Few things seem to preoccupy people today as much as the elimination of suffering. I’ve often heard people argue against God’s existence by pointing to the suffering in the world. Many look for methods and techniques that promise to reduce it, and many see faith, even the Catholic faith, as a path to a happy life. Some say their faith in God has done exactly that for them. And some priests see themselves, to some extent, as therapists or psychologists, offering their flock a kind of pain relief that conventional, science-based approaches cannot. Liberal believers think one way about this, conservatives another, and the problem of suffering sometimes becomes a front in the culture wars.
I suspect the whole question has less to do with suffering itself than with how much we overestimate natural language as a means of speaking truthfully about reality, and words like “suffering” and “happiness” in particular.
Let’s start untangling it with God Himself, by asking whether He can suffer at all. The simple answer is that He certainly suffered terribly in the Lord Jesus, but beyond that, who can say? We can imagine how Jesus the man felt, but God as such remains far more impenetrable to us. What we can say for sure is that God is not pleased when His will is not done. But if we called this suffering, it would follow that there is suffering in heaven. Most believers would find that unacceptable, and so would the Church’s Magisterium and tradition. Among other things, it would mean that the saints in heaven, who live in complete harmony with God, suffer too, which would seem to break God’s most important promise. On the other hand, one of the few things we know about heaven is that the saints there are not detached from our earthly life; they intercede for us. So when bad things happen on earth, we would expect that things are not as the saints would wish them to be. Some might call that suffering, but in the eyes of the Church it cannot be, by definition.
Perhaps it all comes down to the terms we use. We could invent special religious terms that let us draw finer distinctions between the different things we mean by suffering. But then nobody would actually be able to think in them, just as we can’t think in the many such terms we have already invented, which now obscure the truth about God rather than reveal it. If we are after the truth rather than a win in a philosophical argument, it should be enough that we can imagine quite well what Saint Thérèse of Lisieux meant when she said, “I want to spend my heaven doing good on earth.”
According to the Catechism, “heaven is the ultimate end and fulfillment of the deepest human longings, the state of supreme, definitive happiness” (CCC 1024). It’s hard to imagine such a state without being there for others, as God is. If we are to be one with God, we should stop seeing our awareness of the evil on earth as suffering. The connection we feel to other people, in this life and in the life to come, is not a design flaw. They matter to us; we are engaged rather than detached and indifferent. It is a defining feature of how God created us.
In this, Catholicism differs from what world religions often propose, and the difference shows clearly in their visions of paradise or supreme happiness. Many of those visions are utterly incompatible with who we believe God is.
The Bible doesn’t actually promise a heaven without tears. In the Book of Revelation, God is said to wipe every tear from the eyes of those in heaven (Rev 7:17, 21:4). That suggests not that there is nothing left to weep over, but that every grief is met with His consolation. Even the promise that “there will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away” (Rev 21:4) speaks of the old order ending, not of love ceasing to care. Elsewhere, Revelation says there will be no more hunger, thirst or scorching heat (Rev 7:16). All these passages echo the prophet Isaiah. What they promise concerns the ailments of the body and the confusion of this world. It does not concern the joy or pain that comes from a loving attachment to others as they draw closer to God or drift away from Him. Supreme happiness does not release us from willing the good of others; it consists in nothing but willing their good. This is why God is supremely happy. Benedict XVI puts it well in Spe Salvi 39, borrowing a phrase from Bernard of Clairvaux: God cannot suffer, but He can suffer with: impassibilis est Deus, sed non incompassibilis.
We don’t know much about heaven, but I thought it useful to start there before projecting this ideal onto our messy, confusing life on earth. Down here, many of us struggle to find happiness, which we mostly understand as the absence of suffering. Seen from the heaven we’ve just described, that understanding is clearly mistaken. And on earth, the line between happiness and suffering is blurrier still.
It is entirely possible to be happy and to suffer at the same time. Mothers are happy to suffer while caring for their sick children, or even their perfectly healthy ones. For a Christian, the sentence “I’m happy to suffer” has an almost mysterious appeal. You sense that just around the corner there might be something that fills your life with purpose, something worth the toil, something that makes sense: a life of service. And every human being is wired this way, not just Christians; we all have the same God. The tendency is so strong that political regimes sometimes exploit it. Russian regimes, for example, have long known how to turn their people’s willingness to suffer to evil ends: Russians are asked to bleed for the supposedly oppressed, for a supposedly patriotic love of the homeland, or for supposedly traditional values. We should therefore make sure that what we suffer for is truly a greater good and not a form of evil.
Suffering for the right thing is far better than living a life devoid of all suffering, including suffering with others. Perhaps this is why the few who actually reach that secular ideal so often find it a dead end rather than a fulfillment.
Many of the most influential saints, such as Saint Francis of Assisi and Saint Thérèse of Lisieux, were people of frail health who suffered from many ailments and illnesses. Yet they led lives full of enthusiasm, if not outright happiness. I have known people who suffered terribly yet were visibly happy. What we should admire in them is not heroism; they were not heroes in the usual sense. They simply suffered with others rather than for themselves. Their lives were not about them.
Once you stop living for yourself, pain and trouble become a little more bearable. If, on the other hand, you aim for happiness without suffering, even the smallest obstacle will grow into the central pain of your life. I have seen such people too: the more they tried to improve their living conditions, the more miserable they became. Even in a perfect world, it sometimes rains. I have seen people fall apart at the first drop of rain — real rain, not a metaphor. It sounds almost absurdly tragic, but I have never met anyone who put improving their living conditions first and did not end up more miserable for it.
And what do the saints do? They seem to try to live heaven here on earth already, and in their mad longing they simply ignore everything else. Not because they are moral athletes or heroic fakirs, but because they just don’t have time. Of course, everyone has dark moments when despair tries to take hold of them. The key difference is whether you occasionally become so confused that you almost doubt the truth, or occasionally become sober enough to almost see the truth.
What I’m trying to show here is that God’s plan somehow cuts across all these dimensions — suffering, pain, happiness and confusion — and none of these terms on its own lets you grasp what is good or bad.
Yet it is not hard to see what God asks of us: that we overcome suffering by not trying to escape it, that we reach happiness by not trying to reach it, and that we do the best for ourselves by doing the best for our neighbors.
This is why, in one of the best-known passages of the Gospels, the Lord Jesus says that the second commandment, to love your neighbor as yourself, is like the first, to love God above all (Mt 22:37–39).
In the end, they are one and the same love, seen from two angles.