, it is the lack of some basic religious vision that tends to render our suffering not only terrible but meaningless too.

For O’Connor, in the absence of such a vision, some context of meaning, we approach the inevitability of suffering and death with less understanding and less hope. Where meaning has lapsed, there is a vacuum that is filled by feelings alone. That is, today we feel more but understand less.

If there is some truth in what she has to say, then it seems that there is a tension between our feelings and our intelligence that is difficult to maintain in equilibrium. What we feel and what we think are not easily held in balance. This tension between feeling and intelligence has a major impact on how we grieve suffering and death.

When we emphasize feeling, without a religious vision or philosophical openness to mystery, what we value most is to feel well, to feel satisfied, to feel happy. Such feelings can only arise in the absence of suffering. Suffering itself is a horror because it counteracts what we value most: feeling well. To suffer is to feel, not well, but miserable. Suffering is the descent into a kind of darkness where there should be light; where one feels a loss of wellbeing. Where feelings are valued above meaning, wellbeing is precisely what one feels entitled to.

Many of us have spent vast sums of money over the course of a lifetime to acquire access to healthcare, comfortable furniture, pleasurable entertainment systems, suitable clothing, and so on. We have rightly done what we could to minimize unnecessary suffering for ourselves and those who depend upon us. But we have deceived ourselves if we have somehow also concluded that we could buy a detour around suffering in general, that suffering should never happen to us, that suffering was beneath us.

Furthermore, in the name of compassion and mercy, we may feel that nobody should suffer (unless they deserve it through their words or actions). The silent pain of animals, leukemia in children, the sudden encounter with a parent’s or a spouse’s mortality: nobody deserves to suffer like this. “Why should they have to suffer?”

Without a religious vision of a loving, personal God or an awareness of abiding mystery in a cosmos of life and death, our outrage at innocent suffering can amplify itself in a vacuum of meaninglessness. Suffering is meaningless when feeling well is the marker of a meaningful life.

Effectively, in the absence of a religious vision or a philosophical foundation, suffering is never appropriate. (Again, perhaps an exception may be made for the sufferer who is reaping the fruits of their oppression or life of hubris). For the sensibilities of a materially comfortable age, suffering lies beneath a dignified life because we have assumed that only a life without suffering can be meaningful. In the name of modern compassion and mercy, we pronounce a suffering life to be unworthy of anyone, a life not worth living, a life without meaning. In the name of compassion and mercy, the option to euthanize increasingly offers itself as the expedient and justified fix.

Just what are the assumptions of modernity here? That physical health and mental wellbeing make a life worth living and alone are called good. Sickness, breakdown, and death are intrinsically and irredeemably bad.

It follows then that a God who allows suffering to happen simply does not measure up to our standards of value. Theodicy: If God exists, and if God were good, He would not permit such suffering.

But what if our assumptions are wrong? What if our non-religious vision of life is limited. What if our grief is telling us something else beyond those limits?

Grief, if we pay attention to it, in all of its depth of feeling and in all of its uncanny strangeness, has a direction. But here lies the difficulty. Grief moves in a direction toward what cannot ever be known. It makes no sense, for example, to call out the name of our deceased beloved. She has died. She is not here. But in a flood of sorrow, we call out for her regardless, as though seeking, as though by grasping we might still cling to a shred of her life. Grief catapults us into the heart of mystery. The direction of grief is oriented toward the known unknown.

Grief is not just a feeling. Nor is it a suffering that is intrinsically meaningless. Grief is a combination of cascading feelings and paradoxical direction. The feelings of grief perform like an engine that drives us beyond the frontier of what is knowable and toward the terra incognita of abiding mystery. Grief confronts us with the reality of life and death, and in this confrontation it can recover some “basic religious vision” or an experience of existential mystery in which life and flourishing, suffering and death, are recovered as already meaningful.

Grief, by its emotional turbulence, can point beyond that turbulence and ferry the one who grieves toward a shore of eventual acceptance of mortal suffering and death. Grief can foster a reluctant growth of the mourner’s soul.

Perhaps Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Confucianism, the Greek philosophers, as well as the mythic imagination of the ancients became crucial to the lives of so many people because they provided that meaningful religious vision of the cosmos that holds us in life and death. They are the most world-significant expressions of belonging in a cosmos pregnant with meaning, inviting us to participate in that mystery that imbues living, suffering, dying, and death with inherent dignity.

In Christianity, God joins us in our suffering. Even God experiences innocent persecution, abandonment, and death. Even God knows what it is to be an atheist as Christ cries out in his god-forsakenness upon the cross.[ii] God becomes human in order to rescue from meaninglessness the misery of suffering and death that each of us must face.

