13. Suffering

'The experience of suffering thwarts us in our ascending flight. All religions, wisdoms and philosophies, have come up against this obstacle. The Stoics advised acceptance - even to despising the body. The Buddha attacked the very source of suffering which, according to him, is the desire to live. The turn of the century witnessed an option for medicine, and the great specialists of our hospitals claim to be able to exorcise the spectre of suffering and reassure their contemporaries... as long as they remain in good health.

But to live in an anaesthetised condition, insensitive to stimuli or even unconscious, is that really a life? Have Christians who proclaim a suffering Messiah not a clear and true word to offer their sick and suffering brothers and sisters? For them, suffering is not the worst of evils - let me explain suffering in itself can become unbearable, absurd, which is worse than annihilation; it is something which should not even exist and in face of which death appears as a liberation. But suffering in itself is non-existent. There are men, women, old people, children, peoples who suffer. And suffering presupposes that one is Iiving.

A person who is suffering is someone who feels in a direct unexceptionable, physical, spontaneous way, a call to something else, a deep down longing to be cured, to be freed. Every fibre of his being is electrified with a negative protest at what is assailing him in this painful state, where love is prevented from manifesting itself, injustice reigns supreme, and the world no longer makes any sense. Protest, appeal, cry, to what? To deliverance? to cure? To something that as yet does not exist, but is there somewhere in shadow, acknowledged in the screaming, in the complaint, the agony, the struggle. From the depths of suffering, from the deepest pit that seems worse than nothingness, there mounts a cry to the impossible!

Is it possible this cry could be heard? Or does it remain imprisoned, echoing off the walls, amplified to infinity? There are persons who can no longer communicate, no longer say anything, but who are walled-in, perpetually isolated by such intense suffering, that they appear unable to feel anymore. Patients suffering from autism, for example, bang their heads against the wall and do themselves injury, without appearing to notice it. As the black spaces in between the stars at night are so dense, that the rays of light can no longer free themselves, so too the spoken word is locked into these peoples' darkness and can never escape.

As a Christian, I believe that humanity is saved from this fatality, because on a certain day, a cry pierced the very depths, traversing the underworld to rejoin the living God. This cry which my parched throat would have been incapable of uttering, was wafted heavenwards on my behalf, and was prayed for me with an intensity of sound beyond human imaginings. In Christ's prayer in the psalms a word springs forth which is not just my prayer, i.e. the desire to live and get better, a word which meets mine and leads me on towards change, towards hope, towards communion.

A thirty six year old man, who was to die a few days later, said to a Religious sister who came to visit him every day: "Do you know it's very important for me that you are there, just there. When you are there, there are three of us, you, me and suffering. If not, I'd be all alone with my suffering."

My suffering isolates and closes me in, but as soon as I realise that it is not mine alone and that it does not belong to me; as soon as I remember that I am a member of a much larger body, from that moment onwards, I feel sympathy and communion. Suffering alienates and changes me, but the echo of Christ's word de-alienates, and reveals to me a new identity, on the way to being freed.

In their suffering brothers and sisters, Christians see the tortured members of Christ's Body, "I am He whom you are persecuting" He tells St. Paul, who in echo as it were, replies: "I fill up in my flesh what is lacking in Christ's sufferings, for His Body which is the Church". Jesus has passed through suffering but He has not abolished it. As Paul Claudel put it: "He has filled it with His presence". Presence and sympathy.

The Sacrament of the sick is at the same time the word which liberates, by causing me to cling on to Christ, and the anointing with holy oil on the forehead and on the palms of the hands. In the Sacrament of the sick which is Christ's own gesture, we affirm and make actual our incorporation into the suffering Christ, our passage with Him from death to life, from sickness to health, from solitude to communion.

And all this is the work of the Holy Spirit. Just as oil makes the limbs of boxers slippery, and so difficult, to grasp, so too the Holy Spirit rescues us from the snares of the Evil One. As oil and fats served in former times to heal wounds, so is the Holy Spirit a source of love and gentleness, assuaging pain and healing in depth. And as in old houses, oil lamps were used to banish darkness, likewise, body, soul and entire being of the patient are illuminated with the brightness and the warmth of the Holy Spirit.

It is to be regretted that this powerful and moving gesture which I have never personally made without seeing tears, tears of joy - well up here and there, is so little known and so little practised. It is not just a symbolic act, but truly one that brings peace and freedom. Thus several times I have heard the wives of those sick men say after the anointing, that for them too, this sacrament had repercussions. The efficacy of the sacrament far exceeds the healing of the sick person.