On some occasions suffering is of comparatively brief duration, being limited to the time in which relief comes, a relief due to the tangible awareness of God's providence. In the Parable of the Prodigal Son as soon as the young man faces the reality of the situation, he becomes open to the voice of God and knows how to proceed. But what if there were no rich father to receive him, and no home to which he could return? How then would he have fared? Much pain goes on indefinitely, and then the sufferer has to cope with it as best he can. He may, of course, at any time renounce life and opt for death and a peaceful oblivion. Suicide in these circumstances has an obvious attraction, but for those with a more profound view of life this solution is seen to be not merely unsatisfactory but also an illusory escape from fundamental problems. They can see that life continues after death of the body, and the person who has deliberately renounced his mortal existence may find himself in a limbo of isolation: his basic problems of character are not only unhealed but there is also attached to him an awareness of sin, a feeling of guilt, not unlike the remorse felt by the Ancient Mariner in Coleridge's poem after his destruction of the beneficent albatross. It should be said that all situations must be judged by the circumstances precipitating them, and the wilful destruction of one's life in a paroxysm of intolerable pain is less blameworthy than if one were to commit suicide to escape the consequences of criminal action now brought to public light. Nevertheless, I am sure it is wiser as well as nobler to endure suffering, as Job did, than to opt out on a note of angry rejection by cursing God and dying.
Once the impossibility of immediate relief or even amelioration of the pain is faced, a new life opens up. One is brought to confront the very basis of reality, the nature of God. At the same time the supports of one's previous existence seem not so much to be disrupted as to dissolve in the general atmosphere. In the gloom an unearthly radiance illuminates not so much the surroundings as one's own being. The soul is laid bare as one becomes like a helpless child in the grip of circumstances beyond one's experience. If the person remains recalcitrant, fearful or immovable he stays on his own, and the darkness of hell surrounds him in his misery. But if one is open to new possibilities and has retained the ability and capacity to remember others in pain, the darkness begins to show a communal aspect: one is no longer alone but is united in suffering with the entire human race, indeed the very cosmos, since the world was created. And in that community of souls apparently lost to the bright world of glittering opportunity there burns a deeper light visible only to the supersensual faculty that draws the person onwards into an enlarged community. At first he cannot bear this deeper glow, but as he accommodates to it, so he enters a peace previously unknown to him.
It is recorded, in the birth narrative of Jesus according to St Matthew's account, that after the three magi had returned to their own country by another route so as to avoid informing King Herod about the location of the holy child, Herod in his fury had all the children in the vicinity of Bethlehem killed, hoping that Jesus might be among the slain. The Holy Innocents are a prototype of blameless humanity that suffers as a victim of the evil in the world. Somehow their unmerited pain brings light to a dark universe. Those who suffer justly for past misdemeanours tend to rage against the pain, only gradually becoming aware of their part in the process, that their selfish, thoughtless way of life has reaped a just harvest of retribution. Why did it have to happen to me? This is the age-old question of those who suffer as a retribution for a self-centred approach to reality. By contrast, the innocent sufferer goes to his place of testing, the world's testing as much as his own, mute and uncomplaining. We remember the words of Isaiah in respect of the Suffering Servant, "On himself he bore our sufferings, our torments he endured, while we counted him smitten by God, struck down by disease and misery; but he was pierced for our transgressions, tortured for our iniquities; the chastisement he bore is health for us and by his scourging we are healed" (Isaiah 53:4-5). The retributive suffering of the thoughtless masses is purified and sanctified by the redemptive suffering of the innocent. These do not ask why it had to happen to them: somehow they know that they are meant to be surrounded by darkness in a vortex of mystery. They know that the way is steadily forward in the darkness, and that their present demeanour is all that matters in a waste whose sinuous track threatens to peter out at any moment. And what is the track that they follow? It is the light of God in the soul, and the impetus to follow along is the Holy Spirit within them.
This light is often very constant and the warmth surrounding it very comforting for those who suffer for the sake of righteousness. Indeed, in the final Beatitude Jesus teaches that those who have suffered persecution for the cause of right have the kingdom of heaven as a present reality (Matthew 5:10). This kingdom of heaven is not a radiant presence in the world beyond death, as portrayed so often in popular religious art. It is a state of complete psychic openness in which the brotherhood of man is experienced as a cogent reality and the fatherly presence of God is known as an atmosphere of pure love, disinterested, all-embracing and transfiguring in effect. All this, it should be said, is taking place in the realm of deepest human relationships while all are in utmost darkness. The physical pain and the emotional bereavement are not removed so much as assuaged in the radiance of a love that knows no limitation. In any group of victims of injustice and persecution there will be only a few who will have ascended the mount of transfiguration as exquisitely as this. The majority will labour at the foothills, bemoaning their lot, trying to escape or else giving up in total despair. But the leaven of holiness is so all-pervading that even a single saint can perform the work of deliverance defined in Isaiah 61: bringing good news to the humble, binding up the broken-hearted, proclaiming liberty to the captives and release to those in prison.
All this sounds ridiculous inasmuch as saint and sinner alike are all incarcerated in the same hell. But the saint has transcended the physical, and even the psychical, hell and is one with God in eternity. By this divine relationship he is able to lift up the others from their hell of anguish, resentment and isolation to a realm of reconciliation where they can find themselves in a larger company, in a more inclusive framework of relationships, both with each other and with God. Indeed, this may be their first experience of deity.
The plateau of suffering is almost intolerable when we feel alone on it; it becomes increasingly bearable when we can share its landscape with others in their special predicament. Those who live in abject poverty, a circumstance common enough in the undeveloped pans of the world, often have an awareness of spiritual things that seems to be hidden from their more affluent fellows in the developed countries. This awareness is no mere opium to dull their depleted senses and starved bodies; on the contrary, it is an awareness of the eternal dimension that far transcends their mortal plight. The circumstance that facilitates their spiritual awareness is communal solidarity. What is experienced together becomes less frightening, more bearable. In the same way the victims of totalitarian brutality in our own century have, on occasions, risen to a height of spiritual awareness in which they could actively thank God for their torture, not as a gesture of masochistic satisfaction, but as an acknowledgement of the deeper insights into reality that their terrible experience had afforded. The essential insight is that the spiritual is alone fully real, and all else is real only in so far as it sheds light on eternal things. The observation of the early Quaker Isaac Penington is especially relevant: "Every truth is shadow except the last. Yet every truth is substance in its own place, though it be but shadow in another place. And the shadow is true shadow, as the substance is true substance." In other words, all life is sacramental if we dedicate ourselves to God's service and to that of our fellow creatures (indeed, the one is incomplete without the other). If we were fully awake to reality, every action of our life would be noble, and self-preservation would find its completion in service to all life. Then the command to love our neighbour as ourselves would find its fulfilment. This fulfilment, far from renouncing the individual self, sees that self glorified in the midst of a transfigured community. And this is what the community of tortured victims in a prison camp may become, in a way that would be hardly conceivable in a stable group of prosperous citizens each intent on his own gain, come what may to the others.