Sometimes grief cries out hopelessly, but at such times the paradox of grief is revealed in a hopeless hope for consolation. The rawness of grief can tilt us in the direction where death can come to mean more than mere nothingness, but rather a way in which we participate in an unknowable mystery. This is the direction where grief becomes lamentation. It is the direction in which a basic religious vision can reconcile the paradox where the misery of loss and the mystery of a cosmos of life and death can become the one encompassing reality.

Dignified Suffering of the Beloved

Your beloved is loved because she was eminently worthy of love across a lifetime.

What made her so worthy of love?

She was loved for all of her uniqueness, her own physical and character traits, her sense of humor, her insights, her idiosyncrasies and oddities. But she was also loved for her very creatureliness. Your beloved was vulnerable to the predicament of existence in the cosmos: pain, loss, aging, all manner of suffering, and inevitable death. You were there with her through the years of her life. When you held her, your held her uniqueness and her mortal-passing-through-time. You treasure those precious years, the term of her life, the term of your lives together.

She is the dignified one. She is the one who dignifies her own suffering and death. In death, her dignity remains.

But imagine for one moment if your beloved could not die. Imagine if she were invulnerable to suffering. That is, imagine if she were only immortal. Then she would not be human.

She would be a god.

Aristotle’s insight was that we cannot be friends with either gods or animals. Beings above us and below us in the metaphysical hierarchy can be worshipped or admired, but they cannot become our friends. In the context of Genesis, Adam was given the world, but he remained unsatisfied until Eve was given into his presence. In the context of Christianity, Jesus would bridge the gap between human and divine by merging his divinity with humanity. He was the paradoxical God-man who called us friends. He made the impossibility of human-divine friendship possible by his love. Yet Aristotle’s point remains valid: all through her life, you loved your beloved because she was capable of suffering and death.

Your beloved may have been occasionally admired (even worshipped at times!) but most saliently she was your life-friend, your soul-friend. You shared each other’s humanity in the mutuality of your love.

You grieve her. You miss her with all of your soul, but would you want her to live on in this world forever? Would you wish for her the fate of enduring when you have long passed away? William Lane Craig recounts:

I once read a science-fiction story in which an astronaut was marooned on a barren chunk of rock lost in outer space. He had with him two vials: one containing poison and the other a potion that would make him live forever. Realizing his predicament, he gulped down the poison. But then, to his horror, he discovered that he had swallowed the wrong vial—he had drunk the potion for immortality. And that meant that he was cursed to live forever—a meaningless, unending life.[iii]

Worse than death for any human being would be the impossibility of dying. This would mean that each of us, including your beloved, would be condemned to an unending life that would never reach its term: a life without consummation, without direction or completion, a life that goes on and on only for the sake of going on and on. It seems that a human life can be a meaningful life only if we can die. Death, in its right moment, confers a profound dignity to human life. Without death, it is not clear what a dignified life could mean.

Your beloved was loved by you because foundationally she was a human person, vulnerable to suffering and death. You loved her for how she lived out her mortality. You grieve her, not because suffering and death destroyed her dignity, but because she has dignified her mortality and vulnerability. You grieve because you love, and you love she who ennobled mortality.

Death Frames a Life

Death frames a life, and all life tends toward its own framing. We put on our socks in the morning and we go out into the world. We struggle for meaning, for the completion of our being. This is the scorching truth that can discomfit lives lived without an overarching religious vision. Death is the necessary completion because how we live and how die discloses to us, and to the world, who we really are. It is Plato’s “art of dying.”

Etty Hillesum, a young Dutch woman who died at the hand of National Socialists, communicates this insight in her diary. It is an insight that gave her the courage to embrace her mortality in the context of that overarching religious vision, the courage to be her own authentic, mortal self:

…They keep telling me that someone like me has a duty to go into hiding because I have so many things to do in life, so much to give. But I know that whatever I may have to give to others, I can give it no matter where I am, here in the circle of my friends or over there, in a concentration camp. And it is sheer arrogance to think oneself too good to share the fate of the masses. And if God Himself should feel that I still have a great deal to do, well then, I shall do it after I have suffered what all the others have to suffer. And whether or not I am a valuable human being will become clear only from my behavior in more arduous circumstances. And if I should not survive, how I die will show me who I really am.[iv]

Etty Hillesum was no fool. She did not choose to die, but to live her mortal life with her eyes wide open to the prospect of death. For her, death would frame the meaning of her life. And the meaning of her life, disclosed in the manner of her suffering and death, endures.