Suffering

Yesterday, over a cup of coffee, an old classmate told me about the death of her friend from ovarian cancer, and her own father's long struggle with Alzheimer's. Eyes wet with tears, she held her mug tightly and asked the questions that plague most of us at one time or another: "Does God know what he's doing? I can't make sense of this. My father wanted to die quickly; he could see what the disease was doing to him. My friend wanted to live, to stay with her husband and children. What was God thinking?"

I could offer nothing in answer. Those are very good questions. They are the hard questions.

Her questions make me think of something that happened earlier this year. My husband and I had just returned from vacation, and I went out into the back yard to check on the garden Along the wooden fence I saw something fluttering almost midway down It was small and brown. I went over for a closer look.

The dried-out carcass of a sparrow hung, swiveling in the wind, head down One foot had caught between the close-set spokes of the fence. One wing hung down, misshapen and broken. On the ground below the plants had been flattened--evidence of our cat's persistent efforts to reach the frightened, trapped bird.

I thought of the pain created by the twisted claw, the exhaustion of constant fluttering to stay upright, to get free. The knifelike pain of the broken wing. The eventual thirst. The slow, torturous death. I felt sick and went back in the house.

As I worked in the kitchen, I could not rid myself of the poignant image of suffering, still fluttering from our fence. I felt deeply distressed.

"All right," I said. "Why? Why did you show me this? It hurts. I can't stop thinking about it. All I can see is that bird. What cruel suffering. What do you have to say about this?" Why are you making me look at this? Why did it happen?

I stopped washing dishes and listened.

In the silence, I became aware that the answer to my question was too big for me. Or that I was too small for it. But, still intent on listening, I heard a voice, thought not audible. It was the voice of someone I know and am learning to trust.

"Do not think that I do not understand suffering. I will not tell you the reason for this bird's death, for your own suffering, for the pain of others. But remember and think. I myself understand suffering. I placed myself at the very deepest point of it. At a point where I could feel and carry in my own self the pain of this sparrow, the suffering of an abused child, the grief of a husband and wife being torn apart by death, the fear and pain of terminal illness, the torture of a lonely and guilty spirit. The grief of betrayal, of a great and gaping aloneness, of all things wrong with the world. I have been there, and carried it all on myself. I know pain, much more than any other living being. I know suffering."

This conversation did not give me understanding into others' suffering. It did, however, give me understanding of the one who loves me. He chose to enter suffering. He took the knife point of the world's pain and aimed it directly at himself. He did this out of a great and deep love, and out of the understanding that things could not be fixed--ever--if he did not do this.

I do not know how that suffering felt for him. Neither do you. We can only know the small particles of suffering that fall on us and threaten to overwhelm our lives. We cannot know how it would be to carry all of those particles at once. What we do know, from an eyewitness, is that the anticipation of this suffering caused the Son of God himself to weep and sweat in fear.

This is a mystery to me, why he had to suffer. And I still do not understand why the people in my life must suffer in the ways that they do. All I know is that, as I meet in solitude with the one who loves me, I am slowly being changed as I see him and as I listen.

There is an icon that paints the living Christ rising from the grave, clothed in blinding white. His right hand grasps Adam, and his left, Eve. They are being pulled out of the grave with him.

I think I understand this much: He endured every particle of pain for that moment.