Suffering and God's Allowance

  • Thread starter Thread starter scameter18
  • Start date Start date
Status
Not open for further replies.
S

scameter18

Guest
As Catholics, we believe that nothing in existence is truly outside God’s plan and His will. While He does not directly cause or force all things, usually using natural laws and permitting free will, nothing can occur that He does not allow, and as can be seen from the Book of Job, everything God allows He does for a purpose. It is all within His larger plan and truth.

God also allows negative things to exist and occur, whether the result of original sin or direct human sin, as well as the sins of demons. He allows these things to give us the opportunity to grow in penance, charity, and faithful reliance on Him through the virtue of suffering. Despite modern phrasing, suffering and pain are not synonymous. One can experience pain without suffering it. To suffer means to not let pain entice us into sin. In the midst of pain, we are tempted to alleviate that pain via sin; suffering is not giving in to this temptation. But the purpose of doing this derives directly from Christ. When we suffer, as suffer with Him as He suffered. We join our sufferings to His and thus offer up our sufferings as penance, for ourselves and others. God wants us to have the opportunity to suffer because through it, we become more like Christ in that we grow in faith, hope and love. Also, through complete focus and reliance upon God through suffering, we distance ourselves from their fallen, passing world and the glamor of sin, fully giving ourselves to God.

God allows negative things in this world for these purposes, the highest and most personal purpose being to suffer, which naturally also involves another high purpose - charity. But my question is: since God allows negative things to exist so that we may respond to them with faith, suffering and charity, to provide us with an opportunity for spiritual growth, and since all negative things that God allows are within His plan, why should we feel discontent towards them? When something bad happens, how can it be truly bad when God is allowing it and using it for a good purpose? Does His ultimate purpose not transform it into something good? Or is it simultaneously bad and good? And how should we respond? Should we ask God prayerfully to take bad things away from us, even though all bad things are allowed by God for a good purpose, or should we just accept bad things as opportunities from God and feel no discontent for them?

I am sorry to overwhelm with many questions. This is just a deep issue for me, not one of faith per se (though it may in fact be, beyond my direct apprehension), but of method and understanding. I want to understand God’s intentions for how we are supposed to live and believe about bad things that happen, praying for them to go away, and suffering them. I thank anyone willing to answer my questions. God bless. 🙂
 
If we consider our four score years and ten on this planet with the depth of eternity lived with God, then we give some context to the idea of suffering in this world.

Suffering is what teaches us to truly live, as the ancient Chinese proverb goes “one must taste bitter in order to taste sweet”.

The most beautiful people we know are those who have known defeat, known suffering, known struggle, known loss, and have found their way out of the depths. These persons have an appreciation, a sensitivity, and an understanding of life that fills them with compassion, gentleness, and a deep loving concern. Beautiful people do not just happen. We can look questioningly at something we do not understand and get sad and cross that it is not made in the way we might make it, or we can look with the eyes of faith, with* tabin Adonai *(fear of the Lord) which is the beginning of wisdom (Proverbs 1:7) and look to learn what we can of the path God has chosen.

Bad things, suffering, does constitute a privation though. An absence of a due good.

Have a look at the speeches of the LORD in Job 38 f. & the book of Job in general actually. You might find it useful in understanding the place of suffering.
 
Some of St Padre Pio comments regarding suffering, from his letters, indicating, in answer to a question you asked, yes we can pray that suffering will ease:

Padre suffered continually for souls and was famously known to say—“If you knew the value of suffering, you would never give it up.” Nevertheless, he prayed for healing for others, and advised anyone in their difficulties to seek divine assistance. “**It is not a loss of patience if one asks Jesus to take away pain, when this becomes insupportable to us and beyond our strength, nor does one lose the merit of the suffering which is offered, by asking this of God.”
“Pray that God will console you when you feel the burden of the Cross, for in doing so you are not acting against the will of God, but you are placing yourself beside the Son of God who asked His Father during the Agony in the Garden to send Him some relief. But if He is not willing to give it, be ready to pronounce the same ‘fiat’ that Jesus did.” “When least you are expecting to be liberated, Jesus, who cannot bear to keep you long in affliction, will come and relieve and comfort you, giving you new courage.” **

“He is the Father of all; He is so in a very special manner for the unhappy.” “The Cross will not crush you; if its weight makes you stagger, its power will also sustain you.” “What does it matter whether Jesus wishes to guide you to heaven by the way of the desert or by the fields, so long as you get there by one way or the other? Put away excessive worrying which results from trials by which the good Lord has desired to test you; and if this is not possible resign yourself to the divine will.”

“**Each soul…is a stone destined to build up the eternal edifice…it has to be polished with the blows of hammer and chisel…these hits of the chisel are the shadows, the fears, the temptations, the afflictions of the spirit, the spiritual tremors with some aroma of desolation, and also physical illness.”

“Be certain that the more a soul loves God, the less he feels it…God is incomprehensible…so that the more a soul enters into the love of this Supreme Good…this sentiment of love towards Him seems to diminish, to the point of seeming to love Him not at all…Say rather that you love, and that you wish to love with a perfect and consummate love. This good cannot be obtained in its completion except in the next life!**”
 
Hi Scameter,

Your questions are valid indeed and have perplexed the greatest of minds, yet alone us poor human beings. It is in our nature to suffer, and even God’s grace does not take the pain away from us. It just happens, that God wants us to endure what ever it is he wills for us, because it is in enduring it that we can attain and understand what he has in mind for us. This doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t ask that he take the pain away when we are over burdened with it. It is natural that we react negatively to the “bad things” that God permits, because it stems from our lack of understanding and weakness. The key is to trust in God and accept that his love for us in such trials is no less than in the good things he gives us. Our Lord gave us the most perfect model of submission to God, despite the unjustice that he endured for our sake, he nonetheless saw in a weak and evil governor (Pilate) the Father’s will, and we all know that our redemption was the fruit of such injustice.

