THE GIFT OF SUFFERING

Rod Dreher has written a perceptive Manual for Christian Dissidents entitled, LIVE NOT BY LIES, which is taken from Solzhenitsyn’s message to the Russian people when he was exiled. It is just as relevant today as then. Dreher references The Triumph of the Therapeutic by Philip Rieff which argued that the decline in belief in God in the West had given birth to a new civilization devoted to liberating the individual to seek his own pleasures and to manage emergent anxieties. Religious Man, who lived according to belief in transcendent principles that ordered human life around communal purposes, had given way to Psychological Man, who believed that there was no transcendent order and that life’s purpose was to seek one’s own way experimentally. Man no longer understood himself to be a pilgrim on a meaningful journey with others, but as a tourist who traveled through life according to his own self-designed itinerary, with personal happiness his ultimate goal. Suffering is to be avoided at all costs.

Dreher interviewed a Hungarian woman who allowed the suffering inflicted by the communist regime to deepen her love for God and for her fellow persecuted believers. Now, in liberty and relative prosperity, the children of the last communist generation have fallen for a more subtle, sophisticated tyranny: one that tells them that anything they find difficult is a form of oppression. For these millennials unhappiness is slavery and freedom is liberation from the burden of unchosen obligations.

A young wife and mother shared the prevailing attitude among her generation is that life’s difficulties are a threat to one’s well-being, and should be refused. Do she and her husband argue at times? Then she should leave him. Are her children annoying her? Then she should send them to day care. She worries that her friends don’t grasp that suffering is a normal part of life – even of part of a good life, in that suffering teaches us how to be patient, kind and loving. She doesn’t want them to give her advice about how to escape her problems; she just wants them to help her live through them.

A 2019 NBC/Wall Street Journal poll found a distinct minority of young American adults believed that religion, patriotism, and having children are an important part of life, while nearly four out of five said “self-fulfillment” is key to the good life. Most believe that society is nothing more than a collection of autonomous individuals out to enjoy life.

Hungarian Christians who were persecuted under communism for their faith claim that “you have to suffer for the truth because that is what makes you authentic. That’s what makes truth credible. Suffering is part of every human’s life. We don’t know why we suffer, But your suffering is like a seal. If you put a seal on your actions, interestingly enough, people start to wonder about your truth – that maybe you are right about God. In one sense, it’s a mystery, because the Evil One wants to persuade us that there is a life without suffering. First you have to live through it, and then you try to pass on the value of suffering, because suffering has a value.”

To recognize the value in suffering is to rediscover a core teaching of historical Christianity, and to see clearly the pilgrim path walked by every generation of Christians since the Twelve Apostles. It requires standing foursquare against much of popular Christianity, which has become a shallow self-help cult whose chief aim is not cultivating discipleship but rooting out personal anxieties. But to refuse to see suffering as a means of sanctification is to surrender to “Christianity without tears” (Huxley, Brave New World).