Prayer and Suffering
Fr. John A. Hardon, S.J.
Christianity is
unique among the religions of the world in giving a rational and
adequate explanation of suffering. In fact, it goes beyond giving a
strong motive for suffering, this motive being the fact that God became
man in the person of Jesus Christ. Those who love Christ are to love the
whole Christ, the child of Bethlehem and the naked, condemned criminal
on Calvary, the Christ in the manger and on the cross. Those who love
God, therefore, on Christian terms, do not or should not run away from
suffering. If anything, they expect it, and for nineteen centuries they
have not been disappointed. In every age and in every stage of their
passage through time, the experience of Christians has been a share in
the experience of Christ which includes joy and peace, of course, but
also and emphatically includes suffering.
Our focus in the
present reflections, however, is more particular. We wish to look at two
cardinal mysteries - the mystery of prayer and the mystery of
suffering.
What Is Christian Suffering?
We begin
by looking at what may seem plain enough on the surface, but is not as
plain as many people think, namely, just what is suffering? If there is
one thing that everybody experiences but few people define, it is
suffering. As commonly understood suffering means the experience of
pain. It may be due to a variety of causes. Every organ of the human
body, every limb and joint, in fact, every cell is capable of greater or
less, and at times, excruciating pain.
So great is the horror of
bodily pain that annually billions of dollars in our country are spent
by those who can afford it to avoid pain or lessen it. And every
drugstore is a symbol of man's dread of pain and his desire to be
relieved of bodily suffering. But there is pain not only in the body. It
is not just our body that suffers, it is we.
There is pain in
the human soul. To be rejected by those we love is pain. To be
misunderstood and worse still to be misrepresented is pain. To be passed
over when others are chosen or ignored when others are recognized and
praised, or forgotten when others are remembered, is pain. To have
strong desires, noble desires like union with God and a sense of His
nearness, and not have these desires fulfilled, as the mystics tell us,
is great pain. To make mistakes and as a consequence be embarrassed, or
to do wrong, then have to live with the memory of our sins, is pain. So
the litany of pain goes on and its experience is suffering.
The Sanctification of Suffering
But
Christian suffering is not the mere experience of pain, nor even just
the tolerance of pain. In the Christian philosophy of life suffering is
to be sanctified and the sanctification of suffering is called
sacrifice. It took me twenty years to reach that definition. I share it
with you.
Every human being suffers, some more and others less, but
all have to undergo pain. But sadly and most tragically, not everyone
sanctifies their suffering to make it a sacrifice. And it is here that
Christianity has so much to teach the world, in fact, so much to teach
Christians. So we ask: How do we sanctify our sufferings such as they
are and change them by divine alchemy into sacrifice? We do so through
the mysterious power of prayer.
What do I do when I suffer prayerfully?
Now that is a new term, I suppose. When I suffer prayerfully I do many things but especially these:
First,
I see that behind what I endure is not the person or the event or the
mishap or even the mistake (as obvious as these may be). I acknowledge
that the real active agent responsible for my suffering is the
mysterious hand of God. When David on one dramatic occasion while on the
road, was being insulted by a certain Shimei who cursed the king,
called him a scoundrel and an usurper and began to throw stones at him,
David's armed guard exclaimed. "Is this dead dog to curse my Lord, the
King? Let me go over and cut off his head!" But David would not let him.
"Let him curse," he replied. "If Yahweh said to him 'Curse David.' what
right has anyone to say 'why have you done this?' Perhaps Yahweh will
look on my misery and repay me with good for his curse today." David was
inspired by Yahweh.
First, then, when I suffer prayerfully, I
recognize that God is behind the suffering and I humble my head in
faith. Second, when I suffer prayerfully, I trust that God has reasons
for permitting what I endure and that in His own time and way, the
experience now suffered will eventually somehow be a source of grace.
What David did in the Old testament, Christ, the Son of David, not yet
born, enabled him to do by anticipation because of the mystery and merit
of the Cross. If ever we are tempted to doubt the value of suffering
patiently, according to the will of God, we have only to look at the
Crucifix. Talk about value in suffering! But the value derives not from
physical or spiritual pain. It comes from the Infinite God who showed us
- this is God teaching us - by His own passion and death how profitable
prayerful suffering can be. The most important single lesson mankind
has to learn is the meaning of suffering and its value. It took God to
teach us. And He has to resort to the extreme expedient of becoming man
and suffering Himself to prove to us that suffering is not meaningless:
that it is the most meaningful and valuable experience in human life.
For
reasons best known to the Almighty, once sin had entered the world,
grace was to be obtained through the Cross, which really means, through
the voluntary acceptance of God's will crossing mine. This voluntary
acceptance on our part is what the Father required of His Son as the
condition for opening the treasury of mercies. It is still the condition
today for conferring these blessings on sinful mankind.
Suffering Elevates Prayer
No
one who understands even the rudiments of Christianity should doubt
that prayer is necessary for every believer if he wants to be saved. It
is further well known that progress in virtue, and growth in holiness
depends absolutely on fervent and frequent prayer. What is perhaps not
so well known is that prayer has interior depths that are not exactly
the same as having ecstasies or even going through what some of the
great friends of God, as Francis of Assisi or Catherine of Sienna,
received from the Lord. Those are depths, though I suppose more
accurately, are heights of prayer.
We are talking about depths.
These interior depths of prayer are not phenomena that some people
mistakenly take to be God's special presence and evidence of the
miraculous diffusion of His gifts. The depths of which I am speaking are
those of the souls in love with Christ the Savior in prayer, when this
prayer is joined with suffering willingly undergone or even willingly
undertaken as evidence of a generous heart.
St Ignatius, My Father and Guide
There
is a passage in the writings of St. Ignatius that I almost hesitate
quoting for fear of having him misunderstood. The saints sometimes said
strange things. But it is worth the risk in order to make clearer what I
think is so much needed today to protect people from what I consider
the heresy of instant mysticism. When all sorts of fads and gimmicks are
being sold to the faithful as means of becoming "their oneness with the
Absolute." I quote St. Ignatius:
"If God gives you an abundant
harvest of trials, it is a sign of great holiness which He desires you
to attain. Do you want to become a great saint? Ask God to send you many
sufferings. The flame of Divine Love never rises higher than when fed
with the wood of the Cross, which the infinite charity of the Savior
used to finish His sacrifice. All the pleasures of the world are nothing
compared with the sweetness found in the gall and vinegar offered to
Jesus Christ. That is, hard and painful things endured for Jesus Christ
and with Jesus Christ."
We may object that these are the
sentiments of a great mystic who, as all mystics, spoke in symbolic
terms and are not to be taken literally. Not so. They are the prosaic
words of all those who believe that the most pleasing prayer to God is
one that proceeds not only from the lips or even from the heart indeed,
but one that is suffering in union with the heart of the innocent Lamb
of God. Not all the faithful are called to the heights of this kind of
prayer, although no Christian is exempt from his share in the life of
the Master whose prayer to His Father was so elevated by the Cross.
Other
things being equal, the more my prayer life is crucified, the more
meritorious it becomes. The more what I say to God is combined with what
I offer to God, the more pleased He will be. The more my petitions to
the Lord are united with sacrifice willingly made, the more certainly
what I ask for will be received.
There is such a thing as cheap
prayer. I call that comfortable prayer. There is such a thing as dear
prayer. I call that sacrificial prayer. I don't know where the idea came
from that the essence of prayer is just praying and presto, we have
satisfied our prayerful duties and can go on to other things. Not at
all. Prayer is an ongoing enterprise and its continuance is especially a
prolongation of what I say to God (which may not be much) with what I
endure and suffer for God (which can be very much).
Peaceful Endurance through Prayer
We
still have one more reflection on our general theme of prayer and
suffering that should not be omitted: how to maintain one's peace of
soul while undergoing whatever trial God may send us. This is no trivial
question because for failure to answer it - either at all or at least
satisfactorily - I am afraid that many otherwise good people do not grow
to the spiritual stature that Providence intends for them, and
certainly do not accomplish in their service for others all that they
could.
