“I have told you these things, so that in me you may have peace. In this world you will have trouble. But take heart! I have overcome the world.”
St. John 16: 33

People take to religion in order to ward off the prospect of suffering. The secular world turns to drugs and tranquilizers, instead. Often, religion is packaged and peddled as a sort of magic wand that wishes away the need to suffer. The words of Jesus explode on the face of such religiosity: “the Son of Man must suffer”. It was to suffer that Jesus came into this world (Mk. 8: 31, 10: 45). At the core of the magnetism of the Cross is Jesus’ attitude to suffering.

But ours is an age in flight from the very idea of suffering. It mistakes suffering as evil, pain as an enemy. Pain management is one of the hottest priorities in medical sciences today. The annual sale of analgesics in the US today stands at US $ 6 billion. At the same time, anthropologists insist that a person’s ability to cope with pain and master suffering is the single most important index to his personality. A low pain-threshold betrays an infantile attitude to life.

Jesus tells the unvarnished tale: “In this world you will have suffering.” As if that is not bad enough, he goes on to outline the blessedness in suffering for his sake. But he is not satisfied with our mere willingness to endure suffering. Jesus says that we are to suffer our privations gladly. In what sense are we blessed because we suffer? Can there be any profit at all in suffering? Was there any profit in the suffering of Jesus? The deepest human instinct is to dodge suffering. Why should we go against the grain of our nature?

We would like the wicked to suffer. We feel aggrieved when the wicked prosper. At least in this instance we agree that suffering is a good thing! Else, why should the suffering of the wicked give us any satisfaction? How can what pleases us be anything but good? Of course, we know the answer! This kind of suffering pleases us because it is the suffering of someone we dislike. Arguably, this is one of the reasons for the prevalence of suffering in this world: this pleasure in the suffering of others that finds countless expressions, direct and indirect. This was what made it necessary for Jesus to suffer.

Jesus, who came to be “the Lamb of God that takes away the sins of the world,” had to suffer. That would mean that there is a connection between sin and suffering. But what kind of connection is this? Is it only individual? Or is it also corporate? Can my sin involve others in suffering? Does not the whole body suffer because the hands have sinned?

This makes suffering inevitable in this world. The necessity to suffer shifts the focus from suffering to the way we respond to suffering. It is neither possible nor desirable to be insulated from suffering. What is both possible and challenging is that we can choose the way we respond to suffering.

May be, by responding positively to suffering, we could master the challenge of suffering. By engaging suffering spiritually, we may access and master its dynamic and so turn it into something positive, something beautiful, which suffering as suffering is not. May be it is like falling into the middle of a sea. It is in vain that we try to run away from it. All we can do is to thrash about in the swirling waters of the sea and, by doing so, come to terms with the sea, almost without knowing it. At that point the life-threatening sea begins to hold us up, to sustain us. The acquired ability to swim transforms the scope of the sea! Blessed are those who try to swim, rather than flee from the sea in fear!

“In this world you have much suffering; but be of good cheer. I have overcome the world,” says Jesus. But it is suicidal to get complacent or reckless about falling into this sea. So we are to pray, “Deliver us from evil.” We must make sure that we do not fall into the sea with our hands and feet tied. To one so immobilized, the sea can hold out only the prospect of unmanning fear, of utter and ultimate despair. To have to suffer, without the freedom to choose how we may respond to suffering, is to encounter the absurdity of suffering. The good news is that we don’t have to go down, like lead, to the bottom of this sea. We can master this raging sea and calm its storms, as Jesus says, with the resources of faith. In practical terms, faith is freedom of choice: the choice to be otherwise than we would be, instinctually and naturally. But what is the secret of this freedom?

Paul finds it in Jesus of Nazareth. To him, Jesus is an invitation to freedom. “It is for freedom that Christ has set us free. Stand firm, then, and do not let yourselves be burdened again by a yoke of slavery.” (Gal. 5: 1). What is this freedom that Paul is taking about? Is it not freedom to respond positively to the total spectrum of life, including the need to suffer? Does not Paul celebrate this freedom when he takes pride in suffering for Christ? (2 Cor. 12:16-29) We may understand this freedom, our spiritual freedom, as freedom from negativity.

