the meaning of human suffering

Irish Jesuit Province

The Meaning of Human SufferingAuthor(s): John NaughtonSource: The Irish Monthly, Vol. 36, No. 423 (Sep., 1908), pp. 522-527Published by: Irish Jesuit ProvinceStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20501404 .

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THE MEANING OF HUMAN SUFFERING

A BENEVOLENT critic in the Catholic Times (February 22, i908) twitted the conductor of this Magazine with his fondness for bringing forward again things that had

already seen the light of day. I plead guilty, and am impeni tent; for I think the judicious reader is likely to relish a thing

which another presumably judicious reader has deemed worth preserving and republishing, always supposing, of course, that the thing would otherwise escape notice altogether, so that, though old, it is as good as new. I once parodied Herrick (or is it Suckling ?) in this context :

If it be not old for me, What care I how old it be ?

I hope it is not quite irrelevant to quote here a remark of Mr. Augustine Birrell's concerning Frederick Locker's Patchwork: " It is intensely original throughout, and never more original than when its matter is borrowed."

All these considerations, I think, apply to the words spoken almost exactly " twenty golden years ago " by the Rev. John

Naughton, S.J. at the opening of the Chapel of the Little Sisters of the Poor, St. Patrick's Home, Kilmainham, Dublin. Perhaps, also, the disinterring of this discourse from an old newspaper

may secure new friends for that admirable Institution. Few works of charity can be dearer to the Heart of Jesus.

* * * *

The ninth chapter of St. John's Gospel begins thus: " And Jesus passing by saw a man who was blind from his birth, and

His disciples asked Him, 'Rabbi, who hath sinned, this man or his parents, that he should be born blind ? ' Jesus answered: ' Neither hath this man sinned, nor his parents; but that the

works of God should be made manifest in him.' "

Poverty stands for all miseries, for it is the cause of many of them, and a crowning sorrow for them all. " Poor " is the epithet we apply to all classes of the suffering and unhappy. The widow, the orphan, the penitent, the souls in purgatory, the patient on his bed of sickness, are called poor. Nay, even it is applied to them that know no want; and not long ago the

world, in its sympathy and admiration, could find no dearer word with which to qualify the name of an illustrious sufferer,



THE MEANINVG OF HUMAN SUFFERING 523

though the ruler of an empire. Thus it is, my brethren, that the title of the sisterhood, to whose relief you have come, " the

Little Sisters of the Poor," brings of itself before our minds the multifarious and numerous ills that afflict the sons of men; and it may not be altogether as inappropriate as at first sight it may appear if I ask you to consider them from one particular point of view. I will, with your permission, discuss, not how it is, for that is the question of unbelievers, but why it is that ills are here at all. What, as far as we can make them out, are the high and divine purposes that underlie sorrows, and what in the light God has deigned to give us is the design of His

unsearchable,providence ? Why is earth a vale of tears, and

why are our days like the days of a hireling ? And first, my brethren, do you notice the theory of human

suffering assumed for certain by the followers of our Lord Himself ? He was going out of the Temple, and passing by saw a man who was blind from his birth. " Rabbi," they said to

Him, " who hath sinned -this man or his father -that he should be born blind ? " No other alternative suggested itself to them to explain his misfortune except the past sins of his parents or the prevision of his own. They were unanimous about it, and spoke in all probability the belief in traditional acceptance through Judea. But it was a belief older far than they, and all but universally received beyond the land of Palestine. When Job was in the height of his patient suffering-all gone from him, and himself shot through with the arrows of the Lord -his friends, every man from his own place, to comfort him brought from regions wide apart as the lands of the Themanite and the Suhite the same theory of human griefs. All the woes of men were but the avenging of God. It was an axiom beyond the region of all doubt that no one ever was afflicted except it was for crime. Men reaped only what they sowed, and the whirl

wind was but the harvest gathering of the wind. It did not come spontaneous out of the ground, and where else could it come from except that the root of it was sin, and it grew in the furrows of iniquity ? And this was an immutable order of things, as firm as the earth, as fixed as the rock -the wicked

were not to prosper; the light should be dark in his tabernacle; he was to perish before his days were full and to be blasted as the vine when the grapes are in their first flower. Whatever happened here below was but the retribution or the reward of virtue or of vice.

But, my brethren, that was not true. It was an ignoble defence of the Providence of God, whose infinite wisdom, if they

were right, it bound and bounded by narrow rules of distributive



524 THE IRISH M10NTHLY

justice. It arrogantly laid down a course of action for Provid ence to follow. It taught Him knowledge who judgeth them that are on high, and dictated by earthly standards for the Lord, whose thoughts are not the thoughts of men, and whose judgments are inscrutable. It was injurious to the Most High,

who maketh the sun to rise on the good and bad, and His rains to fall on the just and unjust. It created a Pharasaical scandal in innocence oppressed and in justice triumphant. It was wrong in theory, and false in fact, belieJ by the working of the uni versal world. It roused the zeal of Job to anger till he poured upon them in the proverbially vivid language of the Orientals, such a flood of scorn, as, whilst it left him undimmed the crown of peerless patience to God, has lost him to the royal David, the palm of meekness to men.

Why do you say to me, he answered, that the good always prosper and the wicked suffer ? Ask of them that go by the way; ask of the stranger and the traveller and of the birds of the air, and they will tell you. One man dieth strong and healthy, rich and happy, and he is bad; another dieth in bitter ness of soul-without any riches, and he was good, and both repose undistinguishable in the dust. How, then, and why do the wicked prosper ? Their houses are secure and peaceable, and

the rod of God is not upon them. They spend their days in good things and then peacefully fall asleep. Their children go out like a flock and dance and play-the very men who have said, " Who is the Almighty, that we should serve Him, and

what does it profit us if we pray ?" It was not that he envied them. " God forbid that I should," wais his short prayer. Far from him be the counsel of the impious, for these good things

were not in their own hands, and how often, after all, are they like chaff before the wind and ashes that the whirlwind scattereth ? Quoties lacerna impiorum extinguitur.

But if Job thus rejected their solution of the difficulty he was not without one of his own, one principle that was potent as a spell on him in his worst woes and made patience itself the least of his virtues. We cannot read the Book of Job without a strange feeling that it was almost an antsthetic to the martyr -a nepenthe in which his soul drank soothing in every violent access of grief, when anguish upon anguish came and sorrow in its triple wave. To him God was the most high God, and long before the revelation of Elohim was made to the Jews, Gentile as he was, he seems to have had no other idea of his Maker. He could not see what was to tie the hands of the All Wise and Omnipotent or bind His adorable will. Though he could not comprehend it, even then he knew that it could not be arbitrary,



THFE MEANING OF HUMAN SUFFERING 525

for He was God, who doeth what seemeth good to Him, who taketh away, and there is none to prevent Him, who is wisdom and strength, who hath counsel and understanding, who brings the conceits of the wise to folly, who looseth the belts of kings to gird them with the captive's chains, who multiplieth nations and destroyeth them and restoreth them again after they are overthrown. In God's hand was the soul of every living thing, and all was righteous because all was divine.

St. Augustine said of Faith that he would ask no reason from the God of Truth. And Job, in suffering, would ask none from the God of Power and Wisdom. In vain do we seek outside the

New Testament for anything more sublime than when, de prived of all, he fell down and worshipping exclaimed: " The Lord gave. The Lord hath taken away. As it has pleased the Lord so is it done. Blessed be the name of the Lord. If we have received good things from the hand of God, why should we not receive evil ? " Such was Job's solution.

And yet, my brethren, all beautiful as that solution is, it left, and leaves, the great question of human sorrow an un solved enigma. It brings us no nearer to seeing the Divine purpose. It is just clear enough to show the will under the' almighty hand of God. Beyond that, it left all, so far, un fathomable. What blessedness in sorrow, what eternal purpose

God had in view in sending it, it did not tell. When the Lord answered Job out of the whirlwind, He only said: " Who is this that wrappeth up sentences in unskilful words, obscuring

wisdom ?" And Job replied: " Lord, I have spoken unwisely, and things that above measure exceed my understanding. Now I will ask Thee, and do Thou tell me."

But no answer came, for it was not the time. The vision was yet afar off. Fifteen hundred years were yet to roll over the land of Edom and the city of Jerusalem before the glory of Israel was to come, and the light unto the revelation of the

Gentiles; before the Lord of Majesty was to come out of the Temple to spread the clay upon the blind man's eyes and proclaim to the world 'that not for sin was sorrow, but that the works of God might be manifest in the miserable. Job answered them according to his lights, and might have answered them

more tnumophantly, had he known more. But little did Job dream that, in his innocence, he was the type of One more innocent than he, and in his direst woe of One more sorrowful,

who was to make sorrow divine by bearing it, and change the very nature of things in changing the name of the once accursed wood, who, all-wise as He was, lay down on it as a lamb. The time was yet too far off for men to understand how the com



526 THE IRISH AIONTHLY

panions of Gethsemane were the companions of Mount Thabor. And just as little did he know the time would be when every child of sorrow would be the living image of that God to

whom the highest of all virtues was to be good, and the greatest of all blessings to be generous. No, not because He is an avenging God, nor yet because He is omnipotent, but because He is a God of love, who chose the path of suffering as the way to glory, and bade us not to go on it, but to come; who suffered for us that we might love Him, and suffered in us that we might love one another. Because

He came to cast the fire of charity on the earth and had no will but that it be enkindled, nor knew a better way to accom plish it than the baptism wherewith He Himself was baptized.

The only inexplicable sorrow on earth is sorrow unrelieved. Look at the Sister of Charity bending eagerly over the poor patient, ministering to his wants and gently whispering of some thing and someone, and it will be no mystery to you why one is suffering and the other anxious; and look at these Little Sisters of the Poor, returned home with what to them are spoils and treasure to make of them a banquet for the aged, and you will not ask any more why one is old and poor and the other weary. You know it is because the work of the Lord is manifest

in them both. Brethren, there are manifest reasons why I should not speak here and now of them or of their work.

Yet, one word at least. We are well nigh the golden jubilee of their foundation, when the first house was opened by the Sisters. But their Foundress lived to see 252 houses of her institute scattered through the world, in every country of

Europe and in every quarter of the globe-lived to see it blessed with final sanction by our Holy Father Leo XIII., and what is yet more happy, she still lives to reign -if reign such gentle rule

may be called-over 4,ooo Little Sisters of the Poor. They have been received everywhere with the instinctive reverence that ever follows lowliness and sanctity. But here in Ireland -here in Catholic Dublin -your own hearts are the testimony and your deeds the proof, not of reverence and esteem, but of love for them and their work-here where strong men, touched by the sight of them, make way with a blessing when the Little Sisters of the Poor pass by, and the voices of little ones that cry in the streets are hushed in holy reverence for these little angels of

mercy. 'Tis seven years to-day-just past seven-since the first novice was received in the Irish cradle of the Little Sisters of the Poor -for evermore hallowed by their lives -which in the Coombe-to borrow from a holy Redemptorist Father-are a very marvel, a wonder to the angels. And now look around.



THE MEANING OF HUMAN SUFFERING .527

A new home; a fair and beautiful temple; one hundred and fifty poor inmates, not to count those who, after holy deaths, have gone where none are old and none are poor. Oh, my brethren, it is a beautiful work. Charity is always on the look out for new objects, seeking for sorrow as men seek for gold. To-day the sick, to-morrow the dying; now the homeless boy, and again the shelterless little girl. There is over all of them the transcendental beauty of charity, and on each of them the distinctive charm of each separate woe. But the devotion to the aged and the poor is ideal in its attraction. When the cynic philosopher was asked what was the earth's greatest misery, he answered it was to be at once old and destitute. And surely they do not well agree and are an ill-matched pair. Prudence, says Cicero, is the only gift that old age brings in exchange for all it takes away. But empiric wisdom is bought at too dear a price, bought for the very stays of life. " What good t6 the fool is money if he cannot buy wisdom with it ? " says Ecclesi astes. And what good to the aged is the experimental knowledge of life'? misery ? He cannot buy bread with it. To tread deserted alone, and powerless the closing span of life's years, with not one of all one knew-no, not one, ex omnibus charis, to sustain or console-that is hard. If always poor, yet never poor before; if once rich, more beggar by the riches once possessed. Happier if time, that stole all-friends, children, health, and hope stole memory, too. But, alas! it remains to the last-the soli tary messenger of Job, the only one that escapes to tell of ruin, and leave the aged poor with nothing but the weary thought, how sadly life must ebb from such old age. Ah ! brethren, to come like angels from the temple, and stir the waters of Siloe for them alone, and cast them into the blessed stream, who have no strength to rise, and no friend to help them; to turn the very valley of Achor into an opening of hope for them; to make for their declining years a southern winter; to spend youth, and life a

mendicant and a stranger, only that their old age should not be without honour, only to close their days in peace and their eyes in death; to turn the couch beneath them, and stroke, with gentle hand, the spotless pillow, when their souls are with God. That is charity indeed; and surely those who were always good to them will be good to-day, and, if they have much, give abundantly, and, if little, even of that little, freely give to the Little Sisters of the Poor.



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