Kindlichkeit: An Explanation and Antidote for Suffering
Many Christian-based explanations for suffering come to the conclusion that it is not a punishment from God (as thought by the friends of Job), but an opportunity for Him to demonstrate His healing and grace (as seen in the miracles of the Gospels) or a chance for us to grow in virtue and to overcome harmful habits that we have formed and to offer it up as a sacrifice for the evils of the world (as witnessed by the lives of the saints). Additionally, these times of trouble are deemed to be an experience of depravity that can give us a deeper hunger for and appreciation of true fulfillment when it finally does arrive. These reasonings may provide relief for the sense of guilt, shame, or despair that arises when we experience unexplained tribulation. Clearly, it makes more sense when our burdens come later in life — when we have already been through years of life to form practices of vices that need to be redeemed with a renewed perspective. Additionally, as we age, we are drawn further into the complex network of the consequences of other people’s actions that can either directly or indirectly cause us to struggle.
Suffering can be defined as experienced evil. Whether it be physical, psychological, social, emotional, or spiritual, living through a trial is witnessing the depravity of some good. A physical cross is the result of some physical dysfunction. Psychological distress is due to psychological disorder. Social, emotion, and spiritual pains are related to some sinful stimuli, whether it be interior or exterior. There can be clear causes for suffering — bad lifestyles, old age, genetic mutations, natural disasters, pride, greed, selfishness, etc. Sometimes, whether or not intentionally, human suffering can be self-inflicted too. The devil can work through these harmful realities to bring about further evil effects.
Yet, one of the greatest stumbling blocks to the problem of pain for me has always been pediatric suffering — when a child dies, gets cancer, loses their parents, or is abused. What purpose is there in this suffering? What sinful habits are there in a young one that need to be corrected? I would dare to say that suffering early on in life may actually cause more negative effects down the road than it does anything to help the child who will have to bear the weight of their lifelong traumas (as I note in “It’s Something I Deal With”). The knots made by the relentless difficulties may take years, or even an entire lifetime, to undo. Even more, what about innocent children who die? What if they pass away in the womb or before they are even able to realize what is going on? What do they do to deserve that fate?
Some might say, “If not to help the child overcome some weakness, well then, maybe for someone else in their life — say, a family member or another in the community — to be inspired and to make a change in their life” (e.g. for one couple to be able to share with another in their mutual experience of a miscarriage or for an adult to be inspired by a pediatric cancer survivor to become more generous or to live a healthier life). Again, that may be encouraging and all to an outsider, but what about to the child who is subjected to this suffering, when they do not even have the option to accept or deny the offer and when they do not obviously cause or deserve it?
Under this explanation, it may seem as if the child is used as a means to an end. They are subjected to suffering for the good of someone else. I know, one may argue, “Well, that is what Jesus did, did He not?” Yes, but He was also the God-Man, the Son of God. And, although He always accepted his Cross, He had a choice, He had plenty of opportunities to say no — during the temptation of the devil, before Holy Thursday, in the Garden of Gethsemane, and at Pilot’s judgment. However, those who have been dealt an unjust cross early on in life rarely have a chance to choose otherwise. Often, it is life or death. Or, the suffering is the result of adults’ decisions or the harms of the world, which are completely out of the control of the vulnerable child. And, at that age, it is very hard to go against the instinctual desire to survive.
The question that I have frequently asked myself is: “If suffering is meant to give us a chance to perfect some imperfection, why could not God have just made us without those tendencies toward imperfection in the first place?” I know there is the Fall, original sin, concupiscence, and all, but why could He not just have made us without flaws from the get go? Why does how we were made necessitate suffering? Cannot God simultaneously respect our free will and stop unjust evils, such as illness, natural disasters, and poverty? Those perils that are detached from human action, what point do they have but to cause more needless pain and difficulty? For example, if God allowed me to pass through my own physical and psychological suffering, so that I would be able to provide care to families going through similar situations, would it not have been much easier for everyone if God just eradicated pediatric cancer and all unjust childhood ailments from the beginning?
At times, it seems as if God passively imposes these things upon us. Especially as children, we do not have a choice otherwise. We are never given the opportunity to respond, to make our voice heard, to speak our objection. Even if God is calling us to something greater through our suffering, it seems that He does not give us a chance otherwise. We are told that if we want to be happy, we have to “deny ourselves, take up our crosses, and follow Him” (Matthew 16:24). So much for respecting our freedom. We are only given one way to be happy. I know, I know. True freedom is not license to do whatever we want or having the ability to live a comfortable life (as we conceptualize it in modern society); rather, it is having the right to do as we ought, to act in accord with our nature, or to choose the good. In doing so, we will actually be given more freedom than unlimited license ever could provide.
But again, what freedom is there in a child dying, being diagnosed with cancer, losing a parent, or being abused? There is no choice in that. Okay, okay. Pull out your Viktor Frankl: there is a choice in how we respond to our suffering. But, why? Why have suffering in the first place? More and more, I have found the simple explanation of it being a consequence of the Fall less and less satisfactory to explain away all of this. Maybe I am becoming more of a cynic, sometimes believing that all life is suffering and that there is no meaning in it at all.
For me, the thought process goes like this: Needless suffering is not due to some wrongdoing of one’s own. So, is it simply because we live in a fallen world? However, that reality is difficult to accept for non-religious interlocutors. So, is it just a sorry part of the human condition? If so, what is left to do? As I have experienced myself, we can fall into desperation or determinedly push through. However, there comes a point when we cannot push through anymore (on our own or even with others’ help). So, the explanation that suffering is just a part of the human condition can also be unsatisfactory and disparaging. Sometimes, it seems as if our own suffering and that of the whole world is all too much.
I have come to believe that it is not that: suffering children are little angels sent to remind everyone how to live a good life and that we should be good people, suffering children are making up for the evil in the world, or that God sends suffering children into the world to bring about good. It is not that they are there to be an inspiration for others; for, that would be an unkind and unjust subjugation (it is easy from the outside to see success stories of pediatric suffering this way; but, as one subjected to the suffering, it can be seen as a detached, privileged perspective). In the end, it may seem that either God is too weak to stop all of this needless suffering or that He is evil, and so he permits it.
“It takes a leap of faith,” some say. But, I have tried that before, and either I get talked down by those around me or I land aright on the other side only for a brief moment, before I am quickly pulled into another dark valley. I have struggled to find one comprehensive reason for suffering in my life. Yet, I have always ended up coming short. The reality is that there is no blanket reason for why anyone suffers.
Nonetheless, recently I was able to understand the reality of suffering in a more logical light. Ultimately, it comes down to the fact that love and freedom cannot exist without the ability to choose. Otherwise, it would be indentured servitude. If we all lived destined to do the good all the time, it would be just that — predestination. The reality of free will necessitates the ability to reject love and to choose evil. Yes, it allows for great evils, but it also allows for even greater goods (as I describe in “In Atonmentfor Our Sins and Those of the Whole World: Offering Suffering as Reparation for the Misuse of Free Will”). It gets to the heart of the question of why God allowed Satan to revolt and why He allowed the Fall of humankind. Evil, or the depravity of goodness, exists because of free will. We also see this disorder in the biological reality of predator and prey or pathogen and host. All created beings can either work for the good or for evil.
C.S. Lewis does a great job of describing this dilemma in The Problem of Pain. In one excerpt, he describes how suffering does not prove that God is either weak or evil. Contrarily,
“His Omnipotence means power to do all that is intrinsically possible, not to do the intrinsically impossible. You may attribute miracles to Him, but not nonsense. This is no limit to His power. If you choose to say ‘God can give a creature free will and at the same time withhold free will from it’, you have not succeeded in saying anything about God: meaningless combinations of words do not suddenly acquire meaning simply because we prefix to them the two other words ‘God can’. It remains true that all things are possible with God: the intrinsic impossibilities are not things but nonentities. It is no more possible for God than for the weakest of His creatures to carry out both of two mutually exclusive alternatives; not because His power meets an obstacle, but because nonsense remains nonsense even when we talk it about God.”
There is no other way about it. The reality of love and free will do not permit it. It is not that God is weak or evil, but that it is logically impossible to not have suffering in a universe with love and free will.
As a type of being that is subject to love, we also have to deal with the consequences of not choosing love. Living in a cosmos that has been in this situation for eons, we are affected by the complex succession of actions that has led our universe, world, and societies to be where we are at this moment. We are not our own makers and we ought not believe our act like we are. We can decry the fact that we do not know why we or others are suffering. We can become angry at life, the universe, or God for making us bear certain crosses. Yet, as I write in “Omnia Cooperantur in Bonum: On Faith, Hope, and Trust,” it all comes back to the fact that we are weak and fallible (faith), that we must believe in God’s providential plan for us (hope), and that we are dependent on God and one another (trust).
As such, we must accept the fact that we will never fully be able to know why a certain cross comes to an individual at a certain time in life. By stopping to worry about or to try to figure out why we are suffering and just trusting that God is good and that He can bring good out of even the worst situations (e.g. His Passion, Death, and Resurrection), the less anxiety and depression from which we will suffer. It is not giving up on finding the reason, but rather, it allows us to more easily give meaning to our suffering (as detailed in “Taking Control of Your Suffering: Finding Meaning in Versus Giving Meaning to Your Crosses”). Instead of endlessly asking what is the reason for our suffering, we can autonomously decide for what purpose we will suffer.
Additionally, when we invite others into our pain, we can find aid in their company. As I heard someone once say: when we open ourselves up to others — be it God, a family member, a friend, or a stranger, then our “why” can become a “who.” Though we may not receive a direct reasoning for our questions of “why?”, we can allow others’ presence to be an answer. When we invite them into our confusion, we can come to understand that the resolution to our doubts is more of a solution than an explanation. There may not be a clear causal connection in our journeys of suffering; however, accompaniment can be the key to unlocking the meaning within our crosses.
The truth is that on its own suffering is pointless and meaningless. However, we can instead come to see it all as a gift from God to be able to participate in the greatest good of all — sacrificial love. We can see it as such because we get to decide how to respond to this gift. In this way, by “offer[ing] our bodies [and lives] as a living sacrifice” we can heed St. Paul’s words: “do not conform yourselves to this age but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and pleasing and perfect” (Romans 12:1–21). Instead of despondently perseverating on the reason for our difficulties, we can choose how we will give it a positive purpose. We get to decide how we live in accord with the gift of love and free will.
In the end, I believe that pediatric suffering can actually remind us all of the key solution to accepting suffering: childlikeness. The title of this article uses the German word for childlikeness — kindlichkeit — because in the words of a fellow polyglot, the German combinations of words are “just so precise and perfect.” I was reflecting on this compound word recently while reading Henri Nouwen’s Our Greatest Gift: A Meditation on Dying and Caring. In it, he focuses on finding meaning in death and being compassionate toward the suffering and dying. One of his main themes is that by claiming our identity as children of God, we are able to accept and deal with the suffering that we encounter. He writes that: “When we know that God holds us safely — whatever happens — we don’t have to fear anything or anyone but can walk through life with great confidence. . . . It is the freedom rooted in being a child of God.” Like children, we can accept whatever happens to us knowing that we are dependent on our benevolent Creator. We can also trust that our sufferings, like early childhood life lessons, are meant to prepare us for something greater. Lastly, childlikeness helps us to remove the calloused cataracts of hatred, anger, self-pity, and fear from our personal schemas and allows us to see how in reality we are part of a greater community of humanity, in whom suffering is a universal and redemptive reality.
Nouwen reveals how life is a journey ultimately book-ended by dependence. He calls senescence a “second childhood” and a “new dependence.” He tells us that Jesus reveals that, “life is lived from dependence to dependence” through his own “journey from the manger to the cross.” He describes that: “Born in complete dependence on those who surrounded him, Jesus died as the passive victim of other people’s actions and decisions. . . . He came as a child and died as a child, and he lived his life so that we may claim and reclaim our own childhood and thus make our death — as he did his — into a new birth.” Nonetheless, we can be reassured that from the cross, Jesus too felt abandoned and hopeless, crying “eloi eloi lama sabachthani.” Yet, we must also remember that Jesus was echoing the words of Psalm 22, which begin with this same lamentation, but which shifts toward saying, “But you, Lord, do not stay far off; my strength, come quickly to help me . . .” Similarly, we can know that it is okay to experience despair yet that we still ought to have the hope of the Psalms and Jesus.
Through the incarnation of Jesus, God shows us how to live as a dependent child, not only in our own early and late years of life, but also in any situation over which we do not have control. Nouwen goes on that, “We too must move from action to ‘passion,’ from being in control to being dependent, from taking initiatives to having to wait, from living to dying.” Dependence ultimately reveals that everything “hangs from,” or relies upon, God (as I detail in “From Darkness to Light: The Allegory of the Cave and Getting Out of Your Head”). Additionally, I heard a priest preach a story about a father who had a newborn that had to go through heart surgery. The father confessed, “I am afraid because I know that this will hurt him; but, I cannot explain to him now how it is necessary for him.” I do not know why, but often God does not explain the reasoning for our sufferings to us in the moment. Nonetheless, only when we give up our independence and return to a childlike dependence (not yet clouded by the frustrations, fatigue, and resentment of adult life) can we come to accept that even our suffering are a necessary part of us becoming who we are meant to be.
Another aspect of childlikeness is patiently undergoing or bearing struggles. Certainly, there are examples to the contrary of toddler temper tantrums and endless questions of “why is the sky blue?” and “why do I have to be good?” Yet, there are also so many more examples of children determinedly setting their minds on a goal, without the jaded capitulation of adulthood. They endure many hardships because they physically do not have the freedom to do otherwise or they do not know that they have the ability to do so.
Additionally, at times, as adults, we too have nothing else to do but bear our crosses. In these moments, it can be easy to become hopeless. Yet, in working with people suffering from AIDS, Nouwen describes that we can still “[bear] fruit when there is nothing left to do.” Here, using the double meaning of “bear,” he shows that by undergoing one’s difficulties well, they are able to cooperate with goodness. Later, Nouwmen writes that: “Just as the ground can only bear fruit if broken by the plow, our own lives can only be fruitful if opened through passion. Suffering is precisely ‘undergoing’ actions by others, over which we have no control.” Here he highlights the etymology of suffering: sub- (“under”) and ferre (“to carry, bear”). It is through enduring with a childlike patience and perseverance that we can allow God to make good of our suffering. Of course, this is a continual process that takes renewed commitment whenever we, just as Jesus did, fall under the weight of our crosses.
Lastly, suffering ought not ostracize us in self-centered woe; rather, it is an opportunity for us to join in the larger community of human suffering. As described earlier, suffering is a fact of living in a reality with love and free will. As such, at some point in our lives, we all will experience it. Many people will witness it multiple times and to varying degrees throughout their years. In his own ministries with various marginalized groups of people, including those dealing with mental illnesses and AIDS, Nouwen tells how suffering “not only asks for community, but it creates” and how it “brings new awareness of the bonds that create a community of love.” If we are open to looking around us, in a childlike way, and seeing all those who are suffering, we can very quickly see that we are not alone in our pain. In doing so, we can start to “grow in [our] awareness that [our] individual, painful condition is embedded in the basic condition of human mortality, and, as such, can be lived in communion with others.” Therein, we can come to understand how we can both receive from and give to others who are similarly suffering in this world (as discussed in “On Man’s Lack is Another Man’s Pleasure; A Declaration of Dependence”). Instead of turning suffering into a self-centered sin, we can turn ourselves outward in service of and compassion toward others.
Additionally, God shares with us in this common struggle through Jesus’ passion, which is “the most radical expression of God’s desire to be God-with-us.” God entered into, endured, and redeemed human suffering through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. Nonetheless, Jesus’ resurrection does not take away all of our suffering. However, His returning in His glorified body, with nail holes and pierced side, shows us that all of our sufferings “will not simply fall away from us as a useless cloak but will mark our unique way of being with God and each other as we make the passage of death.” It is this realization that our suffering can help us become who we are meant to be that is the childlike realization at which we ought to arrive.
Maybe this explanation of suffering is not satisfactory for you. I certainly still struggle with it myself at times. However, with continually returning to great thinkers and writers, I have been repeatedly reminded of these truths. Having a childlike mindset toward suffering can allow us to refocus ourselves on our dependence on God and others, what it means to undergo and to bear our crosses, and that we are all a part of a greater community of human sufferers.
In conclusion of his book, Nouwen writes:
“The resurrection does not solve our problems about dying and death. No, the resurrection is the expression of God’s faithfulness to Jesus and to all God’s children . . . The resurrection is God’s way of revealing to us that nothing that belongs to God will ever go to waste . . . The resurrection doesn’t answer any of our curious questions about life after death . . . But it does reveal to us that, indeed, love is stronger than death. After that reevaluation, we must remain silent, leave the whys, wheres, hows, and whens behind, and simply trust.”
In this way, childlikeness provides both an explanation and antidote for suffering by showing us that, as children of God, suffering and death never win.
I would like to end by paraphrasing a fictional story that Nouwen tells in the first chapter of his book. It is about two twins talking with each other in the womb. One believes that there is nothing more than life inside the womb. He believes that it is dark and warm inside and that there is no reason to leave it or hope that there is anything beyond the womb. Contrarily, the other twin replies that there must be a world in which there is light and freedom to move about and the ability to meet their mother. The first twin retorts that these ideas are absurd and that it is useless to think such things. Then, the second calmly replies, “Don’t you feel these squeezes every once in a while? They’re quite unpleasant and sometimes even painful . . . I think that these squeezes are there to get us ready for another place, much more beautiful than this, where we will see our mother face-to-face.” Likewise, we can fall into believing that there is nothing beyond this life and that our current struggles are meaningless. However, in a grander perspective, these “contractions” of suffering are preparing us for something much greater. Though we may often fall into thinking like the first twin, let us strive to take on the perspective of this second, wiser twin.
