Ann’s father was dying. Her pastor’s compassion unlocked something inside her, and she found herself talking to him about the pain of her marriage. Now a decade old, it had always been unhappy. She was often hurt by her husband’s words, and sometimes by his hands, too.  As she haltingly told the story, she paused. Looking up, she said, “I’m suffering a lot in this marriage, so it must be good, right Father?”

The stone barricade of suffering is what atheistic secularism, pious Catholicism and every other faith system eventually finds itself smacking up against. Whether it’s our own or someone else’s, suffering breaks us all. It can split apart whatever ground we’ve stood on our whole lives.  

Suffering meets us all, and we can all meet in suffering. In Mark’s Gospel, four friends break open the roof of a house to get their suffering friend inside. It’s a house full of suffering. At the centre of the house and at the heart of the sufferers is Jesus. The five friends break open suffering by bringing it to the face of Jesus.

Does God want us to suffer?  Is Ann’s marital suffering a sign that God is pleased with how things are? Sometimes people speak of suffering with a tone of praise and gratitude, leaving the impression that suffering’s a wonderful thing God just can’t wait to inflict on us.  Some say we shouldn’t even try to alleviate or prevent suffering —doesn’t God send it to accomplish His purpose? After all, God the Father made His own Son suffer to bring about salvation. Didn’t He?

Pain and agony can leave us feeling as though we’re in the hands of a vindictive God. The “great vivisectionist,” as C. S. Lewis put it. The “great eviscerator,” as someone else said.  We might think of God as a “divine abuser” who wanted His Son to suffer, and wants us to suffer. All of us. 

Does God like to see His little creatures in pain? Or is it that His desire to heal us can reach into the parts of ourselves we prefer to avoid? These are the places suffering can take us. In such places, we can discover who God is, encountering there the transforming power of His love for us. Anyone who’s descended into their own hell (or someone else’s) can attest that suffering can lead us to places that otherwise can’t be reached. As the Christian thinker Paul Evdokimov sees it, when suffering comes it can seemingly carve new places in our heart into existence. 

As with those people in St. Mark’s crowded house, suffering urges us to seek Christ. (“Why now?” Why her?” “Are you here?” “I don’t want this cup!”) And so we need to know how to take afflicted others to Him, as the four friends did. Suffering itself is not the healer. Christ is the divine physician. He knows how to take us up in our anguish, touching our hurts into wholeness. 

The hard part is there’s no way to get to Christ without the reality of suffering. We can’t meet Jesus apart from the Cross. With St. Paul, “we proclaim Christ crucified” (1 Corinthians 1:23).  The Shroud of Turin shows a body swathed in cuts and wounds, becoming the dead man’s swaddling clothes.

At the centre of suffering, the Cross invites us into the intimacy of the Father and Son. When we stand before the crucified Jesus, held by the gaze of the Son as He looks to His Father, do we see a manipulative, abusive or coercive relationship? Looking with Jesus upon His Abba, we behold the one He feels abandoned by. We know that feeling. But we also look with Him toward the Abba to whom He freely abandoned His will. In utter trust, Jesus commends His spirit. 

On the Cross, the excruciating suffering that humans can inflict on one another is revealed. Revealed, too, is the intimate relationship between Father and Son. From the Cross, the divine Spirit is breathed into the world. This breath is neither sadistic nor vengeful. The Trinity whom the Cross reveals embraces us in the mystery of suffering. Suffering isn’t revealed as being objectively good. It is, however, the path that love can take to heal us broken people.  

I remember seeing a young family I knew at a long-past Holy Thursday Mass of the Lord’s Supper. The father held his eight-year-old daughter in his arms throughout the entire two-hour service.  She’d begun crying softly, heart-sore about something one of her friends had said to her at school, and so he picked her up. She soon stopped crying and fell asleep. Her father would not put her down. Those fatherly arms clearly got weary, but the fatherly heart did not. In his embrace, her tears were held. It wasn’t because he loved her suffering, but because he loved her.