Could This Virus Change How We Understand Suffering?
Wisdom from the Orthodox in the face of fear
Pope Francis called for all Catholics to pray the Rosary yesterday. Though I am not Catholic, I paused with my family to join our Catholic brothers and sisters in prayer. Not long after, though, I recalled the scoffing from religion’s cultured despisers about the ineffectiveness, irrationality, and stupidity of prayer.
We’ve seen them do it before: “Thoughts and prayers after a mass shooting? How about legislation!”
How absurd this mass prayer must seem to enlightened materialists: “Prayers for the pandemic? How about a vaccine!”
What Are We Supposed to Do With Our Suffering?
In an Orthodox prayer for one who is ill, the sufferer asks that their suffering be to their spiritual benefit. They also ask for a full recovery.
But we are more than just bodies, and any full recovery is temporary at best. Suffering puts us in close contact with death and our own weakness. And since we are from dust and to dust we shall return, suffering ushers us closer to the center of reality, if only we have eyes to see.
“Suffering is imperative for the preservation of life created from nothing.”
In his exposition on monastic prayer, the Russian monk Archimandrite Sophrony explains, “Suffering is imperative for the preservation of life created from nothing.”
Our very nature requires that we suffer, and thus he who suffers should be thankful (while still working for health), for, as Archimandrite Sophrony says:
Suffering discloses to his contemplative mind both his imperfection and that of the world around him. This forces him to recognize the necessity for a new form of creative effort to perfect life in all its manifestations. Later, he will arrive at a certain perception of Supreme Being which will inspire his soul to seek for better knowledge of Him.
Our Suffering Leaves Us Clueless
But contrast this with the ethos of our age: Has there ever been a time when suffering and awareness of death’s inevitability have been so far removed from our thoughts?
Or a time when suffering was so misunderstood, as something to be immediately eradicated, as something which keeps us from full participation in the materiality of our culture, not as an occasion for contemplation of our true nature?
Has humanity ever been so comfortable, so entertained, so well-fed?
Have we ever been so far removed from reality, forgetting the most fundamental and necessary truth for a rightly ordered life: We are created beings, having been pulled from non-being into existence by Love Itself, and this Love has revealed Himself to all mankind, calling us all to Himself?
Has humanity ever been so comfortable, so entertained, so well-fed?
So far removed from reality, we live in the world of Nietzsche’s madman: We have killed God and strive to be worthy of the deed, summoning angels of our own invention to satisfy our every craving and whim, building isolated kingdoms of self-love, attempting to order nature according to our own pleasure principle.
What Do We Do Now?
If Coronavirus is to be to our spiritual benefit, we must do more than pass legislation about supply chains, do more than rethink globalist presuppositions, do more than rally behind sloganeering of America’s Greatness.
We must also pray.
We must repent from the demons of individualism. Only in prayer will we know who we really are and Who our Maker truly is.
Sophrony describes what awaits us if we do: “Emerging from the prison cell of selfish individualism into the wide expanse of life in the image of Christ, we perceive the nature of the personalism of the Gospel.” He contrasts “individualism” — the life of one who “refuses Christ’s call to open our hearts to total, universal love” — with “persona” — the life lived in God’s universal love, understood through “prolonged and far from easy ascetic effort,” where we inhabit the fullness of our humanity.
Perhaps it is no coincidence that this virus and its fears consume our world during the Lenten season, where millions of Christians are fasting in eager anticipation of the Easter celebration, the world’s only hope. In fasting and prayer we strive to see what it is that Christ has overcome: humanity’s sin, weakness, and inevitable death.
The “return to normal” will be a curse.
“To behold one’s pitiful reality is a heavenly gift,” writes Sophrony. But how often we deny this gift, refusing to see ourselves as we are and thus refusing to see the Love of our Creator.
How tempting it will be to see our future victory over this pandemic as further evidence that we are masters of our own fate. The “return to normal” will be a curse.
Sophrony explains that “when the human persona stands before Him Who named Himself ‘I AM THAT I AM’ (Exos. 3.14), his spirit, his whole being not only glories but agonises over his own littleness, his ignorance, his wrong-doing. Suffering is his lot from the moment of his spiritual birth. Conscious that the process of transforming our whole earthly being is still far from complete, the spirit wearies.”
Let us hope that in the wake of the great virus, a great re-ordering occurs, not just economic, political, or cultural. After all, their forms depend on the souls of those who build them. Let our fear and mortality drive us deeper into prayer and repentance, and may we then pick up the shards of America in full awareness of our own fragile and weary spirit encountered in that glorious abyss.
