Sunday, October 05, 2003

 
This morning's Washington Post Book World contains an interesting review of Samuel Butler's The Way of All Flesh, a book about a Christian minister who loses his faith in anything supernatural while maintaining a firm belief in right and wrong. In case you were wondering, the Post's "Book Club" discusses classic books in an online forum, so it is not unusual to see a review of a book that is 100 years old or more in the Post. In fact, it is quite refreshing.

But Samuel Butler is a disturbing author for a Christian, because of the kind of things he advocates, which are the same kind of thing that every aggressively non-Christian writer since Machiavelli or Rousseau has advocated: somehow, a world "based on love" begins to look a lot like the world described by Pope John Paul II in which the rich conduct a total war against the poor. In Butler's "utopian" Erehwon, illness is a crime and crime is treated as a disease. Rather like more "liberal" cultures today.

A number of things this week have put me in mind of one of the Pope's greatest writings, a short "apostolic letter" on The Christian Meaning of Human Suffering . Here again, I must protest the bureaucratic note that seems to enter into official English translations from the Vatican, because the name is actually Salvific Suffering (Salvific Doloris). Whatever you call it, it is a lovely work, and one that requires careful reflection. In it, John Paul takes us through the different ways that suffering appears in Scripture, in human life through the ages, and in the world today.

The passage that springs to mind was quoted in part by a Protestant pastor, a man I revered, to whom I had given a copy of it. And he quoted part of the following in remembering a mutual friend of ours, a woman who fought bravely on behalf of the persecuted Church around the world, and who bravely fought, with much suffering, the uterine cancer that took her home at a tragically early age.

Writes Karol Wojtyla:

Down through the centuries and generations it has been seen that in suffering there is concealed a particular power that draws a person interiorly close to Christ, a special grace. To this grace many saints, such as Saint Francis of Assisi, Saint Ignatius of Loyola and others, owe their profound conversion. A result of such a conversion is not only that the individual discovers the salvific meaning of suffering but above all that he becomes a completely new person. He discovers a new dimension, as it were, of his entire life and vocation. This discovery is a particular confirmation of the spiritual greatness which in man surpasses the body in a way that is completely beyond compare. When this body is gravely ill, totally incapacitated, and the person is almost incapable of living and acting, all the more do interior maturity and spiritual greatness become evident, constituting a touching lesson to those who are healthy and normal.

This interior maturity and spiritual greatness in suffering are certainly the result of a particular conversion and cooperation with the grace of the Crucified Redeemer. It is he himself who acts at the heart of human sufferings through his Spirit of truth, through the consoling Spirit. It is he who transforms, in a certain sense, the very substance of the spiritual life, indicating for the person who suffers a place close to himself. It is he—as the interior Master and Guide—who reveals to the suffering brother and sister this wonderful interchange, situated at the very heart of the mystery of the Redemption. Suffering is, in itself, an experience of evil. But Christ has made suffering the firmest basis of the definitive good, namely the good of eternal salvation. By his suffering on the Cross, Christ reached the very roots of evil, of sin and death. He conquered the author of evil, Satan, and his permanent rebellion against the Creator. To the suffering brother or sister Christ discloses and gradually reveals the horizons of the Kingdom of God: the horizons of a world converted to the Creator, of a world free from sin, a world being built on the saving power of love. And slowly but effectively, Christ leads into this world, into this Kingdom of the Father, suffering man, in a certain sense through the very heart of his suffering. For suffering cannot be transformed and changed by a grace from outside, but from within. And Christ through his own salvific suffering is very much present in every human suffering, and can act from within that suffering by the powers of his Spirit of truth, his consoling Spirit.

Grant peace to your servant Karen, dear Lord, and teach us to understand the suffering around us as You do.

The quote is from Section 26 of Salvifici Doloris .

There is a gracious and touching tribute to Karn Lord by Rep. Chris Smith here .
posted by A Mind That Suits 6:25 PM