The Silence in Suffering

“The real problem is not why some pious, humble, believing people suffer, but why some do not.”

C. S. Lewis

I repeatedly listened to Horatio Spafford’s moving hymn “It is well with my soul” this morning as I was enjoying the peace of a tranquil Sunday morning prior to attending church. It is one of the most memorable and agonizing songs I have ever heard. As often happens when I have chosen to play this song I was in a reflective mood and wanted to delve deeper than the "distracted denial" which is what most of our modern “worship” songs offer the listener.  

Back home we called these types of songs “happy clappy” christian songs, and in my opinion they’re most often used to distract children from the tedium of the “adult” nature of all things Sacred.  

In a few short weeks I’ll have reached the age of 43 which was when Horatio penned this famous hymn of agony. And like Horatio I have acquired my own share of sorrow and suffering along the way and it has crafted deep within my soul my own bitter, but poignant, paean of submission.  

When we visited Rome a few years ago I was held transfixed by Michelangelo’s Pieta in St. Peter’s Basilica. There is a breathtaking air of agony around this statue that holds this beholder in a state of tremulous trepidation. It provoked a studied silence which is not a state I’m comfortable with.

I left St. Peter’s subdued, just as I leave Horatio’s paean of submission to The Almighty this morning with a very subdued sense of just how little my own intimate experience of suffering and sorrow has produced. As I take account of my internal audit I find only a tiny silently blossoming capacity for submission in the face of Suffering and Sorrow. 

I feel both The Pieta and Spafford’s Hymn are meant to provoke silence in the soul of the beholder, just as all suffering and sorrow are meant to produce a humane silence from the observer.  

I’ve known many Christians who see tragedy as an opportunity to share Jesus with people. I was one of those people, and there was a time I would have considered any suffering or sorrow in the unrepentant as an opportunity to compel them to repent. Indeed, funerals are the favorite place back home for preaching to the “lost” of the dangers of unrepentant sin and the fearfulness of falling into the hands of the living God! For the Saints, it was an opportunity to prove our Faith and we saw it as a point of pride not to complain too much or weep too long in the face of suffering and death.

That time has passed and I now see the suffering and sorrow of others as an agony for all who care for them. It no longer tempts me to suborn their pain for my “holy” purposes.

Indeed I have almost grown to a place where I need no “answers" for Suffering or Sorrow. As the years have flown past I feel less and less the compulsion to “explain” why God “allows" such things. I have left my own childlike answers to such questions behind long ago, and now embrace a posture of empathetic or sympathetic silence when faced with the agonizing questions of the Marys and Marthas as they seek a “Savior" in the shadow of their brother’s untimely death. 

Silence is such an uncomfortable response to suffering or sorrow. But it may be the only response I’ve found that doesn’t demean or delude the Suffering and Sorrowful. 

I spent the morning reflecting silently on suffering and the price one must pay if one wishes to be able to sit in silence with those who struggle with the agony of living in a broken world.

Perhaps you may think it outrageous that I could conjure up so many words from a morning spent studying silent suffering. But words are like air for me, if I hold them in too long, I turn blue and pass out. Such is the fate of being me…..