North of the Shire

This is a post that I made at Whippleshire two years ago and stands the test of the passage of that time. For some reason, today it seems rather poignant, so I will repeat it here in its entirety;

Some Thoughts on Suffering
Since becoming Catholic one of the most difficult concepts/subjects for me to get my mind around and then internalize has been the mystery of suffering. Intellectually I have been able to learn and understand but to genuinely appropriate this has been a straining toward the light, as it were. In a sense I have to see it, but with the eyes of my soul, not only my mind.

Something that has been useful to me has been to meditate upon the mystery of the Incarnation. The more of that essential mystery that I can grasp, the more that many other Catholic essentials fall into place. I won’t enumerate them all, but one example is the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist. The Incarnation is a miracle of self-sacrificing love, in and of itself. That God should become a man is almost beyond comprehension, when we truly understand who God is and who man is. What’s more, that act of God is irrevocable. Jesus, the second person of the Trinity is a man, forever. By becoming a man he bestowed on us as human beings an incalculable honour, raising us up by that very act. He bestowed a blessing, as well, upon all matter, having once declared it “good” he now enters into it, as C.S.Lewis points out, the artist entering the painting. So now the feeding of the nation of Israel upon manna in the desert, a miracle, and then the feeding of the five thousand, another miracle, become more clearly the natural prefiguring of the Eucharist. And in this miracle of the Eucharist is the feeding of the millions, down through time, across any time or place, transcending time itself. Jesus the man feeds us his own flesh and blood, just as the Jews consumed the sacrifice for sin. It is the Incarnation over and over again at every Mass.

In the case of suffering we can understand at the most immediate and obvious level that our suffering, whatever its kind, is meaningful as we look at the suffering of Jesus Christ and also offer our suffering to add to his for the salvation of souls. His suffering had infinite meaning and our suffering, thereby, can have meaning as well. It is not wasted.

But beyond that understanding is another that I have discovered recently through working my way through Cardinal Ratzinger’s (now Pope Benedict XVI) book “Introduction to Christianity.” In a very deep discussion of the meaning of the Resurrection of the Body, which statement of belief we find in the Apostle’s Creed. He makes the point, with St. Paul, that the current flesh and blood body is corruptible and therefore since the “corruptible cannot inherit the incorruptible” we know that the resurrected bodies will not simply be restored versions of our old body. So what are we talking about here?

In order to get some concept of this across, Ratzinger points out that the content of the concept of soul that we have modified from the original body/soul construct in Greek philosophy is best discussed in terms of a dialogue with God. We have all been addressed by God, regardless of how we respond to that call, and that is what identifies us as truly human beings. Thus the derivative of the Greek concept of soul is useful as a shorthand to understand death and the separation of body and soul, but what makes it useful and real is that the individual is only human at the behest of God, and in some sense what we will be at the resurrection is not a soul re-united with a corporeal body but rather the “person” that we were.

But to speak of the person that we are is not possible without the two constituent parts, the body and the soul. This is more or less where the Hebrew concept rested prior to the influence of the Greeks.

Now we know that the physical characteristics of a human being are transitory and perishable and that the world, in its superficiality places much stock in appearance and other physical qualities. However, our physicality, whatever it happens to be in relation to the world’s ideals does play a role in shaping our person, the content of who we are, as this composite being. This, we would assert, greatly depends upon how the world around us treats us and how we respond to that treatment. Our character and our response to God’s dialogic address to us, is shaped in certain measure by that physicality.

This dynamic works even strictly on the worldly level. An example is the predominance of less than “model quality” appearance in many of the performing arts. How many of us have seen the great guitar hero of a popular rock band and discovered that the guy is quite ugly, by the standards of beauty that the world normally uses? Then it dawns on us. That guy was likely ugly as a kid and not athletic either so he didn’t fit into the popular social groups at the time of his life when he desperately wanted some sort of acceptance. This likely motivated him not just to pick up that particular musical instrument but drove him to be the best at it, at least better than most. By contrast, the good-looking high-school jock had very few social obstacles and early success at that level. If he picked up the guitar, for example, even if he had natural talent, he was unlikely to become proficient because the social motivation was not high.

Likewise, the circumstances of our life in the physical world can help shape our souls, the “who” of who we are, and the content of our character. An obvious example is all around us. Jesus said that it is extremely difficult for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of Heaven. He didn’t mean that there are any special obstacles placed by God in that man’s path, but rather the motivation for virtue, and for understanding the need of salvation in the first place are rare in the rich. We can see that an affluent society leads to self-satisfaction in many and because they are blinded by this material world they cannot see the next. And, of course, this is the principle reason that monks and religious for centuries have taken vows of poverty.

What does this have to do with suffering? Bringing all of this together it seems to me that the “person” of who we are is shaped immeasurably by suffering and how we respond to it. And much of that suffering is bodily suffering in one form or another. From this we see that relationship of body and soul whereby the person is not simply a body and a soul attached together for a time, but rather a particular body and a particular soul and the person that is the integrated human being, is the person that survives death and is restored or “awakened” at the resurrection. That person has become that person through the vehicle of the body as a human being so that for all time, after death, that person is still that same person even when the corporeal body has disintegrated in the grave. Even so, that person would not be who they are, without that particular body and set of circumstances which represented their life as a human being in the corporeal world. Even gone back to dust, that body, that physicality, that life is a huge component of who we are and where we will end up, and an essential part of the “person” that lives beyond the grave.

So what we do with suffering in this world is critical to our future in the next. If we are able, through the grace of God to see everything that comes our way as an opportunity be more like Christ, purifying ourselves of attachments to sin, of attachments to little idols, God’s grace will abound within us all the more so that as St. Paul admonishes, we do all to the Glory of God.