LOVE SUFFERS TOO

As I enter into old age (I am 82 years old in 2023) and experience physical challenges I find consolation in Miguel de Unamuno’s classic written in 1912: The Tragic Sense of Life. Let me share with you some of his thoughts which stimulate my thinking.

Love, pity, personalizes everything, we have said; in discovering the suffering in everything and in personalizing everything, it personalizes the Universe itself as well – for the Universe also suffers – and it discovers God to us. For God is revealed to us because He suffers and because we suffer; because He suffers He demands our love, and because we suffer He gives us His love, and he covers our anguish with the eternal and infinite anguish.

This was the scandal of Christianity among Jews and Greeks, among Pharisees and Stoics, and this, which was its scandal of old, the scandal of the Cross, is still its scandal today, and will continue to be so, even among Christians themselves – the scandal of a God who becomes man in order that He may suffer and die and rise again, because He has suffered and died, the scandal of a God subject to suffering and death. And this truth that God suffers – a truth that appalls the mind of man – is the revelation of the very heart of the Universe and of its mystery, the revelation that God revealed to us when He sent His Son in order that He might redeem us by suffering and dying. It was the revelation of the divine in suffering, for only that which suffers is divine.

Whosoever knows not the Son will never know the Father, and the Father is only known through the Son; whosoever knows not the Son of Man – he who suffers bloody anguish and the pangs of a breaking heart, whose soul is heavy within him even unto death, who suffers the pain that kills and brings to life again – will never know the Father, and can know nothing of the suffering God.

Suffering is the substance of life and the root of personality, for it is only suffering that makes us persons. And suffering is universal, suffering is that which unites us living beings together; it is the universal or divine blood that flows through us all.

There is no true love save in suffering, and in this world we have to choose either love, which is suffering, or happiness…..Suffering is a spiritual thing. It is the most immediate revelation of consciousness, and it may be that our body was given us simply in order that suffering might be enabled to manifest itself. A man who has never known suffering, either in greater or less degree, would scarcely possess consciousness of himself. The child first cried at birth when the air, entering into his lungs and limiting him, seem to say to him: You have to breathe me in order that you may live!…Physical suffering, or even discomfort, is what reveals to us our own internal core….Pain, which is a kind of dissolution, makes us discover our internal core; and in the supreme dissolution, which is death, we shall at last, through the pain of annihilation arrive at the core of our temporal core – at God, whom in our spiritual anguish we breathe and learn to love.

St. Paul echoed this experience of suffering when he wrote, “Now I rejoice in what was suffered for you, and I fill up in my flesh what is still lacking in regard to Christ’s afflictions, for the sake of his body, which is the church.” (Colossians 1:24)