This article by Mary Craig originally appeared

under the title, "Take Up Your Cross," in The Way, January, 1973.
It has been regendered, edited and adapted by
John Veltri, S.J. and Rev. Jean Mitchell in 1996.
At the time of its original publication
Mary Craig was the mother of three boys
and a free-lance journalist and broadcaster.
She was writing regularly for BBC Radio of London.

In the introduction to Elie Wiesel's sad story Night about a

young Jewish boy's gradual loss of faith in the midst of the
holocaust, Francois Mauriac wrote about his own powerlessness to
help, "... I could only embrace him weeping." Mauriac could not
share that the stumbling block to the boy's faith -- the Jew on the
cross -- was the cornerstone of his own.

There have been many events in recent history to which the only
immediate response possible was tears followed by the anguished
question "Why?" The slaughter of the Jews, the annihilation of
Hiroshima, the massacres in Africa, the plundering of Third World
economies with starving families and children, the genocide in
Cambodia -- why must such horrible things happen? God stands
accused! If I were God, we think, I should never allow such
suffering! On the face of things, we have two alternatives to
explain suffering -- either the universe is governed by a cruel,
vengeful God who delights in torturing the innocent; or there is
no God and we drift through time in total absurdity.

But there is another possible explanation. Our images of God,

generated from our own human projections, often prevent us from
understanding things as they really are. To make us human and
distinct from other levels of creation, our creator gave us the
ability to make choices. If we are to exercise this innate ability,
it follows that we must be able to abuse it. If God were to
intervene in our decisions, wrong actions would be impossible, our
ability to make choices would be meaningless, and we would be no
more than robots. The price of our freedom is pain and suffering,
a price that must be paid. Kierkegaard wrote that, if being human
were only a variation of animal life on the one hand or of
angelic life on the other, humans would not be the prey of anguish.

It is we who first turn our world awry, and then we reap the
harvest -- either ourselves or our children or our children's
children. Throughout the ages, human beings have destroyed their
harmony and at-one-ness with the world and introduced discordance
everywhere. We humans, not God, have produced the instruments of
torture and destruction and have devised ever more effective means
of enslaving or terrorizing other human beings. It is our greed or
stupidity or blindness that has caused the inequalities and the
injustices in our societies. And God, who foresaw all the
inhumanities that we would perpetrate on others and on our world,
stepped into our ranks through the Word made flesh to show us the
way to love and become reconciled.
When we are confronted with suffering in our own personal lives,
even our most profoundly held beliefs easily break down . Our
natural human impulse is to fly from trouble, and when we realize
there is no escape, we are tempted to despair. When the suffering
is our own, it shrouds our whole being, undermining the little
courage we have. We become deaf to all but the din of our own
misery. Every human being must travel this road at some time and
experience this temptation to despair.

The Temptation To Despair Has Different Faces

Some people drift from despair to self-pity ...

"Why should this happen to me? ... Haven't I always tried to lead
a good life?" Self-pity may be a normal reaction, but the time
for it passes. If we allow it to take hold, it can destroy us as
surely as a cancerous growth. Self-pity erodes our courage and
our humanity. It is destructive not only of ourselves but of those
who love us and who would support us. If we see ourselves as the
victims of a vicious fate, we become embittered and the love that
is in us will be soured into envy and hate.

Some people refuse to face reality ...

The refusal to face reality is almost as destructive as self-pity.

If I shut my eyes hard enough and long enough, I can convince
myself that this dreadful thing has not really happened. It will
go away. I may even deaden my response with tranquillizers. In
refusing to face reality, I abdicate my responsibility and say
"no" to the possibility of growth.

Some people bargain with God and demand a miracle ...

Another response is to pray frantically that God will get us out

of this mess. We even feel a barely suppressed sense of outrage
that, since God has got us into it in the first place, God will get
us out. So we expect a miracle and when the miracle fails to happen,
we feel that God has failed to take care of us: "God, you let us
down. Get us away from this nasty reality. Hide us." It doesn't
occur to us that we are just using God as another form of denial.

