Whenever we suffer or see others suffer, we often think of one word: “why?” It is an appropriate question, for it seems to go against justice; and if God is loving, then why is suffering permitted to be a part of this world?  People have wondered it for centuries, such as Job, the book from which our first reading came this past week. (The full readings can be found here:)
http://www.usccb.org/nab/readings/020809.shtml

Job laments his suffering in this reading, and talks about life on earth being a “drudgery” with life on earth being “like the wind” and that he “shall not see happiness again.” You hear it and want to check the calendar to make sure Lent hasn’t started early.

Job is a righteous man who suffers, and I used this past week to talk about how suffering is a part of life that is hard to make sense of. I shared an experience, and talked about some Christian responses to suffering based on the C.S. Lewis book “The Problem of Pain,” John Paul the Great’s Encyclical “On The Christian Meaning of Human Suffering” and a two-part talk I watched from Louis Giglio, an evangelical preacher who is quite good; he preaches largely to college-aged young adults. My homily of course does not answer all the questions on suffering; some things we won’t know this side of heaven, but some things we can know are suffering is not without meaning and God does not abandon us. The full text of my homily is below. God bless – Fr. Paul

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One of the most difficult things for me is showing the emotion of sadness and grief. It’s challenge perhaps lies in being a man, we are typically viewed as less emotional. But also as a priest, when you find yourself in challenging circumstances where people are hurting, you try your best to keep your composure and console people. Despite that, there are those times where it takes all of your might not to break down, and shortly before Christmas, I had one of those moments.

It came over the Thanksgiving weekend. I received a phone call asking if I would anoint a person. This isn’t all that unusual. But what was unusual was the person who I was anointing, a 17-year old young woman by the name of Leslie. Earlier in the year, I had anointed her as she was heading into the hospital for cancer treatment. I had not heard much about how things had gone, other than they were hopeful that she would respond to treatment. But unfortunately, things took a turn for the worse. She did respond to the treatment, and the cancer was removed. But the treatment was so intense that it caused internal bleeding which could not be stopped. Leslie had been sent home to be with her family, and wished the sacrament to be celebrated again. I made my way to her house not knowing really what to say or do. Her mom met me at the door, and took me into the living room where her family and friends were gathered. Her sister brought Leslie slowly up the stairs, and we gathered around her and prayed over her. I tried to say some words of comfort, and just sat with her and the family for a time. And while I can’t remember what I said, I do remember Leslie. Here was a young woman just getting set to start her life, blindsided by a horrible disease, and I looked into her eyes and saw someone at peace and someone of remarkable fortitude. I also saw someone with a great family who was standing by her, but obviously was wondering why this was happening to their granddaughter, daughter and friend. And I was wondering the same thing. I prayed for her that day; asking God for a miracle that somehow she might be healed, that the bleeding would stop. But that’s not what happened. Instead, a few days later, I received word that Leslie died late at night, and again I was meeting with the family, but this time it was to plan a funeral.

When the day of her funeral came, the church was packed. It was easily the largest funeral I have been a part of. And it began with a beautiful video set to music of Leslie’s life. But I wasn’t in the sanctuary for the video; I was in the Narthex, because frankly I couldn’t take it. An usher tried to talk to me, but I wondered off alone and began to cry. I regained my composure for the Mass, and proceeded down the aisle with grief in my heart, hoping for the strength to make it through. I made it to the last few lines of my homily, shaking as I delivered it, and I could sense myself beginning to lose my composure once again, so had to end it early to try to get control again. I somehow made it through the rest of the Mass, and the burial with the help of the Spirit, but I can say that in my short priesthood, this has been one of the most difficult moments for me. As a priest, you study theology in seminary and you want all the answers; and theology can tell us a lot, but not the answers to the difficult questions, which typically involve the question “why?” Why would this happen to a 17-year old in the prime of her life? What is the point of all this? And on the larger level, why must things like this happen to anyone? I spent a summer interning in a hospital as a chaplain, and there saw all kinds of suffering; a 20-year old with a body ravaged by an infection; a middle-aged man with no legs because of diabetes; a woman in her early 70’s struggling to come to terms with her lung disease, hoping against hope that she would recover. Neither Leslie or her family or her friends asked me “why is this happening to our daughter,” but I know it’s a question I was wondering, and ponder every time I see someone hurt. And indeed, when we see suffering on TV, we may be able to change the channel. But there is no changing the reality that at one point or another, even if the waters of life are calm and tranquil, trouble is coming for us all. Big trouble. Earth-shattering trouble that will rock our faith to the core. There is no getting around the fact that for us all, the clock is ticking, and at various points on the road of life we will have to deal with pain and grief. For some, this means throwing in the towel on God. For others, suffering has meaning. The question then is what are we to make of suffering and how are we to confront what we would prefer to ignore or deny?

