Q&A 102
Q. I've had this conversation with my priest even but I don't seem to grasp the concept of offering our suffering up to God in reparation, penance and as petition. What's the underlying philosophy? Or theology?
A. Basic idea is that pain or suffering (from injury, illness, calamity or the 101 contradictions we face in our ordinary day-to-day lives) can be useful or useless. Useful if it leads us closer to God and helps us grow in virtue, useless if it doesn't.
Q. How does pain help me get closer to God?
A. At the end of the day the main lesson of pain, suffering and death is to teach us that we are not God. We are not it. We are not perfect or even nearly perfect. The world does not revolve around me. I am not the centre of the universe if only because I don't control even my own body - look: I'm sick and dying and there's not much I can do about it. One day I will not be around: the most certain truth of each of us. In one word, to teach me humility.
As we have mentioned before on this column, consider that the greatest sin/vice is pride. Every sin in one way or another says to God, " My will be done!"
If I'm not it, pain and suffering can lead me to realise that there is Another (who is in charge). As C. S. Lewis would say, “God whispers in our pleasures but shouts in our pains. Pain is his megaphone to rouse a dulled world.”
That's the main point.
In this sense, pain and suffering almost forces us to face God and acknowledge Him.
Beyond that pain can help us to not just face Him but actually get closerto Him, to become more like Him.
Q. How?
A. If God is love and love is forgetting self and wanting the good of another (even at the cost of self), then pain and suffering can be useful if they can teach and train me how to forget about myself and think about others especially in these painful circumstances when even my very body is clamouring for singular and undivided attention.
It's like an athlete or bodybuilder who increases the resistance in his weights during training so that by overcoming these greater weights he can grow stronger and more powerful. Pain and suffering (of body or soul) are to the virtue of the soul what those heavier weights are to the muscles of the body.
Q. So how do I "offer" up pain and suffering?
A. Much in the same way you dedicate something like a song to your beloved: you state or make the reason/purpose for singing that song so passionately to be your beloved whom you want to please. So too you make or state the reason/purpose for putting up so cheerfully and heroically with this pain, suffering, illness or setback to be God whom you want to please or a friend you want to pray for.
Q. Ah. Thanks! Makes things a bit clearer now...
A. Karibu! Apologies for the delay in responding to that query.
15th June 2016