That being the case, the freedom that Jesus offers is not, and cannot be, freedom from suffering. The very desire to be incubated from suffering is a symptom of negativity. The freedom that Jesus activates is the opposite of this: freedom from the tyranny of negativity, freedom from the ways of responding to suffering encoded in our fallen nature. It was this freedom that Jesus unveiled in all its glory on the Cross of Calvary: something that moved the Roman centurion to exclaim: “Surely, this was a righteous man!” (Lk. 23: 47) This freedom should be the identification mark of the followers of Christ. Freedom from negativity cannot be a negative state, a state of mere absence. It is a positive state of ‘abiding in,’ of engagement. Our freedom to move derives from our abiding in the force of gravity. The airplane flies by abiding in the law of aviation. The ship sails by abiding in the law of flotation.

Freedom of the positive kind derives from this ‘abiding in’ (Jn. 15:4). It is this kind of freedom that leads to ‘fruitfulness’ on which there is such an unapologetic emphasis in the Bible. In contrast, Freedom of the negative kind, the freedom that led to the lostness of the younger son in the parable (Lk. 15: 11ff), involves a ‘walking out,’ a flight to the ‘far country’ of negative freedom. It was freedom of this kind that Judas chose for himself. He turned the sacrament, an invitation to the freedom of ‘abiding in,’ into the freedom of ‘walking out’. John records that Judas, on receiving the bread of fellowship, walked out into darkness (Jn. 13: 27, 30). That ‘walking out,’ a symbolic choice of darkness in preference over light, cost him his life.

The choice we have vis-à-vis suffering is, hence, the choice between two options. We can respond to suffering either as those who abide in the world or as those who abide in the Lord. This makes all the difference. ‘Escape’ is the logic of sin. This has been the archetypal pattern of the world since the Fall. The spiritual counter-paradigm is engagement. The irony of escape is that it leads to further enslavement: the enslavement to negativity. Engagement leads to liberation: dynamic liberation. Jesus came to set the captives free, that they may have life in all its fullness (Lk. 4: 18, Jn. 10: 10).

The strategy of escape has a thousand faces, ranging from subtle denial to crude destruction. Murder and suicide are final forms of escape: they are the two sides of the coin of negativity. Love, on the other hand, is a force of engagement. Hence love “always protects, always trusts, always hopes, and always perseveres. Love never fails” (1 Cor. 13: 7-8). Spiritually, suffering is valuable both in exposing hidden negativity and in overcoming it. Our fundamental spiritual need is to be set free from negativity. Negativity is the dark dungeon of un-freedom. The popular assumption that the business of religion is to ward off suffering is a cultic and materialistic make-believe. It is irreligion, even if it puts on the garb of piety.

Jesus would have us know that spirituality calls for a positive engagement with reality. Religion may degenerate into escapism; but that is only when it gives up on its spiritual core. It is through a pro-active engagement with reality that our spirituality deepens and matures. But engaging reality positively does not come naturally to the natural man. More often than not, the idea of responding positively to one’s suffering seems pathological to the world. It is mistaken for masochism. Inflicting pain, especially in an indirect fashion (as in the case of waging war and terrorizing people groups) is not considered pathological. If it were, we would have known that many among the heroes of the world were, in fact, villains. This notwithstanding, we still nurse dreams of moral heroism: of enduring gigantic privations in the pursuit of great causes, of not wincing in the face of tragedy and terror. But when life puts us to the test we wilt under pressure, as Peter did in the courtyard of Caiaphaz. Peter was not exactly insincere when he told his Master, “Even if all fall away on account of you, I never will.” (Mtt. 26: 33) Peter was human, all too human.

Suffering breeds terror when, in enduring it, we have nothing more than our own ideals and good intentions to bank on. It is as a quivering witness to this humbling truth that Peter retains his place in the Passion Narrative. The worst is not that we have to suffer. It is that in our suffering we feel forsaken. Ask Job, and he will tell you what it means to cope with that kind of hell on this earth. It is this pain in the human predicament that Jesus took into himself on the Cross, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”

Jesus stands out as a shining example of the positive and transforming approach to suffering. He makes it abundantly clear that the secret of his response is his rootedness in God. “You will leave me all alone,” he says, “Yet I am not alone, for my Father is with me.” (Jn. 16: 31-32) The basic issues in coping with suffering are:

(a) Suffering and loneliness. Loneliness sharpens the edges of human suffering. Milton’s Satan strives to seduce human beings away from God and lure them into his camp because “it is good to have company in suffering”. The Bible in general, and Jesus in particular, portrays God as “a near help in trouble”. This, of course, presupposes the reality of trouble. In the mystery of God’s compassion, human suffering becomes a preferred sanctuary of the divine presence. In the parable of the sheep and the goats (Mtt. 25: 31ff) Jesus identifies himself with the “hungry, thirsty, sick, suffering, naked, imprisoned and alienated” –the universal facets of human suffering.

Suffering has an uncanny knack for insulating human beings from their life-world. It is like being clothed in fire. The wall that separates you from the rest of the world is not tangible; but it is not insignificant for that. Prolonged suffering wears a person down, and robs him of the inward dynamism for coping with the world around. Besides this, suffering activates anxiety. Anxiety is the fire of suffering spreading into the forest of the psyche. It gnaws the strings of life with the teeth of exasperation.

While human company offers relief in suffering, it is not enough in itself to meet the full needs of a person in agony. We can walk only up to a point with a suffering a person. Suffering is intensely personal, and there is a lakshman rekha that no one, except God, can cross. That is because alienation is basic to the logic of suffering. Suffering breeds solitude; and that is the paradox. Human fellowship mitigates suffering; but extreme suffering shuts others out. Pain insulates a person from the rest of the world. It brings on a black out. It is a barrier that God alone can breach. This is what Jesus means when he says that when the world around you collapses and all the familiar pillars of strength fail, you are still left with God. That is because does not change. He alone does not change in this changing world.

The spiritual purpose that underlies the unfailing presence of God in the sanctuary of human suffering is to empower a positive response to our predicament. God is not a religious ornament. God is spiritual Energy: the Energy of the Absolute Positive. God as Positive is Absolute because this Being never acquires a negative charge. So to abide in God is to exemplify a positive response, even when the scope for it seems non-existent.

(b) Suffering and fear The second element of negativity in suffering is fear. Suffering catalyzes fear; and fear intensifies suffering. Fear, except of the spiritual kind, is a negative phenomenon. That is why Paul says, “The fullness of love casts out fear”. Love is positive; fear is negative. Love is stronger than fear. One way or another, fear has a reference to discontinuity. Death is the most dreaded form of discontinuity. Suffering, especially of the chronic kind, is instinct with the intimation of mortality.

Fear disables. It alienates us from our inner resources for coping with the given situation. Fear paralyses and this paralysis makes us pathetic. Fear freezes our potential heroism in coping with the crisis at hand. That was what happened when, on the sea of Galilee, the boat was tempest-tossed and the disciples gave in to panic. Jesus told them, in his own way, that the key to calming the sea was calming their own inner selves. Fear distorts the size and scope of our suffering. Exaggeration is a universal form of distortion. Exaggeration is an enemy to effective crisis management. It makes us our own enemies. Worst of all, fear makes us blind: blind to the other half of the situation where the light shines. Every crisis in this world is like our planet. At any point in time only one-half of it is dark; the other is bathed in light. As the Psalmist says, “Weeping may remain for a night, but rejoicing comes in the morning.” (Ps. 30:5).

Overcoming fear is basic to any positive response to suffering. Fear is of the essence of human predicament. Everything about human life involves fear, one way or another. Parents use fear as a weapon against their children, even as a shortcut to discipline. Fear is the foremost weapon that rulers use against their subjects. The strangest of all, we relate to the God of love in fear, even as we say, “Fullness of love casts our fear”! All these prove that we are poised precariously over the precipice of fear. Come a gentle nudge, and we tip over.

Alienation is the source and essence of fear. Adam and Eve began to experience fear only after the Fall. It is in this space of alienation that human suffering is situated. Suffering is an eloquent sign of alienation. In creational terms, alienation is imperfection. The imperfect is, by definition, impermanent. The impermanent must change. Change involves the death of the old and the birth of the new. On account of this inexorable logic, human consciousness situated in the sphere of imperfection –the imperfection of its own making- is tinged with fear psychosis. In this respect, as in many others, we are sick. The degree of psychic morbidity might vary from person to person; but there is none who is free from it. Not surprisingly, it takes very little to catalyze fear!