Job wonders the same thing. Most of us know the story; a righteous man is faithful to God. The devil says if you took everything away from him, he really wouldn’t be all that faithful. God allows the devil to torment his servant; and
everything Job has falls away. Our first reading picks up after Job has endured much pain, and naturally Job is wondering “why, God?” His days pass by coming to an end, “without hope” and that his life is like the wind, and he “shall not see happiness again.” I love the book of Job, because it is something we can all relate to. All of us suffer; and when we suffer, we wonder why, and we even become angry. Even Jesus wondered why He had to suffer and die; He asks the Father to take the cup from Him, but it doesn’t happen. But what Job and Jesus show us is that suffering is not meaningless.

In his encyclical, “On the Christian Meaning of Human Suffering,” John Paul II points out how we all ask that question “why” when we suffer, and that some reach the point of concluding suffering proves there is no God. But in his writing, he sheds light on why we suffer, and tries to show us how it is not pointless, even if it is mysterious as to why it happens.

For one, sometimes today we still make the mistake Job’s friends did. We have come a long way in understanding medicine, but deep inside when someone is suffering, sometimes they think “I must have done something wrong.”
Jobs friends look at him and say “what did you do?” Logically, God is just; and if God is just then evil must be punished; so it would seem that for something Job did there must be consequences, ergo he is suffering. But God rebukes the friends of Job. His suffering is the suffering of someone who is innocent, and as such it has to be recognized as a mystery. God permitted the suffering of Job as a result of Satan’s transgression, to show the righteousness of Job to his friends and family. The suffering then, says the Holy Father, “has the nature of a test.”

Now does that mean that all suffering is a test? No. Again, why a particular individual is suffering is mysterious. What Job shows is that God does not go around punishing people with sickness to get back at them or their family. But Job’s suffering was also not without meaning; something good came of it – Job was justified, and his faithfulness was a sign to others. God used the suffering of Job for a greater purpose. That’s tough for us to handle, because it seems to be very contradictory to a God who is loving. But it does make sense. C.S. Lewis, in his book “The Problem of Pain,” points out how while we call God “Father,” we might prefer to call Him a grandfather, a “senile benevolence who, as they say, ‘liked to see young people enjoying themselves,’ and whose plan for the universe was simply that it might be truly said at the end of each day, ‘a good time was had by all.’ God is kind, but beyond that, God is loving and wants us to reach our potential, which is learning how to love Him and one another with our whole being, which pain can at times do. Lewis also points out how “everyone has noticed how hard it is to turn our thought to God when everything is going well with us,” and states how a friend of his summed up what I think is in many ideas our modern conception of God: as an airman regards his parachute; there for emergencies, but hopefully never to be used. Pain reminds us of our need for God, but also one another, for when things are going great, we can easily think we have no need of God and can do it all on our own. Indeed, as Hebrews reminds us: “For it was fitting that he, for whom and through whom all things exist, in bringing many children to glory, should make the leader to their salvation perfect through suffering.” (2:10). Pain comes along and can shatter our world; but what is so important to remember too is that all happiness in this world is fleeting, and inevitably if we put our trust into the things of this world it will end up like a house of cards.
Does this mean that we should be happy about suffering, or even seek it out? Of course not. We can even be angry
and frustrated about it; Job certainly is, and if you read through that book, you find many expressions of frustration and anger – but through it all he remains faithful. It is OK to cry out “why is this happening to me God?” and go through moments of frustration. Lewis rightly points out that “suffering is not good in itself” but what is good in any painful experience is learning to submit to the will of God. The challenge though is when we suffer, that is hard to do. Instead, we might get philosophical and think “why is God doing this to me?” and indeed, in suffering, some lose their faith. For others it is deepened, because they know they do not suffer alone. The Cross is the ultimate sign of that.

