Botched Suffering

Botched suffering: What an elegant phrase. Servant of God Madeleine Delbrel writes from France during the 1940’s...”have we ever thought that the fact of botching a small part of our daily suffering-whether it be by getting up with bad grace... turning up our nose at insipid food is of greater significance to the real history of the world than the current disaster or victory reported on the radio?”

Fundamental to our Catholic faith is the utility of suffering, that our embrace of our own anguish, however small or great, can unite us to Christ in unique and mysterious ways. To much of the world that statement is, at the least, foolish, at the most, abhorrent, even evil. I understand, because I spent years of my life believing that the suffering and indignities I witnessed among too many patients in the academic medical center where I worked was appalling and unnecessary. Upon learning from the medical staff that their insistence on continuing treatment in the face of terminal illness was, in large part, based on their fear of litigation, a small group of us worked to change the medical practice of treating the dying. We developed educational programs and hospital policies to teach that discontinuation of technological treatment was good medicine. As Chairman of one the first Institutional Ethics Committees in the country, I along with our hospital became known locally and nationally as leaders in ethics, care of the dying and palliative care.

That suffering could be used to serve a purpose, be ennobling, even redemptive, for him who suffers and potentially others if so desired was alien, cruel, even crazy in my pre-Catholic reality. That is until the divine two by four: Upon the act of conversion, the divine ‘two by four’ flattens everything in its path. Just like St. Paul says, We are made new. Nothing is the same once the blinders are removed:

“Therefore if any man be in Christ, he is a new creature: old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new.”

I recall the horror with which a friend greeted my new Catholic understanding of suffering quite clearly. The notion that Peter could use his anguish over losing his girl-friend was so shocking that he literally backed out the door of our house. His burgeoning interest in returning to the Catholic faith of his childhood vanished soon after that conversation.

I can imagine the sadness of Madeline Debrel if she knew the extent to which so many have gone to avoid the pain and suffering of this life. Our cultural fear of suffering has resulted in opiate addiction as the fourth cause of death in this country. Last year, some fifty-thousand Americans died from opiate and heroin overdose. And addiction to heroin has quadrupled in just five years.

Sobering data. And newsworthy only when a celebrity is found dead. Unfortunately, the media follow-up about the star’s death frequently lacks any reference to the cause of death: Overdose of pain killing prescription drugs.

One of the first articles I wrote upon my conversion to Catholicism was published in Canticle Magazine, To Love is to Suffer. The article begins like this:

"The problem with the Catholic Church is the crucifix." The three of us were
sitting at my friends' dinner table savoring the comforts of their beautiful
Houston home and enjoying a relaxed conversation. My host explained that he
had been brought up in the Catholic Church but he was drawn to the
Protestant churches due to their more "positive" depiction of Christ. The
focus, he explained, really should be on the risen Christ rather than the
crucified Christ, for the crucifixion is so negative.