The fact of suffering poses real intellectual challenges to the Christian message. So how do we share the gospel of a loving God, when suffering seems to reflect so poorly on him? Mark Giszcack, author of Suffering: What Every Catholic Should Know, joins us.
Cy Kellett:
Hello and welcome to Focus, the Catholic Answers Podcast for living, understanding and defending your Catholic faith. One of the greatest challenges faced with any person who wants to explain and defend the Catholic faith is life, and the fact that life involves sometimes overwhelming suffering. So you got to be able to answer the suffering question for many people. For many people, it is the obstacle that keeps them from accepting the Church’s proposition, even for the person of very deep faith. Suffering can devastate the sense of meaning, the confidence that life makes sense, and both of those things we need for our faith life. So we’re often left asking how this God who loves us and made us could allow all of this. And because suffering often involves that personal crisis, it asks a great deal of us in responding to it.
So what does every Catholic need to know about suffering? Here to help us answer that question is Dr. Mark Giszczak. He’s a professor of sacred scripture at the Augustine Institute in the Graduate School of Theology. His books include the Wisdom of Solomon and Light on the Dark Passages of Scripture. He writes regularly on his blog CatholicBibleStudent.com, and the name of his newest book is Suffering: What Every Catholic Should Know in the What Every Catholic Should Know series from Augustine Institute and Ignatius Press. Dr. Giszczak, thank you very much for being here with us.
Mark Giszczak:
It’s really fun to be here with you, Cy.
Cy Kellett:
Well, congratulations on the new book. They said, let’s take the most difficult topic in the whole series and give it to Giszczak, apparently. This is a tough one, what to make of suffering.
Mark Giszczak:
Well, they probably gave me the most difficult topic because I have the most difficult last name to spell.
Cy Kellett:
And it seems perfectly fair, I believe. Yes, exactly.
Mark Giszczak:
So yeah, those of Polish ancestry, we have certain virtues in that regard. So yeah, I wanted to tackle this topic because I had had a few experiences of teaching on suffering. In particular, when I was teaching the letters of St. Paul and teaching about his idea of being a suffering servant, a cruciform apostle.
One of the most profound passages from the life of St. Paul is actually when the Lord Jesus is speaking to Ananias about Paul in Acts chapter nine, and he says of Paul, “I will show him how much he will suffer for the sake of my name.” It’s really an astounding passage because you’re like, “Wow, from the get-go St. Paul had a vocation to suffer.”
Cy Kellett:
To suffer. Yeah.
Mark Giszczak:
For the sake of Christ. So when people encounter St. teaching on suffering, all of a sudden certain theological themes start to click and you’re like, “Oh. Oh, okay. So Jesus isn’t the only suffering servant, he’s just the paradigm. Every single apostle is supposed to be a suffering servant in some way.”
And in fact, Jesus doesn’t come just to be glorified. He comes first to suffer. This is Philippians chapter two, and then be glorified. And that’s the pattern that all of our lives are supposed to follow. It’s not just some sort of up and to the right kind of trajectory for all of us, rather it’s kind of like v-shaped right? We actually go down to the depths of suffering with Christ. We join him in the process of crucifixion each in our own way, of course. And then it’s from that place that the Lord raises us up and glorifies us with Christ.
Cy Kellett:
I appreciate that very much, but you appreciate, I know from the book that for many people, the personal crisis of their own suffering is intense in a way that almost seems to dispose them against theological or philosophical answers. They need something else. So how do you find that? Where’s the sweet spot for making a personal response to individual suffering and putting all of that in the theological context?
Mark Giszczak:
Yeah, yeah. I mean, so much of this has to do with balance. And I think one way of thinking about it is that I read this somewhere that change times resistance equals suffering, right? It’s like when we kick against the goads of life. And the process of change, that’s when we really experience suffering. So there is a kind of interior element to it where it’s not just about, say, external pain or external circumstances. It really is about our interior response to them.
And this is why there’s something so special about the lives of the saints when you see them. I think of Francis-Xavier Nguyễn Văn Thuận, who was a bishop in Vietnam, who was imprisoned in solitary confinement for I think 13 years or nine years in solitary and four years with other prisoners. And the intensity of his suffering also produced the intensity of sanctity in him. So much of it is just about our response to suffering. How am I going to relate to this? Because what suffering does is you have a narrative arc in your life. You’re thinking of, “This is my story, this is what my story was, this is what it’ll always be.”
And then suffering comes in and just breaks that all up. You get a terminal diagnosis or your spouse dies or some other terrible thing happens, and it’s like it actually really takes us a long time to make sense of it. We end up in denial. So this is where the psychiatric framework of the five stages of grief, I think it’s actually a really helpful way of thinking about how suffering is a process. It’s a spiritual and psychological process, and it begins with us denying reality. How weird is that, right?
Cy Kellett:
That is, yeah.
Mark Giszczak:
Where something terrible happens and we’re just like, “no, that couldn’t have happened. My spouse could not have died, or maybe the doctor is wrong. I’ll go get a second opinion.” And we really end up in this place of denying reality. And the final stage is that of acceptance, where we actually come to accept the reality of what has occurred to us, the reality of our suffering.
And I think when we’re sort of locked into the process of denial, that’s when there’s this real risk of losing our faith. Where we can look to God and be like, “This is your fault. You shouldn’t have let this happen.” I think there’s a real temptation at that moment to give up on faith and to say, “Life doesn’t make sense. It’s actually absurd. God’s not looking out for me. I need to look out for myself.” And there’s a kind of resolution to the problem that we can get to by rejecting God in the middle of that, but it actually doesn’t solve the problem of suffering. It really doesn’t. It actually just introduces us to a new set of problems, which is like, “Oh, that means the universe I’m living is no longer rational. It’s not meaningful. It doesn’t have a sensible place from which it came or to which it’s headed.”
Cy Kellett:
So where do you move from denial then? I mean, you got us to the end, but you didn’t tell. Because you see that there are some people who seem to move quickly to reality, and there are some other people, and I think I would put myself in this category who we almost need other people’s leadership to move us out of whatever stuck place we get into. It’s almost like the person who’s on the hijacked plane. There’s some guy who gets up and goes, “We need to”, whereas most of us will sit there and we’re still working through it. We haven’t gotten to where that person is. So where do we move from this denial?
Mark Giszczak:
So in the book, what I try to do is compare the book of Job and his process, if you will. So Job is the one who suffers beyond all suffering. All of his children die. He gets afflicted with sores and whatever, and his wife tells him to curse God and die. But I really feel like he goes through those stages. So it starts with denial and then to anger. Job is really angry at God at some of the passages in the Book of Job.
And then to bargaining. So this is where we start to almost play mental tricks on ourselves. “Well, maybe my spouse isn’t really dead. Maybe they can revive him, or maybe I don’t really have cancer. Maybe I have a bad cold, or I maybe they made a mistake on the spreadsheet and I didn’t really lose my job. It was supposed to be somebody else.”
And then once we get past that kind of stage of bargaining where we’re trying to almost figure things out, to negotiate those two realities, we get to depression. It’s not just simple sadness. And then finally to acceptance. And I think for most people, if they’ve experienced the loss of a loved one, a close loved one, I think that these stages are very familiar.
And they really go back to this one psychiatrist, Elisabeth Kübler-Ross. And she was applying it mainly to sort of realizing our own mortality, but then she also applied it to the grief process. But what I think is so valuable about this whole idea is that when we encounter difficulty and suffering in life, we need to grieve. I think a lot of times, spiritual teachers or advisors will talk to people about the redemptive value of suffering or about their need to accept or their need to surrender. Those are all true, but we have to recognize this is a human process, and we’ve got to work through those stages in our grief, and that’s going to set us up for success to getting to that stage of acceptance. If we try to short circuit the process, it’s not going to work. We’re going to end up going in circles.
Cy Kellett:
So we got to that, what you just described, because I asked you about how do you balance that moving? Not just giving, because it does seem to be when someone’s suffering, you could give a really good theological answer that wouldn’t be helpful to that person. This is one of those areas where it’s not that the theology is unimportant, but at certain times, someone’s child dies or something, and you go straight to a theology of suffering with that person. It’s just a mistake.
Mark Giszczak:
It is a mistake. And that’s the sort of thing, I think my book is helpful at kind of thinking through the problem of suffering, but I don’t think it would be like, “Oh, your friend died here, read this book.” It’s more like, “No, no, no, no, no. It’s like six months later, a year later, two years later, after you’ve processed a lot of the emotions and you’ve worked through a lot of those stages, then you might get to a more kind of contemplative phase.”
But I really think that for most people at the very beginning when they’re experiencing grief over anything dramatic, what they really need is compassion. They need somebody who’s going to come give them a hug and be a brother or sister. And for me, I feel like the most beautiful depiction of this in sacred scripture is when Job’s friends arrive on the scene. They come from a long way away just to be with Job. And when they arrive, they sit with him for seven days in silence. They don’t say anything. And if you read the rest of the Book of Job, you’re like, “Well, maybe they should have kept their mouth shut.”
Cy Kellett:
I know.
Mark Giszczak:
The conversation doesn’t go very well.
Cy Kellett:
But that is a beautiful thing, that they understood to sit quietly with Job.
Mark Giszczak:
Exactly. And if you think of the agony in the garden, what does Jesus want? “Could you not just wait one hour with me?” He just wanted his friends to sit with him in his grief. That’s it. It’s not like they could take away the problem. It’s not like they could fix anything. They couldn’t give him any advice that would make the crucifixion easier to handle. He just wanted companionship.
And I think that there’s some sort of clue in there about eternity, that we really are made for a relationship with God and with others. We’re not solo entities. No man is an island. We really are made for connection. And there’s something really beautiful about that where in the midst of grief, oftentimes people have deep and profound connections with one another. There’s a kind of shared sorrow that can produce a kind of beautiful experience of friendship.
Cy Kellett:
This suggests, and I know you get into this in the book, that there are better ways to suffer and worse ways to suffer. So one of the things that we might ask, because we can’t say, “Well, all suffering can be relieved.” There is no insight. There is no system for the perfect relief of all suffering. So what does it mean to suffer well? How do I suffer well, and what gets in the way of people suffering well?
Mark Giszczak:
I mean, this is where thinking about patients in the hospital is a really good way of thinking about this, where some patients are good patients and some patients are not good patients. What’s the difference? And, “How do I become a good patient?” Is essentially the question. I think it really comes down to this idea of surrender and of acceptance, that the more I kind of kick against the goads of life, the more I reject the fact that I have this problem. The more that I am in denial, the more painful it’s going to be, the more suffering I’ll experience. And the quicker I can get myself into that phase of acceptance, the more successful I’ll be, the better a patient I will be, and the more surrendered to reality I will be.
So in the book I lay it out as a kind of fork in the road. There’s the false road of comfort and the true road of acceptance. And so when we get into serious suffering, something terrible happens to us. It’s very tempting for us to find refuge and things that make us feel comfortable. “Oh, I’m going to have a snack, or I’m going to sleep in, or I’m going to watch my favorite TV show”, or whatever it might be. And those things are whatever, fine for a little while, but they don’t actually solve the problem. They just sort of distract us from the problem.
And the more we kind of work our way down that false road of comfort, we can find ourselves in really dangerous places like addiction and alcoholism and so forth, really destructive kinds of behaviors. And you know what? The suffering doesn’t go away. It just keeps chasing us. It’s like what Jesus says, “If anyone’s going to follow after me, he has to deny himself, take up his cross and follow me.” Well, you know what the secret is? If you don’t pick up the cross and follow Jesus, the cross will chase you your whole life.
So that’s where we need to move from the false road of comfort to what I call the true road of acceptance, where we say, “Okay, I’m going to do what Jesus advises us to do. I’m going to pick up my cross.” So it’s not to say that I’m somehow saying suffering is good, or suffering is okay. I’m just staring it in the face and I’m saying, “I’m going to embrace this cross. I’m going to pick it up. I’m going to carry it.”
And one of the most beautiful moments in the Passion of the Christ, the movie, it’s when Jesus receives the cross, he kisses it and it’s just like, oh, that scene has stuck with me forever. Because I feel like that’s what we’re called to do. When we experience suffering in our own lives, we have to somehow look it in the face, embrace it, even kiss it, and then carry that cross with us the rest of the way.
Cy Kellett:
Our guest is Dr. Mark Giszczak, and the book is called Suffering: What Every Catholic Should Know. It’s available from Augustine Institute and Ignatius Press. And towards the end of the book, you get us onto some tasks related to suffering, practical tasks and spiritual tasks of suffering. So are you just giving us homework there at the end, or what is this about, this laying tasks on your reader?
Mark Giszczak:
Yeah, this is, I think, really important because one of the things about suffering that I talk about in the book is it’s really disorienting. It’s really confusing because it’s like you have this idea of what life is supposed to be like, and now all of a sudden that story is broken. The chapters have been ripped out of the book, and some other story is going to be written, and you’re not really ready for that. You want to go back to the old story, but the old story is no longer available. Things have fundamentally changed.
And so in order to deal with that, I lay out just a handful of tasks that I think we need to do in order to get from the pre-suffering phase to the acceptance phase. So practically speaking, really simple stuff. Seek appropriate care. If you’ve got a medical problem, obviously you need to go to a doctor or get whatever appropriate care that you need, whether that’s mental health, spiritual health, physical health.
Second is to grieve. Go through that emotional process of the five stages. Allow yourself to get angry, to bargain, to get a little sad. Allow yourself to experience those emotions. You need to work through them in order to get to the end of the process.
Third, seek appropriate comfort. So yeah, the false road of comfort is a dead end eventually. But in the meantime, you know what? It’s probably a good idea to maybe distract yourself sometimes or to have your friends over and that kind of thing.
Fourth, I also say renegotiate your responsibilities. So a lot of times when we experience suffering, something that disables us, we actually need to change our lifestyle. We might not be able to do all the things that we were able to do before, and we might need to figure out some really practical stuff. I can’t cook for myself anymore, or I can’t carry heavy objects anymore. I need to find a way to get those things taken care of.
But more important than the practical stuff, I think, is the spiritual tasks. So first I say you need to balance comfort-seeking with cross-carrying. So you need to walk that road of comfort a little bit, but then you need to work your way over to the road where you’re carrying the cross, and you’re going to kind of go back and forth between both of those, but end up on the road with Jesus carrying the cross.
Second, forgive those who have harmed us. So many people allow themselves to be trapped in a prison of resentment, where they will not forgive those people that have hurt them who’ve maybe done really terrible things to them. But we have to find a way to forgive from the heart those who have harmed us, and that can free us from that prison of resentment.
And then really the next step is this just idea of surrender. Let go, right? Just allow life to be, allow reality to be and kind of be like a leaf floating on the water. And when you surrender yourself to God, surrender yourself to reality, there’s a real freedom that comes with that. Think of again, Cardinal Francis-Xavier Nguyễn Văn Thuận in prison, just surrendering himself to divine providence, surrendering himself to the fact of his imprisonment, to the fact of his suffering and allowing God to transform him by his grace.
So it’s really about getting to that point of surrender, surrender to God, surrender to his will, surrender to divine providence, and then to the kind of ultimate paradox here is that as Christians, we’re supposed to be able to carry our cross and have joy at the same time. So scripture even says, “Count it all joy when you meet trials of various kinds.” Well, how does that make any sense? Right? From the world’s vantage point, I should just have as much comfort as possible, and then I can have joy, but it doesn’t really work that way. It’s when I can suffer and at the same time experience the virtue of joy. That’s really the paradox that we’re headed toward.
Cy Kellett:
It is a paradox, and I feel like there’s something in the modern mind that even more than in previous eras resists that. Almost resists it, not just on the visceral level, which is a human thing to do, but resists it intellectually. And I can remember a few years ago there was a shooting in a Protestant church, and I don’t know if they were Baptists or Methodists or Presbyterians, but it was a Black church. And so it was Black people who got shot in a Bible study basically.
And then I remember being overwhelmed with how beautiful their forgiveness was, that these people were deeply imbued with Christ. And so they turned this horrible suffering that they went through into forgiveness. And then I remember reading an article, and I don’t know if it was the New Yorker or the Atlantic or whichever, really highbrow, they’re giving the modern take on things, somebody writing about how this was wrong, and this is why Christianity basically was wrong for Black people because they shouldn’t be Forgiving.
So I thought that’s a very twisted intellectualism. These people got to the point that you are trying to get to us, all of us to, with this book. They’re living examples of Christ, and the rejection of them is not just, “Oh, they’re fools”, but that there’s kind of an intellectual facade to the rejection of the Christian approach to suffering.
Mark Giszczak:
Yeah, I think you’re right. And honestly, I think that this problem is actually at the root of our mental health crisis.
Cy Kellett:
Oh, wonderful. That’s helpful. Yeah. Dig into that for us.
Mark Giszczak:
If you have been taught your whole life that you should never experience suffering, and that all suffering is somehow somebody else’s fault or is somehow unjust or whatever, then even little sufferings can become enormous, impossible weights. Whereas I think in previous eras of humanity, people just were very accustomed to a lot of grief and suffering. When children died more frequently and when life was a lot harder, it was just people experienced a lot of suffering all the time, and they found a way to cope with it. But I think in a time period that’s so comfortable, where we have all of our needs met and we can distract ourselves with a smartphone. Even if we only have 10 seconds of boredom, we can distract ourselves.
And it’s like our ability to just sort of deal with life and to deal with, whether it be inconvenience or with things that require physical effort and this sort of thing. It’s like we’ve gotten so comfortable that we never have to suffer. And so that has, I think, implanted a kind of subconscious idea of, “I never should suffer at all under any circumstances.”
And I mean, I do think that there are certain things in our society that are militating against that. I mean, if you think of, say for example, the exercise movement or the fasting movement, or there are all these guys doing cold plunges now. There is a kind of counter reaction to that, but I think very few people are doing cold plunges and exercise and fasting. Most of us are seeking out comfort, and I think that’s making us go crazy, right? Because we actually need to experience some level of discomfort just in our daily life in order to be sane human beings.
Cy Kellett:
Wow. That’s really something. Because as you said that, I was thinking of this documentary that’s out about people who climb Mount Everest, and those people take on extreme suffering, and they’re lauded as heroes. But if you take on extreme suffering to be someone who forgives as Christ forgives from your heart, you’re not lauded as a hero. Nobody’s making a documentary about you.
Mark Giszczak:
Yeah, that’s true. That’s true. But it’s like those folks who were able to forgive this heinous crime, they actually have the insight that those columnists are missing and that those columnists actually need. Guess who’s taking antidepressants every night?
Cy Kellett:
Oh, yeah.
Mark Giszczak:
Guess who is? You know what I mean?
Cy Kellett:
Yes.
Mark Giszczak:
Guess who is having all of these problems in their mental life, their spiritual life, et cetera? It’s those who are rejecting the possibility of reconciliation. And I think going back to St. Paul, this is where Jesus really turns the world upside down. The Roman world was all about advancement, advancement, advancement. “I want to get more money, get more power, climb the social ladder, be as close to Caesar as possible.” And Jesus takes that entire pyramid scheme and just flips it on its head And says, “No, actually the place of greatest honor is the lowest place. And that’s where I’m going. I’m going to go die on the cross like a criminal, and that is going to be the place of greatest honor.”
So to experience honor as a Christian is to be conformed to Christ’s suffering. To become like him in his suffering, in order that you might become like him in his glory. This is Romans chapter eight. It’s Philippians chapter two. That’s what we’re all called to do, but it is extremely paradoxical. But once we understand that concept, we start to say, “Okay, that actually makes sense”, because at the very end of my life, what am I going to have to do?
I’m going to have to engage in an act of spiritual surrender where I’m going to have to say, “Lord, I can’t take any of this with me. None of my relationships, none of my stuff, not my house, nothing. I’m going to surrender it all back to you, and I’m going to come to you personally.” And our whole life is meant to be a preparation for that act of spiritual surrender at the moment of death. And the more we’re attached to all the things of the world, all of our relationships, all of our stuff, our houses, our cars, whatever, the less likely it’ll be that we’re going to be able to succeed at that act of spiritual surrender. So everything that we should be doing, everything that we’re doing should be preparing us for that moment of total surrender to God in the end.
Cy Kellett:
Wow. So I suppose I’ll just end with this if I may, and I think you have in various ways come at this, but I think for some people, the great fear of their life in evangelizing or defending the faith or catechizing and others is that they will be confronted with the question why? Why?
So having said all that you’ve said, could you maybe distill an answer for me to, how do you answer the why question? Why does God allow this? Why all this suffering? Because it can be overwhelming, even when one’s not suffering oneself. Just to see the amount of suffering can be overwhelming. So why?
Mark Giszczak:
No, this is a really important question. And I mean, there’s so many ways to ask it, right? If God is all good and all powerful, why does he allow suffering in this world? Or why did God allow the serpent into the garden of Eden, right? Why did Jesus have to die on the cross? There are a lot of different ways of thinking about how to ask the problem.
I think maybe one way to go about answering the question is to step back for a second and think about whether anybody on planet Earth has figured this out from any religion or any philosophy. And have the Hindus, the Muslims, the Jews, the Christians, anybody else, the atheists, the agnostics, has anyone really figured it out? And I kind of feel like the answer is no.
And so Christianity doesn’t provide some sort of catchall perfect like, “Oh, this is going to make all of your philosophical questioning go away.” Rather, it just gives you a rational way to wrestle with the problem, which is to say that there is an ultimate story that God is writing with the universe. I’m part of that story, but there’s all of these imperfections along the way that are created by the fact that he gave us freedom. So the X factor in the garden of Eden is the freedom that Adam and Eve have to reject God. If they didn’t have that freedom, they couldn’t love God, they would just be robots, right? So freedom, it is a prerequisite for the possibility of love.
If we don’t have the ability to reject God, we don’t have the ability to love God. So we live in this universe that has that X factor that then creates all of these problems. We become real moral agents who have the possibility of good and the possibility of evil, but we know that in the end, somehow at the final judgment, God is going to rectify everything. He’s going to rescue the oppressed. He’s going to set free the prisoners who are unjustly imprisoned. He’s going to set to right everything that’s ever happened. And I mean, that is a kind of romantic or fanciful notion. It makes me think, I was just listening to the Chronicles of Narnia with my children last week. It makes me think of that. It’s like somehow the deep magic starts working backwards, and God will put everything right, even though it seems impossible now.
How could God ever undo these terrible things that I’ve experienced? But in the end, we have to believe that life is good, life is worth living, that God has put us here for a reason, and that reason is communion with Him, and that as we experience suffering in this life, there’s actually a way in which he’s going to bring good out of it. Like Joseph said to his brothers at the end of the Book of Genesis, “You meant it for evil, but God meant it for good” and we just got to hang onto that in faith and just say, “Lord, I don’t understand how this is all going to work out, but I trust you, and that’s what matters.”
Cy Kellett:
Our guest is Dr. Mark Giszczak. The book is Suffering: What Every Catholic Should Know. It’s part of a wonderful series, What Every Catholic Should Know books from Augustine Institute and The Ignatius Press. You can check out Dr. Giszczak’s work at… Wait, you’re going to have to tell me the, can I get this right? Yes.
Mark Giszczak:
CatholicBibleStudent.com.
Cy Kellett:
CatholicBibleStudent.com, check out his work there. Dr. Giszczak’s, thank you very much.
Mark Giszczak:
Hey, it’s been a real pleasure, Cy. I wish you the best. Have a great day.
Cy Kellett:
You too. And I thank you to all our listeners. We appreciate that you join us here, wherever you’re listening. I was going to say, if you’re listening, but I’m pretty sure you are listening, so wherever you’re listening, if you could give us those five stars and maybe a few nice words that will help to grow the podcast, if you want to get in touch with us, send us an email. Focus@Catholic.com is our email address. I am Cy Kellett, your host. We’ll see you next time, God willing, right here on Catholic Answers Focus.