Despite our weakness, their are basic principles we must abide by:
  1. Always seek God’s will in everything we do
  2. Trust that God knows what is best for us and that he will help us in everything
  3. Do what God asks of us and leave the rest to him
  4. Accept whatever he gives us
With these principles, we can begin to understand if we devote ourselves completely to his will and strive to do the best we can, he will not abandon us and will only give us what is good.

Whenever we pray and work for what is good and receive in return what we did not seek, we should ask the Lord to reveal to us what his will is in that situation.
 
Some papal teaching regarding redemptive suffering.

REDEMPTORIS MISSIO OF THE SUPREME PONTIFF JOHN PAUL II

vatican.va/holy_father/john_paul_ii/encyclicals/documents/hf_jp-ii_enc_07121990_redemptoris-missio_en.html

SALVIFICI DOLORIS OF THE SUPREME PONTIFF JOHN PAUL II
vatican.va/holy_father/john_paul_ii/apost_letters/documents/hf_jp-ii_apl_11021984_salvifici-doloris_en.html

From the CATECHISM of the CATHOLIC CHURCH:

vatican.va/archive/ENG0015/__P4K.HTM

Some Priestly comments on Redemptive suffering:

copiosa.org/suffering/suffering_redemptive.htm

copiosa.org/suffering/index.htm Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen,

religious-vocation.com/redemptive_suffering.html"To Love and To Suffer" - The Science of the Saints

therealpresence.org/eucharst/pea/suffer.htm
The Value of Suffering in the Life of Christian Perfection Fr. John A. Hardon, S.J.
 
Thank you all very much for your help, especially in the quotes and links. I greatly appreciate them all. 🙂

It seems to me that the real heart of the issue of suffering is freedom. Pain and bad things themselves do not give us any benefit, nor does God allow them because they are good (since they are not). Rather, God permits bad things to happen to people because each one of us has free will. This is so for a few reasons:
  1. Experiencing bad things enhances our capacity for choice by making the good and the bad more apparent and forcing us out of apathy.
  2. By forcing us out of apathy, our truest and deepest will in our heart is tested by how we choose to respond to bad things. When we experience something bad and choose to respond with sorrow, faith in God and charity for others, the freedom of our will is enhanced, the cloud and chains of sin pulled away precisely because bad events force us to choose - and when we choose good in the midst of bad, our will is freed from confusion, indifference and habitual sin.
  3. All bad things derive from the choice of free agents, whether humans or angels/demons. Disease, death, confusion, disorder, weakness of the flesh, all derive from the free choice of our first parents who caused original sin, as well as the free choice of Satan to tempt us. The countless other evils of this world derive from the cooperative efforts of humans and demons who choose to cause such things. God permits the consequences of bad choices, and he allows them to affect good people for many purposes - to humble us, increase our faith, hope and charity, to increase our wisdom of what is God’s will, to help us see that nothing is random or pointless and outside God’s plan, etc.
Many would ask, couldn’t these benefits be worked without the need for bad things and bad experiences? They could, except for one thing: freedom. Because of the wonderful and pure gift of freedom, good and bad will and must exist, and we cannot grow without experiencing both. Even Adam and Eve were not as spiritual complete and holy as we can become. They were innocent, but innocence is not the same as the holiness Christ offers us through His Cross and Resurrection. Even though salvation derives from God’s free gift of grace, unmerited, and all people receive this grace, how we respond to it, how we use our gift depends on our free choice. This is the necessity of the sacraments - when (not if) we misuse and discolor our received grace by our sins, the sacraments heal and replenish this grace and thus restore our eternal life. Thus, the suffering we experience is a penance. It is redemptive precisely because we choose to suffer - pain itself is not suffering. Christ embraced His Cross, as we should embrace ours, understanding that pain is an opportunity from God, completely within His control, for our benefit, so that we may continually choose the good and shun sin and thus grow in freedom and holiness.

Further, suffering is the opposite of violence, which is another type of response to pain. Sinful responses to pain, such as anger, sex, drugs, aggression, etc., are violent in nature because they do not submit to the pain and trust in God’s purpose and deliverance. By responding violently to pain, we trust in ourselves rather than in God. By praying for our pain to go away, we use our opportunity of pain to increase our reliance and trust in God. While He may not take away our pain, our response must be twofold: prayerful petitions to remove our pain, but the ultimate submission of ourselves to His higher purposes, and then attempting to find ways to grow spiritually from our trials. Praying increases faith, charity, and our sense of the distinction of good and bad, God’s will and sin; and suffering increases these things, as well as our humility and acquiescence before God, thus freeing our will from sin, clarifying our hearts and minds, and making us ever more like Christ. Also, suffering is a penitential punishment not only for our sins, but we can offer it up as penance for other people’s sins as well, thus increasing the range of its redemptive effect.

As Catholics, we especially should not forget the role and importance of freedom in all things, especially the spiritual and moral life. Freedom is our very heart and life, and God calls us to use our freedom correctly. Suffering helps us to do this.

God bless. 🙂
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Back
Top