Spirituality helps us to master fear; but not in a magical way. It does so by enabling us to see the hidden, and better, side of the given situation. Also, by urging us to respond constructively to the crisis at hand and to look beyond the present in hope. Above all, spirituality empowers by annulling the logic of alienation. The Psalmist says he will not fear, even if the earth shakes and the mountains go and fall into the sea (Ps.46: 1), not because he is brave, but because God is his refuge. Fear bred by alienation is a state of spiritual and psychic homelessness. Suffering inheres in such a situation.

(c) Suffering and meaninglessness Suffering is compounded not only of loneliness and fear but also of meaninglessness. If the anguish of Job is any indication, what breaks our spirit is not so much the quantity of our suffering, but its seeming absurdity and unintelligibility. Rarely do we realize that the meaningless we sense about life in general and our suffering in particular stems from the insulated life we live. Most of us are living to ourselves. The fallacy in the individualistic life is its insistence that every aspect of a person’s life must make sense with reference only to himself. But that is not blueprint on which life is designed. The Bible begins with the insight that the whole of mankind is a corporate personality. As such, it is illogical to insist that the value or meaning of an experience must blossom precisely at the site of its occurrence. Here too the analogy of the human body helps. It is in the brain, and not at site of occurrence, that the meaning of a sensation in the body is processed and interpreted. Self-centredness is, thus, quite contrary to the logic of life. We cannot live to ourselves without reducing the scope of our life. Basic to Jesus’ mission to lead people to fullness of life was the creation of a caring and sacramental community.

Jesus was acutely aware of the weariness and heavy-ladenness of human existence. He invited the weary to himself. He couched this invitation (Mtt. 11: 28-30) in a missional metaphor. The weary are to find rest under his yoke: the yoke of a shared mission. This is an image of dynamic integration, which is the spiritual alternative to solipsistic alienation. The solipsistic way of life is nagged by an unending ache. The name of this chronic pain is ‘boredom’. Boredom afflicts a way of life devoid of the luxury even of a stimulating crisis that could liberate its victims from the world of make-believe they live in.

As a matter of fact, a great deal of our suffering stems from this make-believe. The very expectation that in this world one can side-step suffering simply by having recourse to religion is a make-believe. This assumption, in turn, arises out of gross misunderstanding of the purpose of religion itself. The business of religion is not to create smug individuals untouched by the sting of life. It is to lead people to fullness of life. Greatness, not happiness, is the goal of spirituality. And that greatness has a vertical reference to God and a horizontal reference to one’s fellow human beings. Growth on both axes involves pain. It is for this reason that the Bible urges us to respond creatively to suffering (Rom. 5: 3-5; James 1: 2 -4 ff.)

The profit in suffering

That suffering can be profitable at all is an impudent thought, except in the sphere of the Spirit. The Holy Spirit is the Spirit of creativity. The essence of creativity is the power to transform the given, and to unveil the hidden potentialities. This is also the essence of positivity and of spiritual engagement. There is no profit in mere suffering; suffering, that is, like an animal. The profit is in responding spiritually to our suffering.

· Suffering deepens personality. Suffering seems to be the pilgrim path to the depth of personality. Jesus urged his disciples to walk the narrow way. >From a spiritual perspective, the greatest achievement is not what we have, but who we are. Human beings cannot be all surface, and no depth. It is from the depth that we derive the nourishment for our personality. The ideals that we cherish blossom there: values such as love, compassion, truth, justice, self-transcendence, and so on. Progressively the Bible unfolds the truth that it is in the inner sanctuary of human beings, and not in man-made temples, that God resides. The Kingdom of God, says Jesus, is within us. Suffering is the insignia of the spiritual Kingdom. Jesus did not come to start a new religion; he came to unveil the Kingdom of God. The spotlight in this Kingdom is on the subjects, unlike in the kingdoms of the world. Jesus is benchmark of our humanity. He came to be the way to the fullness of our humanity. It is in respect of this that suffering is a profit. Prosperity, said Bacon, was the blessing of the Old Testament; but adversity is the blessing in the New Testament.

It is universally known that those who have endured and mastered suffering come to have a rare depth and power of personality. They are apt to be compassionate and sensitive. But they are also a disturbing presence among shallow people, because of the core of mystery in them.Alternately, those who flee from suffering and are negative in their outlook, become two-dimensional characters, lacking depth and inward core mystery.

· Suffering pricks the bubble of self-sufficiency. The most universal of human delusions, even when this is not stated publicly, is the delusion of individual self-sufficiency. The prosperous are particularly vulnerable to it. Affluence facilitates, for a while, a way of life insulated from life’s painful realities. Progressively, this breeds an exclusive dependence on material resources. Referring to such a state the Psalmist says, “The fool says in his heart there is no God” (Ps. 14:1). The sole dependence on material resources amounts to de facto atheism. This tells on the quality of one’s personality. Emboldened by what mammon can do, those who are materially privileged gradually walk out on God. This, according to the Psalmist, is a state of lethal foolishness. Suffering is the key that can unlock this inward prison. Suffering ushers in the moment of truth when the deluded victims of self-sufficiency recognize that they are “wretched, pitiful, poor, blind and naked” (Rev.3: 17) in spite of all their material wealth. This illumines the logic of God-dependence, which then is felt to comforting, and not humiliating.

· The redemptive scope of suffering. Suffering has not only refining and regenerative implications for the individuals concerned, it also has redemptive overtones for those around him. It is well-known that the suffering of parents avails their children much. Those who suffer for the sake of righteousness, are assured of abundant harvests through the generations after them. The noblest form of suffering is suffering for the sake of others. It is only in God that this finds its purest expression.

A glimpse of its rare glory may be caught in those who abide in God. Millions of their fellow human beings are blessed and inspired by it. This is the paradox of the innocent suffering, as exemplified in Job and Jesus.

Coping with suffering spiritually has also a prophetic dimension. This involves articulating the insights born out of one’s spiritual engagement with this irreducible aspect of human reality. Reading the Word as a daily routine, and reading the same to receive the manna for our pilgrimage in the wilderness that this world is, are two different experiences altogether!

The second lays bare the treasures hidden beneath the printed word. It is then that we move from the word to the Word. At that level the Word does become ‘a lantern unto our feet and a light unto our path’ (Ps. 119: 105). The paradigmatic prophetic truth in this context is that suffering is integral to any scheme of things driven by power. Societies and nations, institutions and relationships, groups and individuals are all gripped and governed by the will to power. This is the quintessential ‘pattern of the world’ that Paul wants us to transcend. The more organized and advanced a society is, the greater is the power play in it. Consequently, such a society abounds in victims and scapegoats.

Those who eat salt, to use an earthy metaphor, must thirst. The solution to the problem does not lie in resenting thirst. The key lies in the salt. It is at once naïve and dishonest to create systems of power and harbour, at the same time, a sense of grievance about the hurt they cause. Of course, there are types of suffering that are not man-made. But that does not in any way become an alibi for not addressing the miseries that we create, personally or systemically. The spiritual task is not only to respond compassionately to those who suffer, it is also to address the roots of man-made suffering in this world. This calls for a shift from power to love, which is the fundamental spiritual revolution.

This may not help avoid natural disasters, such as cyclones and earthquakes. But this will definitely help the victims of natural disasters, in terms of relief and rehabilitation. A disaster worse than the killer quake in Gujarat this year or the super cyclone in Orissa last year is the crass corruption and mercenary hardheartedness witnessed in the wake of these unimaginable human tragedies, when relief meant for its victims was misappropriated by the relief and rehabilitation sharks of this country. They too would, given a platform, denounce the insensitivity of God in letting these disasters happen. Though, in point of fact, it would be a real disaster for them if no disasters were to happen at all in a given year.

Minimally, the inevitability of suffering boils down to two basic challenges. First, we are obliged to respond to our suffering positively and creatively, and to develop the spiritual resources for doing so. Second, we must respond in compassion and solidarity to those who suffer. In suffering we stand at the crossroads. From there we can branch off in two different directions. We can turn either to repentance and renewal. Or, we can take the path of hardheartedness and embittered stubbornness. The choice is wholly ours.