Christians are meant to suffer

Nihilism: the modern disease and meaningless suffering – and how to fix it.

A decade or more ago I wrote an article entitled, Christians are meant to suffer. The article itself is buried somewhere in the internet dustbin of early 2000s blogging sites but its musings gave rise to a conclusion that I think about to this day – and one common to many who wrote before me:

to suffer is human; to suffer well is superhuman.

Suffering is inexplicably connected to life in a fallen world. In a sense, to live is to suffer. And to live well is to suffer well. But to suffer well we must willingly accept the preconditions of postlapsarian life, with all its difficulties and sorrows, and live virtuously in spite of it.

NIHILISM: THE MODERN DISEASE AND MEANINGLESS SUFFERING

In 1882, when Frederich Nietzsche famously declared that “God is dead,” he agonized over the resulting abnegation of meaning in life. For a life without meaning leaves suffering likewise. Recognizing life’s looming absurdity for modern man – and the potency of despair in the face of meaningless suffering – Nietzsche dedicated much of his career to developing an antidote to nihilism for the post-Christian world. What he came up with was the Übermensch.

The Übermensch is one who accepts even the involuntary sufferings of life as an opportunity to sculpt something beautiful – to overcome his own paradigmatic limitations and emerge stronger and more resilient. While Nietzsche would go on to posture his own life as anti-Christian, proclaiming a self-creation adjacent to self-deification, much of his philosophy would stress a tenet that is central Christianity itself: suffering can be redeemed.

Nietzsche implied as much with his principle of eternal recurrence – an idea espousing that every human being will relive life, exactly as they has chosen to live it, ad infinitum. Nietzsche was not pointing to a literal truth, but a metaphorical one: to live well is to live in such a way that makes every sorrow, every pain, worth willingly suffering again. In other words, to live well is to imbue suffering with productive meaning through creative action. The rhetorical force of this concept lies precisely in the fact that, in this life, suffering is inevitable but it does not have to be meaningless. Whether or not it is, is up to us.

The dilemma for modern man is exactly as Nietzsche foresaw: life without meaning makes suffering unbearable. Today, the debilitating force of this ideology is variously demonstrated by perpetual grousing on social media, the all-too-readily accepted performance of victimism, and the prevalence of despair – even in the environs of Christendom.

CHRISTIAN SUFFERING: AN HONOR, AN OPPORTUNITY

Christians throughout history are no strangers to suffering. But reading about the tortures experienced by the martyrs will likely compel reflection: how can these early Christians withstand intense persecution such as the filleting of their flesh without denying Christ while I cannot experience an internet outage without cursing him? The answer, it would seem, lies in that they viewed suffering as an expected outcome of their choice to follow Christ. Indeed, many considered such brutal torments to be an honor bestowed on them by Christ himself, who counted them worthy to suffer (Acts 5:41).

Much like Nietzsche, these early Christians viewed suffering as an opportunity – but instead of an opportunity for self-deification, as one that allows Christ to be formed in them (Galatians 2:20; 4:19). In a sense, suffering became for the Christian a rite of passage into the glory of Christ – with whom they suffered and through whom they were resurrected. This “productive” view of suffering was so prominent, in fact, that the Church had to condemn the growing trend of seeking martyrdom, as it was bordering the sin of self-immolation.

The point is that early Christians held a fundamentally different view of suffering than many of us do today. And until we are able to give thanks for our daily sufferings as opportunities to pick up our cross and die with Christ, we will continue to be imprisoned by the seeming inanity and meaninglessness of our daily struggle. Given enough time, if we do not break out of this prison, we will inevitably buy into a lie that is worse than death: despair, which says God is not there, he does not care, and my suffering, my life, is meaningless.

HOW TO MAKE A BEGINNING AT SUFFERING WELL

Orthodox spirituality emphasizes that, long before sin is acted out, sin is conceived in the mind. How we respond to suffering is similar: it begins with a mindset.

If we are intent on avoiding suffering at all costs, then our paradigm – that suffering is bad and ultimately meaningless – will not allow us to suffer well. We will wind up complaining like the children of Israel in the desert (Exodus 16); we will forget the Lord and his mighty work of delivering us from the hands of Pharoah, that is the evil one, through baptism (Exodus 14); how he provided food and drink for us in the desert of spiritual dryness, that is, the Eucharist (Exodus 16); how he wanted to lead us through the sufferings of the desert to the promise land, preferring instead the golden calf of temporary comforts – food, alcohol, sex (Luke 15:11-32)…theological study divorced from prayer, prayer as an act of hubris divorced from God (Luke 18:9–14)…the act of ministry for the sake of self-identity instead of for the sake of the least of these (Matthew 25:31-46)… But such things cannot hold the weight of existential meaning – and in the end, we will be irritated by the inconvenience of suffering no matter how small (Numbers 11:4–14). Re-enacting this response over a lifetime leads to death in the desert (Numbers chs. 13–36).