What are we saying? We are asking ourselves a very special
question. How can I live up to the sublime teaching of my faith and
suffer as God wants me to without becoming anxious, worried and
irritable in the process? Christ could not be plainer in telling me not
to worry, but to be at peace. The problem is: how do you combine the
two? How can I practice the one that is, carry the Cross: and maintain
the other, that is, be at peace? I am afraid that sometimes God often
tells us: "Well, if that's the way you feel about it, all right. All
right, no more Cross, at least of that kind, for you. I can see you
can't take it." The answer on how to combine the two is the prayer of
sacrifice.
We begin by admitting, without deletion, that
suffering means suffering and there is no disguising the fact. But there
are two sides to every painful experience. There is objective pain and
there is subjective reaction. The same objective source of pain, say a
cut or wound in the body, an insult or humiliation in the soul, can
produce only a mild reaction in one person and invoke a delirium of
agony in another. Or even the same person, on one occasion is not much
disturbed over the painful experience he has, and at other times, feels
it excruciatingly or worries himself sick over some future suffering or
convulsive fear. Our interest here is not to know how psychologically to
cope with the trials of life so as not to suffer more than we should;
it is rather to see how we can preserve ourselves in peace whenever
God's hand touches us, or He asks us, as He does to carry our cross.
The
method, we said, is through the prayer of sacrifice. What does this
mean? It means that whenever any trial enters our life, no matter how
small, we prayerfully place ourselves in God's presence and voluntarily
accept the trial. Memorize that. We prayerfully place ourselves in God's
presence and voluntarily accept the trial. I said, we should do this no
matter how small the trial may be, and one index of how big we are or
how grown-up spiritually, is the little things that can rock us. After
all, most of our difficulties are not individually major problems and
there is great wisdom in spelling them out and dealing with each one as
it comes; one trial at a time. These trials can be humiliating small
things taken separately but together they can become oppressively big.
A
priest confrere of mine tells the story of a pilgrimage he once
attended and how, during the pilgrimage, he shared his room with another
man. The priest said, "Hardly had my partner gone to bed than he began
to snore loudly, loud enough to waken the dead. At first I started to be
impatient, then I applied the remedy: I willed to listen to the snoring
and hear it clearly, tranquilly observed it and, a little later fell
asleep. Waking up once during the night (the noise was terrific!), I
used the same method again and returned to sleep."
There are in
the lives of all of us countless sources of annoyance, all kinds of
noise and distasteful persons, place and things. We can be opposed or
oppressed but we should never be depressed by no-matter-what tribulation
enters our lives. The way to retain our peaceful serenity is to
promptly ask God for the grace to endure what cannot be changed or in
His own time, to change what for the time being is to be endured. What
God wants of us is a pure sacrifice unalloyed by our reluctance to
suffer at His hands or made worse than His Providence intends. He will
never give us more than we can bear. What He does not want is to have us
spoil the opportunity for sacrifice by making an issue of what is,
after all, the normal way He deals with those whom He calls His friends.
This is God's way of embracing those that He loves. What God wants is
that "we", by resigning ourselves to His gracious will, may do His will,
which can sometimes be hard but always is to be done in peace. This is
what Christ must have meant when He told us: "My yoke is easy and My
burden is light."
Surely, serving God does mean carrying the
yoke and the burden that He sends us. He wants us prayerfully to realize
that they are His yoke and His burden that He places upon us, and let
us be sure that is plenty and for that we have the grace. If we can keep
this vision before us through life, we shall not, of course, be spared
the Cross - that would be unthinkable - but we shall be at peace. Peace
is the absence of conflict between wills, here between the will of God
and ours. It is open to everyone who is willing to pray and live by His
prayer: "Lord, not my will but Thine be done."
[http://www.therealpresence.org/archives/Prayer/Prayer_002.htm]
Pray an Our Father now for the restoration of the Mass and the Church as well as for the Triumph of the Kingdom of the Sacred Heart of Jesus and the Immaculate Heart of Mary
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