This is part of a read-along hosted by myself and MrsDarwin of DarwinCatholic.
The main page is here.
MrsDarwin's biographical sketch of the author, Robert Hugh Benson, is here.
My introductory post is here.
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The twin chapters of "Christ in the Saint" and "Christ in the Sinner" were very satisfying in their symmetry, and I'm very glad that Cat incorporated both into her most recent meditation.
I think that "Christ in the Sufferer" must disappoint many who turn to it in hope, at least if the few comments in our little reading group were to be believed.
Some of us, being sufferers ourselves, are looking for instructions on what to do with our own suffering. We have been told that we ought to unite our sufferings to Christ's. We may have been told that we ought to "offer up" our sufferings, perhaps on behalf of some other soul; for example, one person reported being taught that suffering should be offered "for the poor souls in Purgatory."
But exactly how one does this is always left unsaid.
Others of us, and I count myself among them, may be searching for help learning what to do with other people's suffering. We may feel helpless faced by the suffering around us: faraway suffering that we only read about, or a suffering person right in front of us, whether it is a stranger or a loved one. Maybe it is our appointed duty to do something particular to help; it can be a relief to know it; but perhaps what we can do is useless or incomplete, and then we are still left with suffering we can't help. Or maybe we don't know what to do: to say "it's not my job" seems wrong, and yet the fear that we might make it worse if we don't understand what we are doing is not an ungrounded one (see: book of Job)! Faced with a third suggestion, that we should suffer-with the sufferer, com-passion-ate ourselves... if we are not naturally feelers of others' feelings, how can we make ourselves do it?
There seem to be no easy answers here either.
And Benson's chapter does not help us. He remains distant from the sufferer. He does not help the sufferer, and he does not help the one who would serve the sufferer. What are we to make of this?
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One possibility is that Benson simply doesn't know the answer, that he himself has searched and come up just as empty. Another possibility is that however forlornly we wish for him to reveal the secrets of offering up our suffering, or of easing the suffering of others, it is simply not within the scope of this book, and he knows it.
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I've noted before that The Friendship of Christ functions in many ways as an act of apologetics, and so it is accessible to the person who has only a partial understanding of Catholic Christianity as well as to the well-catechized person who wishes to enter more deeply into relationship with the Christ who dwells there.
This is a very apologetic chapter, and the apologia defends here against the category of accusations sometimes called "The Problem of Pain." Almost anyone who has dabbled in apologetics will have encountered this, and it is a fundamental enough problem in the human condition that practically every religion or philosophy must address it in some way or another.
Why do we observe that the just and the innocent suffer pains beyond that which can do them any discernible good?
Christianity does have answers for this, and Benson discusses some of them in this chapter. At the moment the thing that I would like to point out to my well-catechized readers is this: Being well-catechized, or being a faithful Christian believer, is not a foolproof inoculation against error in the matter of The Problem of Pain.
I daresay you do not have to look very far among your acquaintances of the faithful and well-catechized sort to find someone who, if pressed, can be shown to believe in at least some cases that suffering is sufficient evidence of the sufferer's deserving the suffering. They are Job's comforters; they believe that divine justice requires divine retribution. It's extremely common, and I suppose that few of us have successfully resisted the temptation to classify a sufferer as having "asked for it" at one time or another, beyond the evidence. Another extremely common error: the assumption that if the apparently innocent do suffer, it must be for their own good, or must meet some need not otherwise met. You see this in the wretched encounters with the "it's God's will" people.
Why are we like this? We do not like to live with uneasy realities.
Anyway, Benson is careful to point these errors out to us in this little apologia. The Problem of Pain is not what arises from "the direct and evident consequence of sin to the sinner;" it is the different problem of what arises beyond that. Indeed the very real existence of evident consequences of sin can soothe us into thinking that, once we have associated sin and consequence in one-to-one correspondence, we have solved it. But Benson ticks them off: Christianity does not allow us to believe that God is not just; it does not allow us to believe that divine justice enacts retribution for past-life sins; it does not allow us to believe that the innocent cannot suffer needlessly (or, the logical equivalent, that the needlessly suffering are therefore not innocent).
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Personally, I think that Benson's answer to the question of "how to unite our sufferings to Christ" is that we do not need to take any steps at all; that Christ suffers in the sufferer through nothing more than the fact that an image-bearer suffers. It is the common humanity of ourselves and of the Suffering God-Man that unites human suffering with the Cross, no more. There may be comfort and peace to be found in making some kind of act of oblation of suffering; there may be virtue to be gained in exercising patience, in refraining from lashing out at people around us. But the essential meaning of suffering already belongs to its every instance, in my view, and is given it by Christ. As Paul says and Benson emphasizes, "I fill up those things that are wanting of the sufferings of Christ," and we are given no further explanation.
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One of the uneasy realities that we find it hard to live with: the instruction that the Christian must take up his cross, which seems to indicate an instruction to suffer willingly; and yet the instruction that we must ease the suffering of the sufferers (cf. the hungry, the naked, the sick, the imprisoned, etc.).
There is a risk that Christians might interpret this as instructing them to tell the hungry, naked, sick, and imprisoned that they should bear their crosses.
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I believe that the scope of this chapter, with regard to the friendship of Christ, that if we recoil from suffering, we are always and in some way recoiling from Christ. Not that there's something wrong with taking steps to prevent or mitigate suffering, either in ourselves or in others; that isn't the kind I mean. There is no risk that we will somehow eliminate the possibility of suffering. There will always be enough to go around; it is out there somewhere; if you cannot see it, keep looking.
(N. B. I've written about this before, in a meditation on II.12 of The Imitation of Christ, "On the Royal Road of the Cross." There is no escape from the Cross; in fact the Cross is precisely that: whatever suffering must be borne. So there's no risk that by alleviating suffering that may be alleviated---as distinct from pushing the suffering onto someone else---we are refusing to bear it.)
My interpretation of Benson's instruction on "how to" unite her pain with His, to offer her pain as "the instrument of His atonement" -- these are the words he uses -- is that the believer has the possibility of knowing that she "fills up" what is wanting in the suffering of Christ. For Christ suffers when we humans suffer, and thus our suffering is part of the atonement. He went willingly for our sakes; we Christian believers can align our will with His and accompany him. It is not the same thing as "God wills our suffering;" it is more like, "God can take this and do something with it -- has already done so." All we need do is trust: that we not deny the justice and love of God in the face of it; that we not deny that Christ is found there, as well as on the lovelier roads; and in fact that there we know Christ in a way we would not otherwise come to know.
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Next: Part III begins.
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