When suffering one either migrates to the poll of despair or resignation; at least I do. We know that despair is not of God but of the Evil One. We know that resignation is the refuge of the fatalists, Stoics, and often the atheist. I don’t want to exist, let alone live, dwell, inhabit, either place. What is the alternative?
The Catholics make use of suffering. They encourage the sufferer to offer it to God usually in a propitiatory sense, to see it as appeasing His just wrath against your sins. No Confessional Lutheran would ‘go here’, but our Flesh bolts for here in the depths to get away from despair and/or resignation.
Blaise Pascal, a 17th century Catholic writer, said: “Move my heart to repent of my faults, since, without this internal sorrow, the external ills with which thou affectest my body will be to me a new occasion of sin. Make me truly to know that the ills of the body are nothing else than the punishment and the symbol combined of the ills of the soul. But, Lord, grant also that they may be their remedy, by making me consider, in the pains which I feel, those that I did not feel in my soul, although wholly diseased, and covered with sores. For, Lord, the greatest of its diseases is this insensibility and extreme weakness, which had taken away from it all feeling of its own sufferings. Make me to feel them acutely, and grant that the portion of life that remains to me may be a continual penitence to wash away the offences that I have committed” (Pascal, Five-Foot Shelf of Books, “Harvard Classics”, Prayer VII, 373-374).
Let’s break this down. This is what the talking-heads on sport’s talk radio are always telling me they’re doing for me for the game ahead. They end up breaking me down. So be forewarned. I may do this to you unwillingly and unwittingly.
Pascal’s first sentenced is the warning I started out with: “Move my heart to repent of my faults, since, without this internal sorrow, the external ills with which thou affectest my body will be to me a new occasion of sin.” If we view our sufferings without sorrow for our sins they will indeed be occasions for even more sinning. We will complain that God is unfair. We will probably end where Job did: justifying ourself.
Pascal’s solution is to regard the physical pains he feels in his body as reminders of the spiritual pains he didn’t feel in his soul “although wholly diseased, and covered with sores.” All men will one day see their sin and guilt for the wretchedness it is either in life, with St. Paul “O wretched man that I am!” (Rom. 7), or in death. Not in dying for then you are still living and it’s not too late. I mean in death when you open your eyes in your well-earned Hell and realize it isn’t a dream. Even then you won’t be repentant, but like Dives in torment, you will realize what the full weight of your sin and guilt has forever gotten you, and demand for another way of saving others.
How salutary then to experience in your physical body the pains you deserve for eternity. Again and again, we sing, we pray asking the Lord to make us know our sin and guilt so that we don’t think we have anything to contribute to our salvation and might cherish our redemption from the just judgment for them.
Of course in the end Pascal gets back to his Catholic roots. We don’t think our “continual penitence” can wash away our offenses, but we do recognize the greatest of sin’s “diseases” is in becoming insensible to the suffering our sins rightly deserve. This is being frostbitten and putting your feet in the fire without knowing it. This is gnawing your cheek or lip after being numbed by Novocain. This is freezing to death or dying from lack of oxygen and feeling good about it.
O Lord preserve us from such insensibility. May we recognize the suffering that all the godly endure as reminders of what we don’t suffer in body or soul but should and Jesus did in our place. Then our suffering will be used well used