How can we sneer at these responses? Who knows how we will respond
when the hour strikes? Surely God is our refuge, and it is our
right to ask for the agony to pass. Even Jesus did that! Did Jesus
not pray that his cup might pass? -- Yes, he did, but in redeeming
humility, he added, "Abba, if it be possible ... not my will but
yours" (Lk 22:42). Our tragedy is not that we suffer, but that we
waste suffering. Self-pity, turned inward, warps us and drives out
love. In refusing to face our situation as it is, we run from the
truth -- and from ourselves. If we are in flight from ourselves,
we have nothing whatever to give to others except our own
barrenness. We can only gain from suffering if we use the
opportunity to grow in compassion and understanding, to become
more sensitive to the needs of others. "Help carry one another's
burdens; in that way you will fulfill the law of Christ" (Gal 6:2).
Through suffering, God is offering us a share in the life that God
chose for God's Word who became human.

It is easy for us to forget that the core of our faith is a human

being, dying in mess and muddle and pain, crying out in despair,
"My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" (Mk 15:34). This
represents our true human condition. Jesus was sharing with us the
sense of having lost God. Yet his cry of despair did not diminish
his love. If one can reach the point of crying, "My God, my God,
" without ceasing to love, one can find contentment in the midst
of one's abandonment. Even though we may not be called to imitate
Jesus' life in detail (1), he does give us a way and the means to
follow him in our own existential situation. At the centre of all
that God is offering us, the cross stands as a commentary -- the
historical sign that Jesus fully shared our human situation.

Faith in Christ Jesus is not an immunizing drug against pain; it

may not even seem to be comfort of any kind. But it is a key to
unlock the meaning and the latent possibilities in what we must
endure. Suffering can be ennobling and creative, but it may be
nonsense if we do not see meaning or put meaning into it.

What do we mean by suffering? It is something, on a trivial or

cosmic scale, which is highly unpleasant to us, which hurts, which
upsets our plans, and which is against our will. That is the crux
of the matter. As we confront each new situation of suffering, we
engage in a struggle. We fear being overcome. We are no longer
sure of ourselves. The bubble of our complacency is shattered. We
become vulnerable and in our vulnerability we can find God.
Although our happiness ultimately lies in God, we usually will not
seek this unless we are compelled to face our radical insufficiency
. C.S. Lewis wrote that pain is God's megaphone to arouse us from
our deafness. It is only when we are afraid or bewildered, aware
of our own helplessness, that we turn to God. If we are to be
re-made, re-born, turned around, we must be first broken into
pieces:

Your pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses your

understanding. Even as the stone of the fruit must break so that
its heart may stand in the sun, so must you know pain. It is the
bitter potion by which the physician within you heals your sick
self. Therefore trust the physician ... the cup the physician
brings, though it burn your lips, has been fashioned of the clay,
moistened by the Potter's own sacred tears.
(Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet)

That there is some therapeutic value in suffering is obvious. When

our own need is great, to whom do we turn? To the person for whom
life has always been easy? Or to the one who has been buffeted by
more than one storm? Somehow we acknowledge that the former lacks
a dimension and cannot help us. However, remember that suffering
does not automatically provide that deeper dimension. Like pleasure
, suffering is morally neutral. What gives or does not give it
value is the way it is received. It is not good in itself. The mere
fact of suffering does not make a martyr. Suffering can sour and
embitter. It can make people less human. It can even turn them into
monsters. However, where it is accepted and used, it can bestow a
maturity and a beauty of spirit that no other experience can
provide. We have all seen shallow men and women grow better through
adversity -- it is their one big chance to do so. (2)

Each one of us has places in our hearts which do not yet exist, and
into them enters suffering in order that they may have existence.
There is a wisdom that only sorrow can bring. It is the source of
great poetry, music, art and the great discoveries of life.It is
in sorrow that we can look into ourselves and find God.

On the day that the second of my two mentally handicapped children

was born, I experienced a fathomless despair. I felt that I was
drowning and did not even know how to struggle. Yet there was
something in me that wanted to grow through this horror, to use
it for good in some way. When I reached what seemed to me the
darkest depths, I was suddenly aware of being upheld, aware of a
promise of strength, if I would only seek it. I know that this was
a direct experience of God.

Simply because we are human, we suffer. We fall and end up with

aching broken bones. We catch a flu by breathing in germs from
random coughs. We experience aching emptiness with the loss of a
loved one. We also suffer from the consequences of faulty decisions
grounded in partial human knowledge -- which can be only partial
because we are human. Such suffering we are called to deal with
and accept.