In the renewal of vision that may complete the experience of suffering innocently borne - at least innocent in terms of the individual's private life, for none of us is absolutely innocent of the world's stain and contagion - there may be a spontaneous outflow of forgiveness to those who have perpetrated the crime. Thus there have been occasions in which victims of prison camp terror have, before their death, been able to forgive all those who hurt them, and this not in a spirit of moral superiority but one of humble gratitude: had it not been for the wicked action of the persecutors, there would have been no experience of communal love which transcended anything that the world could give in terms of riches, power and recognition. The experience of this superhuman love - by which I mean a love beyond that which one individual can bestow on another in the course of everyday life, inasmuch as it is private and discriminating - was the zenith and ultimate meaning of their existence, and also their mode of forgiving their torturers. In this light we can begin to understand Jesus' almost unattainable demands in the Sermon on the Mount: "Do not set yourself against the man who wrongs you. If someone slaps you on the right cheek, turn and offer him your left . . . Love your enemies and pray for your persecutors" (Matthew 5:39 and 44). Jesus goes on to remind his audience that only so can they be God's children, for God makes his sun and rain available for good and bad alike. We have to love everyone, irrespective of their attitude towards us. There must be no limit to our goodness, so that our very being becomes akin to God. Such an injunction is beyond realization until we remember that Jesus Christ is the effulgence of God's splendour and the stamp of God's very being (Hebrews 1:3). But how Jesus the man retains the effulgence and remains the image of God is a mystery to us until we have traversed the impenetrable dark wilderness of divine ignorance.
In the horror of suffering unjustly inflicted but uncomplainingly borne, an experience of true selfhood emerges out of the darkness. There is a gradual dissolution of the barriers of personality; and the individual attains an identity with his suffering companions. Eventually this identity expands to embrace the entire created order: its life becomes the one life and its being the true being of each individual. A freedom is suddenly known that is unrelated to material affluence; it is a freedom of the spirit of man that roams unfettered in the limitless expanse of eternity. As Heraclitus said, "You can never find out the boundaries of the soul, so deep are they." There is, in fact, no boundary of the individual soul; its depth reaches out to the soul of every creature, to the very soul of creation, and its height taps the Holy Spirit universally and eternally. And so it comes about when the man in the street, who aspires to no special spiritual knowledge or religious commitment, is in contact with a source of human sanctity, as the witless pupil and the master together traverse the barren, featureless plateau of unremitting suffering, the vision of the unenlightened one is illuminated with spiritual radiance; the very uncreated light of God, and he begins to see the path ahead for the first time in his life. It leads to the unknown region where God is to be found. The newly-fledged aspirant is lifted above the; fear of death to an existence that contains within itself a new perspective of reality.
But what of the many who move aimlessly on the bare plateau, filled with hatred and seething with resentment? Their vision is clouded by emotional turbulence. They are not able to let go. They cannot surrender themselves and therefore remain closed to an existence beyond the bounds of human suffering. Indeed, suffering; however induced, brings with it seething anger and resentment. How could a loving God allow such injustice to occur, whether the pain is physical or mental, individual or communal? The person who is diverted along the path of recrimination soon finds himself in an enclosed circuit that magnifies the force of his anguish, providing no spark of relief nor any resolution of the difficulty. As much suffering is produced by an attitude of intransigent rebellion to the circumstances at hand as by those circumstances themselves. In a situation of mortal danger, as in a prison camp where there is communal solidarity in the face of imminent destruction, personal striving for life is expanded to fraternal concern. But if the pain is a solitary experience, like that of Job sitting on an ash-heap and covered with repulsive sores, the ego revolts at the injustice of the situation, and moves around in a vicious circle of anger and frustration. In such a condition, the traditional solutions based on Scripture or the world's wisdom serve to irritate the victim rather than strengthen him for onward confrontation with the forces of darkness. The hope is that light will eventually break through the obscurity as the plateau is explored and claimed with trust, care and patience in the face of continuing evil. In the end the core of obscurity is to be mastered and its gloom dispelled.
In fact it is the unyielding attitude of the victim that prevents light penetrating the darkness. The more he fights the sea of misfortunes, the more they close in on him. The more he tries to break loose from the prison, the more securely do its walls surround him. Pure intellectual analysis of the problem soon founders on the rock of incomprehensibility. And a gradually enveloping fatigue takes over the scene; at last the victim can rest in the darkness. Only then can his sense of grievance, his implacable resentment and his subterranean fear be relinquished. Then the light of hope, a light issuing forth from the depth of the soul, can cast some meaning and illuminate some direction in the further journey of the sufferer. It is noteworthy that only when the theological arguments of Job and his comforters came to an end, when silence was at last restored, did God come directly in a vision to Job. It was indeed something more than a vision, which by its nature has elements of separateness about it; it was rather an experience of union in which the deepest secrets of creation were imparted to Job. The silence of rest, the same silence that follows the distribution of the elements of the Eucharist to the congregation, brought the reasoning mind and the turbulent emotions to a halt. And then God could make his presence felt. Though he is always there, we are all too seldom available to receive him because our awareness is distracted with emotional turmoil of one type or another.
