“Do not measure your loss by itself. If you do, it will seem intolerable.” – St. Basil
As I drew near the end of the school year this year, two things became inevitable. Students asking for “extra credit” a week before the grades were due, and our discussions about end-of-life issues in moral theology class. Though I was ready for the school year to end, I somehow wish we had more time to discuss such matters of importance — especially since these are the matters that seem to resonate most with high school juniors.
Most of my students haven’t lived long enough to experience a ton of suffering. But that doesn’t mean they don’t know what it is. And hopefully, they’ve gotten enough of a taste of it to see how God can transform it. Most have had grandparents who have died. Some have had parents. And the underlying questions those deaths can create might bring them face to face not only with their own mortality, but with the nascent question: “If God is so good, why is there so much suffering in the world?”
In speaking with teenagers, I’ve found it’s personal stories that seem to resonate more than lectures about Church doctrine and the moral mandates of ordinary or extraordinary care. Unfortunately, in my own life, my family has experienced some of those decisions quite recently.
“Life’s not fair.” It’s what my parents always taught me. It’s what I tell my students. And it’s what I experienced for 25 years as a police officer. Suffering is inevitable. And being a “good person” doesn’t always protect us from it. I’ve learned through the years that the good suffer with “the bad.” And when bad things happen, when people die, it isn’t an implicit sign that God is unhappy with us. But sometimes, like the belief of old, we have the tendency to believe that it is.
“As he walked along, he saw a man blind from birth. His disciples asked him, ‘Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?’ Jesus answered, ‘Neither this man nor his parents sinned: he was born blind so that God’s works might be revealed in him” (John 9:1-3).
For some reason, in our world today, we’ve taken the idea of God’s omnipotence and conflated it with God’s tyranny. We’ve underscored the idea that “God is in control” means that “God does control,” which means, “He could have stopped my grandparent from dying,” or “He could have allayed the suffering of my father,” or “He could have cured my mom’s cancer if he had wanted to.”
But this “mystery” — if you will — is perhaps more exhaustible than knowable. And as I’ve grown older and made my own mistakes, I’ve realized something: God is not in the “removal” business. He is in the “transition” business.
I did an exercise with my students this year. It involved showing them instruments of suffering and death and asking them to give me synonyms for each: a noose, an electric chair, a gun, and a cross. For the first few, I got what I expected: loss, sorrow, pain, desolation. The last was a bit different. When faced with a cross, their synonyms suddenly changed: hope, faith, redemption and love. I quickly asked them: “What if I had shown this image to a first century Judean prior to Christ’s redemptive act?” Suddenly, their synonyms changed to more ominous words. The point? God did not create the cross. Nor did he remove it. Rather, he transitioned it from something horrendous, to the greatest sign of hope the world knows today.
A very wise priest with whom I work sums it up nicely: “Sometime God saves us from our suffering. And sometimes God saves us through our suffering.” When I experienced unfathomable suffering in my former career, I learned two things: God was never the author of it. And families who suffered with God had much more hope than the ones who suffered without Him. It gave me a mantra that I’ve tried to live by and share with my students, who so often embrace the idea that “Everything happens for a reason,” which can implicitly make God the author of the bad, and replacing it with, “God can bring reason out of everything that happens,” which makes Him the redeemer from it.
Over the past few months, in my own life, there has been a litany of deaths and mishaps. And while I realize there are those who have it far worse — and I pray for them regularly — I’ve tried to “dial-up” God’s “transition company” rather than expecting God’s “removal company” to knock at my door. It isn’t easy.
When my aunt died in February, it was unexpected and difficult for my uncle. But I’ve seen such growth, faith, and friendship around him, it’s hard not to see God’s hand. When my father-in-law died two weeks later after a lengthy struggle with dementia, it was taxing. But when I saw my wife’s strength and virtue, staying with her mother for a week, two-and-a-half hours away from her family — when nephews, nieces, and neighbors all came together to help — and when my college-aged daughter pulled me aside one day, tears in her eyes, and said: “You know what Dad? I could literally feel God’s presence in the room.” I could see that “God’s transition service” was there to help.
I must say, when our older daughter drove her car through the back of the garage a few weeks later, it was difficult to see much of anything. But hey — a new paint job in the family isn’t a bad thing, right?
You see, God didn’t save us from any of those mishaps. But neither did he save the saints, nor even his own Son. At times, I’m tempted to echo the words of St. Therese of Lisieux, who once wrote, during a difficult time: “Lord, if this is how you treat your friends, no wonder you have so few.” I love her ability to be “real.” It’s what’s attracted me to read more about her.
There is a truth so poignant, we scarcely wish to embrace it: that we will all encounter suffering in this life. But there is another inexorable truth that we will not find unless we allow Christ’s light to guide us — that God can turn loss and sorrow, into hope and transition. And the way I figure, if we must go through it anyway, we might as well ask for some “extra credit” for it. Luckily, God is a much more understanding teacher than I.
Paul Stuligross teaches theology at Detroit Catholic Central High School in Novi, and will become the school’s director of campus ministry in the fall.
