No Mourning, No Lamentation, and No Pain (Essay, Dushan)

Without me having addressed them about anything faith-related, simply because it occupies them, people approach me about suffering. Suffering in the context of the logical (im)possibility of a loving, omnipotent God.

Sometimes these dear people refer to personal suffering. Their own suffering or the suffering of loved ones. More often they speak of suffering as an abstract concept.

Always these dear people formulate a variant of the old theodicy question: If God is omnipotent and all-loving, how can it be that suffering exists in the world?

Implicitly and sometimes explicitly, such questions carry the undertone: „Yes, I would like to want to believe in God, but because so much suffering exists, I cannot.“

One can debate whether this in turn contains: „I am too lazy and spiritually neglected to rouse myself on Sundays and go to church. Too lazy am I, and too animal-like, to shape my life according to higher morality.“ (At the same time, let it be said: The German church is known worldwide for its dalliances with heresy and blasphemy, whereby those responsible possibly bear certain responsibility for the lostness of many a German soul. I must think of Matthew 18:6, but enough of this accusatory and exculpatory digression.)

In the All-Inclusive Holiday Resort

So when someone asks me about theodicy (literally: justice of God), I respond with an illustrative counter-question, with a double contrast: If suffering speaks against the possibility and worthiness of worship of God, and if the absence of suffering spoke for Him, then we would have to find only believers in the all-inclusive holiday resort – and the hospital chapel in the oncology ward would have to be empty and deserted.

The prophets warn often enough of the danger to the soul when body and soul are doing too well!

When they had pasture, they became satisfied, and when they were satisfied, their heart became proud; therefore they forgot me.
– Hosea 13:6

Whoever sets the absence of pain and suffering as a condition of the possibility and worthiness of worship of God implies a – let’s be honest – hedonistic, narcissistic concept of the meaning of life.

Is it the meaning of life to get through it as pain-free and cheerfully as possible? Then it would indeed be preferable to be a heroin junkie or a madman rather than, say, a mother.

In fact, it is the same narcissistic logic that makes the possibility and worthiness of worship of God dependent on earthly painlessness, which allows millions of children to be murdered in the womb because they might disturb the carefree nature of the „mother.“

Drawing Near to God

But if the meaning of life in the broadest sense is to draw near to God (or: to become holier, to find redemption), then suffering is a property of the world that can serve precisely this goal.

Yes, I am aware that it can sound cynical (that is: coldly contradictory) that suffering can be a means to become holier, but it only sounds contradictory as long as you have set freedom from pain as part of the meaning of life.

The question is not whether it feels comfortable for you. The question is whether it is true. (Spelled out: Whether it could be true and whether enough evidence can be found that it actually is true.)

Suffering and its overcoming are a way to draw near to God. See the rather cruelly appearing Book of Job.

It is very explicitly divine to alleviate the suffering of one’s fellow human beings. It is Jesus’s commission. Alleviating the suffering of one’s neighbor is explicitly and immediately a service to God (Matthew 25:40). Yes, your neighbor and you, when you alleviate his suffering or he yours, are holier than when you burp contentedly to yourselves, full and satisfied.

On Good Friday

I write these lines from the real occasion of private conversations. But I write them on Good Friday.

This is the day on which Jesus Christ is crucified. The Passion is a story full of pain.

In physical and spiritual pain He cried out on the cross:

„Eli, Eli, lema sabachthani?“ – that is: „My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?“
– Matthew 27:46

It is a new, unofficial Catholic tradition to watch Mel Gibson’s film „The Passion of the Christ“ on Good Friday (and to pause shortly before the end to watch the resurrection on Sunday). It is a conceivably bloody, barely bearable film. But that which pains is precisely part of the truth.

The crucifixion – and soon the resurrection – is also the story of overcoming the greatest of all suffering: the suffering from literal meaning-lessness. The suffering of being lost in every sense of the word. The suffering of separation.

Already for today the Crucified One promises: Be of good cheer, I have overcome the world! (John 16:33)

And for tomorrow we are promised:

„He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away.“
– Revelation 21:4

But as beautiful and perfect as all this sounds, the path there leads through suffering – until and so that there shall be no more mourning and no more pain.

Psalm of the Crucified

Let us not forget that when Jesus seemed to cry out on the cross to his Father, why he had „forsaken“ him, he was actually praying a psalm:

My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Why are you so far from saving me, from the words of my groaning?
– Psalm 22:2

Every one of the listeners knew the psalm and knew what turn it takes, what the Crucified One was calling out to them in his pain. This psalm also describes the joy after the tears: