My Mom and I were discussing a movie she had seen recently:

“It wasn’t bad.  The acting was very good.  But you know how movies are, there just isn’t enough suffering.  You have to earn a happy ending.”

I’ve been thinking a lot about suffering lately.  In fact, I’m always thinking about suffering.  Recently though I keep asking myself why everyone is so afraid of feeling bad.  Why can’t we face ANYTHING anymore without someone trying to “protect” us?

I was perplexed by my co-worker yesterday when we were discussing a job one of the parents is interviewing for.  The job seems well suited to the woman in particular, and I wish her all the best.  It is a position in the crisis pregnancy field, which I know from friends can be very stressful and emotionally demanding.  My co-worker said to me “oh I just don’t want her to take a job where she’ll be stressed out.  She’s my friend.”

I literally couldn’t follow the logic.  What on earth does being someone’s friend have to do with how stressful their job is?  Is the measure of being a friend how much you wish for your friend’s life to be easy?  Do you not want them to take a stressful job because you don’t think they can live up to the responsibility and therefore you’re weighing the prudence of telling them you think they should look in a field more compatible with their skills?  Are you afraid of, as her friend, having to listen to endless complaining about how stressed out she is?

The simplest, and most generous, answer is that the possibility of her friend experiencing difficulty makes my co-worker sad.  But that only leads me to my first question: why?  I’m not saying that REAL suffering is inconsequential, that when faced with serious trials, be they individual, familial, societal or human, that we should not be moved, should not desire to help, to give of ourselves for another person.  But I can’t help but see that we have lost that distinction between difficulty and suffering, and that we have become so averse to anything even remotely unpleasant we have completely abandoned the idea that through suffering we are redeemed.

I take no joy when my loved ones are going through rough times, or are upset.  But I have absolutely no patience for people who seem to think they were born with a “get out of pain free” card.  I have no patience with myself when I start adopting this attitude, as I do every so often, whining about how things are so hard for me and why did I have to get the fuzzy end of the lollypop?  (Please see my crocodile tears and self-pity cake.)

My priest keeps saying over and over again that God can make something good out of any circumstances if we just let him.  And maybe that is what bothers me so much about a general attitude of suffering-escapism; it’s not letting God do his job.  By trying so hard to never let anything bad happen we are trying to prevent the situations where God can show us how to grow in love and virtue.  As if we deep down don’t trust that he can make a silk purse out of sow’s ear, so we keep trying to dress the pig up as a different animal.  (Okay, I think that metaphor got away from me.)  It’s kind of “well, I’m not going to let God test me, because what if HE fails?”

My senior year of college my heart was terribly broken.  (I do not at all like using the passive voice for that sentence, but my emotional situation was mostly my fault, so I also don’t like to say “a man broke my heart.”)  Right before graduation it became clear that my romantic hopes were not to be fulfilled by the man I loved.  I called my mom crying, pouring out the whole story, sure that she would tell me I was being silly and that it wasn’t worth crying over.  She told me to cry.  She sat on the phone with me for over an hour while I just cried.  For my mother tears are reserved for death of a loved one, mass with the Pope, Shakespeare, and Beethoven; tears are only appropriate for expressing the highest things in life.  So I was a bit surprised that she was willing to indulge my sobbing over a man who I loved but loved a different woman.  It wasn’t because she saw my little drama as some singular tragedy evocative of a deep human truth.  Nope, not at all.  It was that she recognized that I was suffering, and that my suffering must be faced, endured, and eventually rejoiced in.  To do that I needed to cry, to not try to push my heartbreak into the background by “being strong” and pretending “it’s no big deal.”  My mother knew I would be a better person if I accepted that I was hurt and learned out to deal with that hurt.

I did both.  It took a long time, and it wasn’t at all in the way I expected.  Or for that matter, in the way my mother expected.  But it worked out in the way God saw as for the best, and the more time has passed, the more for the best it becomes.  If my mother had tried to “protect” me, to distract me and coddle me and behave as if there was nothing for me to learn from my pain, then there wouldn’t have been that open space for God to shape my life.  I would be an entirely different person, and I can’t say that I think I would be happier.  To be spared momentary (or a few-months-long) discomfort at the expense of the wisdom, maturity, humility, empathy, and love that I gained by allowing God’s will just doesn’t seem worth it at all to me.

Suffering isn’t just how we become better people.  It is how we become fuller people, it’s how we live a more real and whole life.  So why are we spending out entire lives trying to avoid it?

(1 Year, 2 Months, 21 Days Sober)