However, most suffering is often the fruit of our oppressive greed

and of our unwillingness to live justly with others. Whenever we
encounter the suffering that has resulted from such greed -- hunger
, disease, economic slavery, poverty, homelessness -- it is not
good enough to quote, "My kingdom is not of this world" (Jn 18:36).
Until the manifestations of our oppressive greed are eradicated
from the world, we cannot hope to achieve the harmony for which
we yearn. Jesus told us to love our neighbour as ourselves. John
expressed it this way: "How does God's love abide in anyone who has
the world's goods and sees a brother or sister in need and yet
refuses help?" (1Jn 3:17).

Closer to our own time, Dom Helder Camara wrote, "If I know that
there are human beings like me in some part of the world whose
lives are not worthy of being children of God, who have neither
house nor clothing, neither food nor education, then I must do
everything I can to help them ... For Christians, the Incarnation
of Christ is a living lesson in commitment." (3) We must do what
we can, however little it may be. It is indifference, not hatred,
which is the true enemy of love -- indifference which keeps the
silent majority silent. "For evil to triumph, the good have only
to remain silent." Shortly before his death, Martin Luther King
echoed these words of Augustine when he wrote, "We will have to
repent in this generation not merely for the vitriolic words and
actions of the bad people but for the appalling silence of the good
people."

It is Christ who dies of starvation or leprosy in Calcutta, who

was burned with napalm in Vietnam. It is Christ who lives in the
handicapped or the mentally ill, the imprisoned or the persecuted.
"When, Lord, did we see you hungry or thirsty or sick or naked or
in prison?" (Mt 25:37). Are we so naive that we really do not
know? The message of Matthew is a terrible challenge to us all.
It is that wherever there is suffering and distress and injustice,
Christ is there in the midst calling to us, "I, if I be lifted up,
will draw all people to myself" (Jn 12:32).

Our lives are lived in a context of human suffering in which our

own experiences are but a single thread in a vast canvas. If we
turn our pain outward, uniting it intentionally with the pain of
the world, then our own suffering becomes a positive gift to God
and the means of our own growth. If we do that, far from rejecting
God, we acknowledge that we are responsible with God for the
redemption of the human family. Nothing has been taken away from
us, something extra has been given to us. If we stand in spirit
at the foot of the cross, we can see that all the sorrow in the
world is gathered together into one sorrow; and there, in the
moment of seeming utter defeat, the victory over sorrow is
complete.

Whether we like it or not, we share in paying the price for being

human beings with our capacity to make choices. Without this
capacity to choose, there would be no capacity to choose the good.
To benefit from the good, we must also suffer the pain from bad
choices. Our popular culture teaches us to dull our pain with many
forms of escapism to protect ourselves from suffering. But if we
do that we may miss something precious in the pain which we really
have the capacity to face. The choice is ours.

Anthony Bloom, a doctor before becoming a priest, spoke of a young

woman who was dying of cancer. Despite great pain, she refused to
take drugs to alleviate her suffering. She said that the time had
not yet come. Then one day she called him and said she was now
ready for the drugs. She had now learned everything that pain had
to teach her, and she could go in peace. He suggested that the
desire to escape suffering is particularly prevalent in the West,
and that in the East there is a much stronger belief that suffering
, like everything else, is related to our journey towards God. When
we escape suffering we may lose a chance to understand something
of great importance for ourselves and, consequently, for others.
(4)

Suffering does not have the last word if it is viewed from the
perspectives of solidarity with others and the hope of our ultimate
union with God. Because of Jesus' death and resurrection, the time
will come when we shall become full human beings -- being with God,
face to face. Jesus pointed the way, "Unless a grain of wheat falls
into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it
dies, it bears much fruit" (Jn 12:24).

Why should we doubt the necessity that suffering has become part
of God's way of redeeming the world? It may be difficult for us to
conceive how suffering could have been part of God's 'original plan.
' Yet, knowing how humanity has developed, the Christian doctrine
of being made perfect through suffering is credible (Heb 5:7-9).
A world without suffering -- a plastic, homogenized world where
growth is forever impossible -- is now unthinkable.