When the human mind turns back to the simple trust of a little child at rest, then alone can purpose be divined, and all the pain seen to be an essential part of the person's progress to a liberty that owes nothing to material circumstances. In the sleep of the bruised victim, healing of the damaged personality can proceed; a new person emerges as a phoenix from the debris of past suffering. When this process can take place within the context of the suffering community, a new type of society is being born into the sleeping world. Thus it was with the early Christian community before personal acquisitiveness cast its shadow and obliterated the sun of righteousness, with its warm rays of charity and selflessness. Indeed, too rapid a relief from spiritual travail can allow the old Adam to re-assert itself as the fleshpots of the past cast their enticing shadows once again. Even the children of Israel, in the journey through the wilderness to the Promised Land, were tempted time and again to yearn after their past life in Egypt. Once, however, one is on the healing journey of suffering, a return to the past becomes inconceivable; a forward passage into the unknown region is alone possible, even when its blackness is total, with no light to promise future illumination. The light of which I speak is the light of reason; the light of spiritual perception is always present though increasingly faint according to the spirituality of the victim. This is paradoxical, since one would assume a truly spiritual person would be closer to that light than a mere beginner on the way. But, in fact, the person attaining sanctity has to dispense even with his intuitive knowledge as part of his journey to the ultimate light, a light that is more like darkness to most of us. But, in fact, it is the darkness that one experiences when one gazes directly into a source of intense illumination. As we read in Scripture, no one can see God directly and remain alive. He would in effect be consumed in the uncreated energies of the Creator. But none of this is apparent to the victim in his journey onwards.
The important lesson we all have to learn in our life on earth is to be true to ourselves. This is the meaning of integrity. We have to shed all pretence, including the comfortable covering of propriety that we value so highly. This propriety is not so much an outer attitude of morality as the reputation we enjoy in the company of our peers. It may, especially in our currently permissive society, be an attitude of antinomianism, of direct rejection of the traditional values that sustain society, so that we assume the role of rebel against the moral order, just as easily as that of conformist rectitude. Thus Job had to shed the image of a wise man full of charity, and become a critic of the very moral order he had previously sustained, before he could see the light of God. He did not reject that morality so much as explore its foundations: what he discovered both confirmed its necessity and extended its range in a way that the previous teachers of wisdom in the Old Testament could scarcely have imagined. It showed that our life on earth is a school of spiritual training based on obedience to the Spirit of God within us, and a movement of the chastened soul beyond the world of punishment and reward to an experience of eternity in the present moment. Once personal suffering can be seen in this light it becomes not only tolerable but also filled with hope of ultimate perfection, of practising the way of life that Christ lays down in his teaching and demonstrates in his ministry.
No worst, there is none. Pitched past pitch of grief,
More pangs will, schooled at forepangs, wilder wring.
Comforters, where, where is your comforting?
Mary, mother of us, where is your relief?
My cries heave, herds-long; huddle in a main, a chief
Woe, world-sorrow; on an age-old anvil wince and sing-
Then lull, then leave off. Fury had shrieked "No lingering!
Let me be fell: force I must be brief".
O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall
Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed. Hold them cheap
May who ne'er hung there. Nor does long our small
Durance deal with that steep or deep. Here! creep,
Wretch, under a comfort serves in a whirlwind: all
Life death does end and each day dies with sleep.
No Worst, There is None
by G. M. Hopkins