We don’t hear it too often these days but if someone says to me that I should offer up pain or suffering, I immediately react with a sense of anger and annoyance. I keep asking myself, what is it all about? Why must some people suffer so much?
Just last week a woman told me about her mother’s dementia. The woman was visiting her father in hospital, so naturally he too was concerned and perplexed about the condition of his wife.
At one stage in our conversation the woman mentioned that she felt guilty because she should have spotted the early signs of the disease and maybe she could have taken action earlier and that might have been of help to her mother. Most of all it was that sentiment that struck a chord with me. There’s an old adage I so often heard as a child: “If all the ifs and buts made pots and pans there’d be no need for tinkers”. Traditionally Travellers and tinsmiths were experts in repairing broken pots and pans.
Some years ago had I left the house two minutes later or earlier I would not have been knocked off my bicycle. All those ifs and buts in our lives ... simply put, there are no answers that make sense to us. Are there any answers to pain and suffering? The wife of a close friend of mine died of a brain tumour. She was far too young to die. We all have similar stories.
Are our lives made up of a succession of accidental happenings, the people we meet, the people we love, those who come together and bring new life into the world? From beginning to end it seems to be one continuous matter of accidental events. In my five years working as a hospital chaplain I have seen first-hand the fragility of our lives. I am constantly amazed by how people cope with their illnesses. We humans are adaptable.
In tomorrow’s Gospel (Mark 8: 27 - 35) when Jesus asks his disciples who do people say he is, he tells them that God’s ways are not the ways of human thinking. If they want to be his followers, they need to renounce themselves, take up their cross and follow him. “For anyone who wants to save his life will lose it.”
In recent days Eileen O’Riordan, mother of the late Dolores O’Riordan of Cranberries fame, has spoken on a number of media outlets about her talented and wonderful daughter, who died in 2018. Last Monday would have been the singer’s 50th birthday. Eileen has spoken publicly of how her faith has kept her going in such difficult times. Listening to her I was back thinking of the fragility of our lives, the fact that we have no idea what might face us.
Maybe because of the very fragility and the randomness of our lives I’m inclined to say that there must be more to it than what meets the eye. Yes, I fall back on the faith of my parents and their parents before them and say, in belief, that we are destined in some way or other to be united with God.
I don’t understand suffering, and I cannot account for the vagaries of human behaviour. But these days I keep saying to myself that there has to be more to our existence, that it does not end with a simple full stop, like a sentence written on paper. I also realise that it is folly – and a terrible form of arrogance – to think that we are fully in control of the circumstances of our lives. Just look around and see the job that we can do. Yes, we humans can do extraordinary good but we can also inflict indescribable pain and suffering. Of course it’s wrong to preach resignation to the poor and suffering, but in moments of great hardship and pain a cry out to God, invoking God’s name, might well give us a perspective on what our lives are about.
There is a line in the reading from Isaiah in tomorrow’s liturgy which goes: “The Lord is coming to my help”(Isaiah 50:7).
Christians believe that all our unanswered questions and dilemmas will be resolved in God’s providence.
In that context I accept that there is an all-seeing God, whose nature is to love the world, to love its creatures, to love me. In that context, I hope and pray that I will be able to carry my cross.