Pain may lead some of us to revolt and rebel. Yet pain can provide
opportunities for conversion in various aspects of our lives.
C.S. Lewis suggested that until some people find evil unmistakably
present in their own existence in the form of pain, they remain
enclosed in an illusion. (5) Without suffering, the evil and the
good pursue parallel courses, never interfacing with each other.
Suffering alone makes them converge. Bonhoeffer, condemned to
death by the Nazis, wrote from his death cell at Flossenburg: "I
believe that God can and intends to let good spring from everything
, even from what is most evil. For this, God needs human beings
who know how to turn all things to the good."

What better (or worse) illustration could there be than the ghettos,
the slave camps, the extermination camps of Nazi-occupied Europe
of World War II? It is estimated that 20 million people died in
3000 camps in terror and starvation and humiliation and degradation
. Evil was let loose and ran amok; it was a world ruled by hatred.
In such a world countless people lost their faith. "I cry to you
and you give me no answer; I stand before you but you take no
notice" (Jb 30:20). In how many hearts must those words of Job have
echoed? The extermination camps, such as Buchenwald and Auschwitz,
represent the horrible levels of suffering that humans have
generated through their capacity to make choices.

Yet consider something else -- those human spirits that rose above
the degradation and found God in the stench and the filth and the
misery. Physical strength counted for nothing. It was inner
strength that counted and this was to be found in unexpected places.
Public persons foundered; obscure and despised individuals
displayed heroic behaviour. Some became beasts; others saints.
Until their hour came, no one could tell who would belong to which
category. There were, of course, magnificent examples: Janusz
Dorczak, the Polish-Jewish doctor who resisted offers of a safe
passage for himself and led his orphanage children from the Warsaw
ghetto to Treblinka, singing all the way;(6) Maria Skobtsova (7) of
Ravensbruck and Maximilian Kolbe of Auschwitz, who both gave their
lives for another; and Edith Stein, of whom it was said that God
called her to implant the cross in the entire desert of hatred.

But most of the heroic women and men were unsung. They were the
ones who testified to the survival of the human spirit "through
the all-transcending grace in the total absence of the means of
grace."(8)

The spirit cannot die even in the bleakest of places. The

concentration camps indeed proved that. The following prayer was
found scribbled on a piece of wrapping paper near the body of a
dead child at Ravensbruck camp where 92,000 women and children
died:

O God, remember not only the men and women of good will, but also
those of ill will. But do not remember all the suffering they have
inflicted upon us; remember the fruits we have bought, thanks to
this suffering -- our comradeship, our loyalty, our humility, our
courage, our generosity, the greatness of heart which has grown out
of all this, and when they come to the judgment let all the fruits
that we have borne be their forgiveness.Only one who had plumbed
the depths of suffering could have learned so much compassion.

And what of the guilty? As time has passed, with a few exceptions,
we have come to accept the judgment that these criminals were as
banal as the rest of the world's little people, that they were in
the grip of forces which they didn't understand and to which they
succumbed. One of the jailers under Franz Stangl, the Nazi
commandant of a concentration camp, described him as "like a human
being, an intelligent person and not a brute." Stangl, like others
of his ilk, was not a natural monster, but quite ordinary, with no
gift for heroics and no instinct stronger than that of self-
preservation. Can we be absolutely certain that we would have acted
differently? Can we be sure that such people are beyond
forgiveness?

Out of the abyss of evil, saints arose. Pierre d'Harcourt,

analyzing the experiences of Buchenwald, commented that in a way,
the life of the camp was "the true life, the life that bore
witness to what really counted in humanity, the spirit." The
letters from the condemned prisoners of the concentration camps,
collected into a paperback anthology, (9)bear witness to the dizzy
heights to which human beings may soar when they discover God in
darkness. The letters are full of faith and courage and a joyful
awareness of new-found values.

Among many of the survivors of the camps, one meets this tremendous
inner strength, this indestructible human spirit. Such survivors
seem to have passed beyond hatred and bitterness because they saw
where the hatred and bitterness led. They are linked together by a
powerful bond and mutual compassion. I shall never forget the
woman I met in Warsaw at a party for survivors of Auschwitz and
Buchenwald. Suddenly she turned to me and said sadly, "I wasn't
there; but I wish to God I had been. I'm on the outside. Do you
understand?"

Other survivors, like Wanda, are even more unforgettable.