So how do we change our mindset? It starts with being aware of it – when we “come to ourselves,” like the Prodigal Son and finally realize that feeding the passions, be they carnal or spiritual, has left us starving in the middle of a pen of pigs (the demons). But this first rung in the ladder of suffering well (coming to ourselves), much like Saint John Climacus’ Ladder, is not one that can be climbed and forgotten, but rather perpetually practiced while climbing the next and the next and the next… Next, we practice by addressing our actions and words. Are we angry when someone cuts us off in traffic? We will still feel that irritation and anger, but we attempt to stay silent with hands on the wheel instead of screaming, honking, and flipping the bird. Given time, space will begin to develop between the acute incident and our reaction, allowing us more freedom to choose how we respond – to choose productive suffering. What follows is the quieting of the mind. Where we once would have an evil thought run through our head, we find that we are aware of the possibility of an evil thought, but avoid it by simply stepping to the side while the evil one’s arrow passes us by.

What if we are caught by the thought that the minutia of our sufferings compared to the early Christians is so pathetic that they still feel meaningless?

In his first volume of Spiritual Counsels, Saint Paisios tangentially answers this question. He mentions that modern man is afflicted by many things the early Christians were not – and the modern man who merely endures to the end without losing faith (Matthew 24:13) with receive a crown greater than the martyrs. We live in a world today where it is easy to get distracted from the one thing needful (Luke 10:42); it is easy to give in to thoughts that our suffering is meaningless and look to melt down the gold of our hard earned virtue to purchase passions that promise deliverance but never deliver. What Saint Paisios is saying is this: do not give up. Never give up. But let’s be clear: giving up is not a one-time event, it is a slow process given in to over a lifetime. It is the frog in boiling water…

SELF-CREATION: FROM IMAGE TO LIKENESS

Long before Nietzsche, Socrates proclaimed that man’s freedom lies within; although he cannot control what happens to him, he can control how he responds. And this is the one thing that can never be taken away him.

God gives us freedom – he creates man in his image – and it is our responsibility to use it to acquire his likeness, according to which we were also created (Genesis 1:27). In this sense, our Christian life is in fact a kind of self-creation project insofar as we choose freely what we make of ourselves. Commenting on this idea in 1987, C.S. Lewis would write the following:

Every time you make a choice you are turning the central part of you, the part of you that chooses, into something a little different than it was before. And taking your life as a whole, with all your innumerable choices, all your life long you are slowly turning this central thing into a heavenly creature or a hellish creature: either into a creature that is in harmony with God, and with other creatures, and with itself, or else into one that is in a state of war and hatred with God, and with its fellow creatures, and with itself. To be the one kind of creature is heaven: that is, it is joy and peace and knowledge and power. To be the other means madness, horror, idiocy, rage, impotence, and eternal loneliness. Each of us at each moment is progressing to the one state of the other (Mere Christianity, p. 92).

CONCLUDING THOUGHTS

The Orthodox Church seeks to guide us on this journey from image to likeness with periods of time dedicated to denying ourselves – to voluntarily suffer, in a sense. One of those times, Great Lent, provides us with an opportunity to exercise those muscles of self-sacrifice, of abstinence, and so on. But there are many other opportunities afforded us by God himself, at varying times throughout the year, when we encounter involuntary suffering… But it is not as one far off that he allows such trials. No, it is as one who is willingly descends with us into our personal hell in order to raise us up with him in his resurrection. Our challenge today is to reach out and grab his hand. To give thanks, to breathe, and to endure.

We also glory in our sufferings, because we know that suffering produces perseverance; perseverance, character; and character, hope. And hope does not put us to shame, because God’s love has been poured out into our hearts through the Holy Spirit, who has been given to us (Romans 5:3–5).

*Next week, in observance of Clean Week, I will not be posting.*

This post was written as a way of organizing my thoughts around my own (and my family’s) suffering. I am still working on all of this myself. I do not tend to write much about myself, but I did make a secondary YouTube channel as a way of exploring – and coping with – life as a caretaker to four special needs children and a chronically ill wife. You can watch the most recent video here. I talk a little more on Twitter as well.

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