Suffering and Sanctity Charles Bouchard, O.P. VP, Theological Education Ascension Health

1. Spiritual Care Champions Catholic Health East April 15, 2009 Suffering and SanctityCharles Bouchard, O.P.VP, Theological EducationAscension Health

2. The Theodicy Question: God and Suffering • God doesn’t exist • God exists, but is not all powerful • God is a just judge and we only get what we deserve • Suffering is part of a bigger plan • Suffering is an illusion • Evil is a test • Reincarnation

3. What is suffering? • Any experience of pain • “The distress brought about by the actual or perceived threat to the integrity or existence of the whole person” • “The inablity to pursue purpose” • The loss of initiative: we are compelled to undergo (“passio”) something we do not want

4. Suffering: a problem to be solved? • “One damaging narcotic is the narcotic that involves ‘doing something about it’ – Of course there is often something to be done about all kinds of things, and it is natural enough to try to do it. But we must not deceive ourselves, however much we do about however many things, we are still ultimately, faced with the helplessness of the human condition. No amount of achievement can overcome death….the ultimate problems cannot be solved…and that is why it is important to mourn.” (Simon Tugwell, 65)

5. Solzhenitzyn’s Cancer Ward “The old folk,” Yefrem said, “didn’t puff them selves up or fight against it and brag that they weren’t going to die – they took death calmly. They didn’t stall squaring things away, they prepared themselves quietly and in good time, deciding who would have the mare, who the foal…and they departed easily, as if they were moving into a new house.” -Quoted in Daniel Callahan, The Troubled Dream of Life

6. A problem to be solved • [For many things in life] if we prepare, we can feel confident. With suffering and death, however, we have no such confidence. We do not know the subject matter nor the questions… suffering cannot be solved by analytical reasoning…” (Nichols, Holiness 142-3)

7. Our Two-Fold Destiny Q: Why did God make me? A: To know Him, Love Him and serve Him in this world and to be happy with Him in the next.

8. Suffering and our two-fold destiny • We can barely know what we are supposed to do, be, or strive for IN THIS LIFE, must less in view of our ultimate destiny • Point of the story of Job. • “Not to humiliate him, but to show him that he was surrounded by mysteries beyond his knowledge” (Barron, 187)

9. Suffering cannot be understood apart from our place in the universe • St. Paul: “All creation groans….” • “Each individual creature is an object of God’s artistic efforts, but it is the universe as a whole that is the primary and proper end of God’s aesthetic endeavor. God found individual creatures GOOD, but found the whole of his work VERY GOOD.” (Barron, 188) • Prophet Mohammed: “Let him groan…for that is also one of the names of God.”

10. Teihard de Chardin: Suffering and the Cosmos • The evolution of the universe – God’s creative act is not yet complete. • In the face of suffering, we must realize that “something is afoot in the universe, some issue is at stake which cannot be better described than as a process of gestation and birth; the birth of a spiritual reality formed by the souls of men and the matter which they bear along with them.”

11. Teilhard’s flower analogy • “In a bunch of flowers we would be surprised to find one imperfect or sickly, because each was chosen and assembled. On a tree, by contrast, which has had to fight the internal hazards of its own growth and the external hazards of weather, the bruised and broken have their own rightful place. The world is an immense groping, a immense search, it can only progress at the cost of many failures and casualties….”

12. The significance of suffering Those who suffer, are a result of this austere but noble condition…they are not useless and diminished, they are those who pay the price of universal progress and triumph…those who bear in their enfeebled bodies the weight of the moving world and who find themselves, by the just dispensation of providence, the most active factors in that progress which seems to sacrifice and shatter them…” (“La Signification and valeur constructrice de la souffrance,” Nichols, 135)

13. Aquinas on suffering • “God’s principal purpose in created things is clearly that form or good which consists in the order of the universe. This requires as we have noticed that there should be some things that can, and do sometimes fall away. So then, in causing the common good of the ordered universe, he causes loss in particular things as a consequence and as it were, indirectly.” (ST 1a, 49, a.2)

14. Suffering and Community • “God will not intervene in suffering of the world without human mediation. The story of God – a promise of well-being and happiness for all – is narrated with the words of human lives. The transcendent mystery of God is too near to us to be experienced directly but in and through the sacrament of human love we come to know in fragmentary ways the mystery of absolute love at the heart of reality.” (Mary Catherine Hilkert, “Grace Optimism”)

15. Suffering and community “Although uniquely solitary in personhood before God, we are yet created for community, structured as mediators of grace for one another.” (McManus, 489-90).

16. Task of Spiritual Care • Suffering experience in light of God’s transcendent purpose; the Gift of Wisdom “The Gift of Wisdom makes the bitter sweet and labor a rest. Somehow, from God’s point of view, everything is OK. When that perspective missing, we suffer greatly.” (Thomas Keating, OCSO, The Fruits and Gifts of the Holy Spirit, 111)

17. Task of Spiritual Care • “We are creatures made not for mere motion but also for meaning, which to my mind comes from hope. And we need not just the thin and flimsy brand of hope that is simple optimism but a strong and tenacious hope that is wedded to obstinacy, a hope that can raise its head above the turbulent water of our every day lives and enable us to see and swim stubbornly toward a vision on the far shore.” (Kyle Kramer, America, Dec 22-29, 2008)

18. Discussion • How do the ideas we’ve explored compare to your own “theology of suffering?” • Are there “modes” or “paradigms” for suffering as you observe it in your patients? • Have you seen a difference in attitudes toward suffering in Christian patients versus non-Christian patients?