Medically experimented on by the SS, she was left to die because
no 'guinea-pigs' were to be left to tell the tale! Rescued by
friends, she was hidden in a bunker, surviving hourly searches by
the Gestapo who were out to liquidate the 'guinea-pigs.'
Suddenly all fear left her. She understood that she could no
longer be hurt. Death was the worst that could happen, but she felt
sure she was not going to die. With the force of a revelation, she
began to see a purpose in her sufferings, and determined that if
she ever got out alive, she would use her new insights and
compassion to help heal the minds of others. Later she was to
become a trained psychiatrist.

That is but one example among countless others. It is stories such

as this which make us realize that God is indeed in the 'limit-
situations' of human existence -- guilt, suffering, death. Human
beings can be carried to the height of redemption only after
passing through the valley of despair. We do not suffer in order
to become other than who we are, but to become the real persons
lying dormant within us. It all depends on ourselves. The suffering
that produced a Beethoven or a Helen Keller could also produce a
snivelling weakling riddled with self-pity. Two people suffer the
same anguish: one is destroyed, the other enriched! One is caught
in one's own turmoil and withers; the other searches more deeply
and finds profound meaning -- Christ suffering in the world.

These truths recall for me a young woman who was in a wheelchair.

Having broken her neck, she was completely paralysed, without
feeling or skin sensation from the shoulders down. She looked
after herself in her own flat (it took her two hours to get dressed
), drove across London each day and did a nine to five-thirty job,
after which she was too exhausted to do anything but sleep. She
rejoiced in her independence, "For me it is the most wonderful and
unbelievable thing. Every morning when I wake up, I think, another
day! I've made it!" To find hope and joy in the midst of
affliction, rather than stoicism or mere patient endurance -- that
is the ultimate achievement of faith.

The paradox remains. We must continue to fight suffering, yet we

must also be prepared to see in it a loving principle of renewal.
We come to know our dependence and our helplessness and to
recognize that we cannot save ourselves. When it is our turn, no
one can persuade us that our own pain is not naked and raw. Pain,
whether mental or physical or the spiritual pain of the dark night
of the soul, hurts like hell and anyone who denies it is a fool and
a hypocrite. But we can't run away from it, and in it lies the
possibility of redemption for ourselves and for others if we can
say, "For what it's worth, take it, God, and use it. Use it for
those tortured people of Rwanda or the napalmed children of
Vietnam. Use it to make me grow in compassion. Use it any way you
will." We may utter such a prayer through clenched teeth, it may
be dragged out of us, but if we can hope one day to mean it, we are
halfway to humility.

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Reflective Questions On Your Own Life Experiences

During your life-time what different forms of suffering have you

noticed in yourself and others?

How do people respond to these different forms of suffering?

Mary Craig writes that suffering "is something, on a trivial or

cosmic scale, which is highly unpleasant to us, which hurts, which
upsets our plans, and which is against our will. That is the crux
of the matter." Give examples to illustrate this working
definition of suffering.

What were your personal reactions to this article? What is God's

Spirit saying to you through these reactions?

What have you perceived to be the therapeutic value to suffering?

Mary Craig has used the example of the extermination camps of the
World War II as the metaphor to reflect on suffering -- how has
this horrible metaphor been repeated in our present time?

Endnotes

1. At the same time it must be admitted that many persons have

frequently suffered worse deaths than crucifixion.

2. It usually takes profound suffering along the way to burn away

or to purify our souls, our psyches, from all the superfluous
elements that hide and cover up the inner treasure of the self,
the divinity within.

--from a lecture given by Kathleen Lyons, CSJ, Guelph.

3. Dom Helder Camara, Church and Colonialism (London, 1969).

4. However, to seek comfort in lieu of the truth may mean that in

an effort to avoid pain, we will also avoid responding to
opportunities of real value, real life. We will merely exist and
eventually die without having ever really lived. ... Allen Boesak
of South Africa says, "We will go before God to be judged, and God
will ask us: 'Where are your wounds?' and we will say, 'We have
no wounds.' And God will ask, 'Was nothing worth fighting for?'"

-- Wicks, R.J., Touching the Holy (Notre Dame, 1992).

5. Lewis, C.S., The Problem of Pain (London, 1940).
6. Olczak, Hanna., Mister Doctor (London, 1966).
7. Hackel, Sergei., One of Great Price (London, 1965).
8. Simon, Ulrich, E., A Theology of Auschwitz (London, 1967).
9. d'Harcourt, Pierre., Dying We Live (London, 1958).