Time and time in the Gospels, we see how Christ comes to the sick and heals, like He does with the mother-in-law of Peter in our Gospel today. Even before the crucifixion, where do we find Jesus? Feeding the hungry; freeing people from deafness and blindness and leprosy, and restoring the dead to life on three different occasions. And He also takes upon suffering Himself long before the Passion, suffering fatigue, homelessness and misunderstanding from those closest to Him. Christ goes forward in His mission, knowing how it will end but also knowing that suffering will save, fulfilling the words of Isaiah: “He was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities.” Jesus will go forward to Calvary and suffer as a human being, suffering innocently on our behalf. But this is not just some event set in history; the Cross reminds us constantly that our Lord loves us and is right there next to us in the trenches. And so, too, does the Cross remind us that not only does our Lord’s love for us know no bounds, but that out of the most horrific of situations, good can result. On Good Friday, the worst possible thing happened – Jesus died; His mission seemingly ending in failure. But out of that, the world is redeemed.

It might be nice to think that once the Crucifixion happened, and death was overcome, that would have been the end to all suffering in the world forever. But we know what happens afterward. Many early Christians are killed; and suffering is just a part of our world today as it was then. Again though, we not only have to cling to the Cross as our anchor and see it as a sign of God’s solidarity with us and love for us, but we also have to bear our own crosses, because God invites us to share in the redemption. Through our sufferings, we can discover faith and spiritual greatness. In Colossians, Paul will say “I rejoice in my sufferings for your sake, and in my flesh I complete what is lacking in Christ’s afflictions for the sake of his body, that is the Church.” This isn’t to say the Redemption isn’t completed by Christ; it does mean though that Christ invites us to participate in both Good Friday and Easter Sunday, and to unite our suffering to His.

Finally, while we might not think of suffering as evangelization, I think it is one of the strongest loudspeakers for the faith there is. John Paul tells us that “When this body is gravely ill, totally incapacitated, and the person is almost incapable of living and acting, all the more do interior maturity and spiritual greatness become evident, constituting a touching lesson to those who are healthy and normal.” When a person has a deep faith, they can use their suffering to make God be known to the world. The person who suffers can think it is proof God hates them, or they can think of it as an invitation to share in the Passion of Christ, and say “Yes, I may not live forever in this world, but my suffering will not be the end of me. It may take my breath, but not my life, for Jesus Christ has given me eternal life.” And indeed, I think that is what so many saw in Leslie too, because Leslie didn’t live for herself; she lived her life wanting to put others ahead of herself. Her family shared with me how after she was diagnosed, and going through treatment, she wasn’t able to skate with her figure skating team. The team was very close-knit, and while she couldn’t skate with them in a big competition they were going to, she took the time to make each member of the team a gift bag and a tiara that the skaters could have with them so that they would know she was with them. That simply is the kind of person Leslie was; someone who lived for others, not herself, so much so that even when she seemingly should be focused on herself and her illness, her concern was “what can I do for these people who I care about so much?” And in my life, seeing that in so many people who suffer from her to my grandma who lost her battle to cancer, to the people I anoint as a priest, it continually amazes me how many people out there use their suffering to broadcast to the world their faith. They know they do not suffer alone, but also they refuse to let their suffering overcome them, but use it as a tool for the glory of God.

I’d like to close with something that Phil, Leslie’s dad, said to me that described Leslie’s relationship to her figure skating team. He said “she made them better.” What he meant by that was not that she was necessarily the best skater on the ice, but that her concern was always for her team in making them better human beings, not just better skaters. And, on a larger scale, I think that is true for everyone Leslie met, as people looked to this remarkable young woman and how she embraced her battle and refused to let it silence her or be the end of her. Her life was a testament to her faith. Why suffering is a part of this world cannot be summarized into a few one-line answers let alone a homily. Parts of it will always be a mystery. But what we do know is that we do not suffer alone, for our God is right there with us. So, too in some ways can suffering make us better and see God with greater clarity, and from people who suffer we can often learn so much.

You know, our reading from Job really has more of a Lenten feeling to it, but I think its best that it comes during Ordinary Time, because it’s in the ordinary moments of our life, when things are going along just fine,that suffering comes and throws us a curveball. And when it does, we can think God has left us, or we can remember that just as He cured Peter’s mother in law at her bed, He comes to us in our pain too. May we never fear turning our fears, our pains and our anxieties over to Him, and using our suffering to glorify Him and show the world that suffering is a sign of faith, not a sign of God abandoning us.