This year has been one of profound but brutal healing. The death of my father opened a deep chasm of wounds. Some of them I didn’t even realize were still festering in dark places within me. We tend to suppress these places within us, but the mystical theologians and saints teach us that the release of these demons—real and metaphorical—is absolutely necessary for progress in the spiritual life. This is a part of the purification of the dark night. Anything within us that is not of God must be purified or pruned.
In that purification process we must confront our own self-absorption. One of the places where we tend to become most self-absorbed is in our own suffering. Experiences of suffering can help us grow in order to become more aware of the suffering of those around us. It can teach us how to love more deeply and expansively as we come to understand that all human beings suffer.
Suffering can also lead us to overly focus on ourselves. By falling into self-absorption, we can forget to see the suffering of the people right in front us. We can burden them with our sorrows and ignore the deep sorrows they are carrying. As I have walked through this period of grief, the Lord has showed me through a variety of painful experiences how I have fallen into self-absorption at times in my life and hurt other people. It is precisely through this grief that the Lord is helping me grow in holiness.
St. John Paul II in his apostolic letter on suffering, Salvifici Doloris, talks about how the Lord uses suffering to bring about greater conversion and growth:
Down through the centuries and generations it has been seen that in suffering there is concealed a particular power that draws a person interiorly close to Christ, a special grace. To this grace many saints, such as Saint Francis of Assisi, Saint Ignatius of Loyola and others, owe their profound conversion. A result of such a conversion is not only that the individual discovers the salvific meaning of suffering but above all that he becomes a completely new person. He discovers a new dimension, as it were, of his entire life and vocation.
The person who suffers is given an invitation by the Lord to enter His suffering and His ministry of saving souls. It is meant to set us on a path to serving Him and others. Suffering is not meant to turn us in on ourselves. It is meant to lead us outwards because we come to a greater realization that the people around us are suffering. In Salvific Doloris, St. John Paul II talks about the Lord’s public ministry to the suffering:
In his messianic activity in the midst of Israel, Christ drew increasingly closer to the world of human suffering. “He went about doing good” (32), and his actions concerned primarily those who were suffering and seeking help. He healed the sick, consoled the afflicted, fed the hungry, freed people from deafness, from blindness, from leprosy, from the devil and from various physical disabilities, three times he restored the dead to life. He was sensitive to every human suffering, whether of the body or of the soul.
This is where we are also called to go. Our fallen nature tends towards self-absorption, while experiences of suffering are meant to open our hearts to the afflicted around us. This allows us to enter more deeply into the lives of others. We begin to see the hungry, the blind, the leper, and the afflicted. The Lord is not calling us to serve others at a surface level. He is calling us to be plunged into the depths of His pierced Most Sacred Heart.
In our own pain we can ignore this piercing and instead insulate ourselves from others. We can hold in our pain and not allow the Lord to redeem it and the sufferings of those around us. This is not the path the Lord wants us to walk. He wants us to walk in His bloody footsteps in order to suffer with Him and enter our own redemption, which then leads us to participate in His redemptive work in the lives of others. Salvifici Doloris again:
The Redeemer suffered in place of man and for man. Every man has his own share in the Redemption. Each one is also called to share in that suffering through which the Redemption was accomplished. He is called to share in that suffering through which all human suffering has also been redeemed. In bringing about the Redemption through suffering, Christ has also raised human suffering to the level of the Redemption. Thus each man, in his suffering, can also become a sharer in the redemptive suffering of Christ.
Our suffering is not without meaning. It is a place through which the Lord unleashes power and glory upon the world. When we suffer with Him for others, He uses those priestly offerings from our common priesthood for the salvation of souls. He also opens our hearts more deeply to His love and the love of others.
One of my college students was surprised when I told him suffering is a requirement of love. To love is to suffer. It is to put ourselves last for the good of another. In the case of grief—like the loss of my father—it is a willingness to love despite the reality of death. It is a willingness to go to the very edge of human suffering in death to the silence of the tomb and to wait there in hope because we love. John Paul II continues:
In the messianic programme of Christ, which is at the same time the programme of the Kingdom of God, suffering is present in the world in order to release love, in order to give birth to works of love towards neighbour, in order to transform the whole of human civilization into a “civilization of love”. In this love the salvific meaning of suffering is completely accomplished and reaches its definitive dimension.
It is precisely because of this supernatural reality that our culture does not know how to love. The greatest “evil” of our day is suffering, but in God’s plan of redemption, it is suffering that leads us to deeper union with Him and our call to use our suffering for the good of others. My grief has been offered repeatedly in union with Him on the Cross through His Sorrowful Mother’s Heart as an intercessory offering for those He has asked me to suffer for. This is a profound act of love guided by His Divine Love.
This fills the grief I am carrying from the loss of my father—and the other griefs in my life—with hope. My gaze becomes fixed on the eternal horizon of heaven, rather than the weightiness of the Cross that constantly threatens, and often does, push me to the ground. Our suffering is not meant to lead us into the exile of self-absorption. It is meant to move us outwards into a dark world. It leads us into the crosses in other people’s lives where we are called to lighten each other’s loads.
Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash
