The Light Shines On in the Darkness: Transforming Suffering through Faith

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I am most grateful to Joan Jacoby—whose invaluable work transformed my thoughts once again into a full manuscript—for typing multiple copies of each chapter, making helpful editing suggestions, and helping with research. I am particularly grateful for her appreciation of the subject, and her undying patience.

I am also grateful to Karlo Broussard and Juliana Gerace for their important input and assistance on preparing the manuscript, and to Joseph Miller for his editorial suggestions and encouragement.

I would also like to express my appreciation to the Board and friends of the Magis Institute who gave me the time and resources to complete this Quartet.

INTRODUCTION

We have taken a rather lengthy path through three volumes to get to this challenging issue within our consideration of transcendent happiness. In the first volume of the Quartet we queried into what the most meaningful kind of happiness and fulfillment might be, and resolved that three inner powers or capacities point the way to true, perfect, and lasting dignity and destiny—empathy, conscience, and transcendent awareness. With respect to the third capacity, we discovered five distinct manifestations of transcendent awareness—perfect truth, perfect love, perfect justice / goodness, perfect beauty, and perfect home. When we viewed the implications of these powers in their relationship to one another, we concluded that the only way we could find eternal happiness is through a supreme interpersonal Being—who is present in our five transcendental desires, and in the depths of our conscious and unconscious psyche. This led us to Saint Augustine’s declaration: For Thou hast made us for Thyself—and our hearts are restless until they rest in Thee!¹

We arrived at this conclusion by exploring four levels of happiness, proceeding from material-external happiness (Level One) to ego-comparative happiness (Level Two). We paused at Level Two because so many within our culture believe it to be true happiness, only to find themselves experiencing profound emptiness, jealousy, fear of loss of esteem, inferiority, superiority, ego-sensitivity, self-pity, resentment, and loneliness. We showed that the way out of these negative feelings of the comparison game is to move toward Levels Three and Four, which lead to a more pervasive, enduring, and deep purpose in life—contribution, love, noble endeavor, transcendence, and communion with the Divine.

This led to another discovery: that Level Three happiness alone is not able to satisfy and fulfill us at the highest levels of our being. Though Level Three purpose in life can bring relief to the negative emotions of the comparison game, it cannot overcome other negative emotions connected with our desire for communion with a personal transcendent Being. We discovered that worldly purpose, love, and home could not overcome four negative states on the cosmic or transcendent level: cosmic emptiness, loneliness, alienation, and guilt. The meaning and love of this world—no matter how powerful and full—cannot satisfy our yearning for and calling to transcendent purpose and home. This was confirmed by a study of the American Psychiatric Association indicating that nonreligiously affiliated individuals have significantly greater anxiety, meaninglessness, familial tensions, past substance abuse, and suicide attempts than the religiously affiliated. ²

We then asked how cosmic emptiness, loneliness, alienation, and guilt can be alleviated. This led to a fivefold path taken by religiously affiliated people throughout the world, through association with a church, participation in sacred rites, the pursuit of transcendent wisdom, and engagement with the personal transcendent Being through prayer. This led to an examination of contemplative prayer and prayers of interior transformation along with special consideration of how to recognize and follow the inspiration and guidance of divine providence in our lives. We concluded that if the personal transcendent Being were unconditionally loving, we could be perfectly and eternally happy, which led to three questions:

   1. Can we be sure that there is really a personal transcendent Being?

   2. If so, is the personal transcendent Being unconditionally loving?

   3. If so, then why does He allow suffering and evil within the world?

This led us to three additional explorations in three subsequent volumes.

In response to the first question, we examined several kinds of evidence for our transcendent nature and the existence of a personal transcendent Being in The Soul’s Upward Yearning: Clues to Our Transcendent Nature from Experience and Reason (Volume II). We began with our universal, fundamental, irreducible experience of the numen (a mysterious, fascinating, overwhelming, inviting wholly Other) manifest to both our conscious and unconscious psyche. We used Rudolf Otto’s seminal study of this phenomenon, The Idea of the Holy,³ to study the interior manifestation of the Divine, and complemented this with the extensive studies of Mircea Eliade on the intuition of the sacred and its centrality to religion throughout the world.⁴ We deepened this study by exploring John Henry Newman’s phenomenal investigation of conscience,⁵ as well as Jung’s and Tolkien’s examination of unconscious archetypal myth and symbolism.⁶

Yet the question still lingered: How do we know that these fundamental experiences originate in a real personal transcendent Being? This led us to an exploration of three kinds of external evidence: Bernard Lonergan’s proof of God,⁷ an examination of the veridical evidence for survival of human consciousness after bodily death (from major medical studies of near-death experiences),⁸ and contemporary scientific evidence for a transcendent creation⁹ from the Borde-Vilenkin-Guth proof,¹⁰ the second law of thermodynamics (entropy),¹¹ and anthropic coincidences at the Big Bang.¹² We found each kind of evidence to be probative in its own right, and in combination, to be mutually corroborative and complementary, validating the existence of God and a transcendent soul as reasonable and responsible.

We investigated other evidence for a transcendent soul from Gödel’s proof of human nonalgorithmic mathematical awareness,¹³ David Chalmers’ Hard Problem of Consciousness,¹⁴ and contemporary studies of the five transcendental desires for perfect truth, love, goodness, beauty, and home.¹⁵ We concluded from the combined evidence the high likelihood that human beings have a transphysical consciousness (soul) capable of self-awareness, genuine creativity, transcendental reflection, and survival after bodily death. We showed how such a transphysical soul could interact with the physical brain through a model proposed by Sir Karl Popper and Sir John Eccles, as well as Michael Polanyi and Bernard Lonergan.¹⁶ We also concluded to the high likelihood of a unique, unrestricted act of thinking that is the Creator of everything else (God)—who is present to our consciousness and invites us to Himself and eternal life, love, and goodness.

The above evidence justified an affirmative answer to our first question: Can we be sure that there is a personal transcendent Being? This led naturally to the second question: Is this personal transcendent Being unconditionally loving? We explored this question in the third volume of the Quartet—God So Loved the World: Clues to Our Transcendent Destiny from the Revelation of Jesus. This investigation took us first to the nature of love—agapē¹⁷ (Chapter 1), and then to Jesus’ revelation of His Father’s unconditional love (Chapter 2), and Jesus’ own unconditional love (Chapter 3). We reflected on how Jesus’ revelation of God’s unconditional love correlated with our transcendental desire for perfect love, and noted how this was verified by the overwhelming love of the bright white light reported by many patients who had near-death experiences. Yet, this correlation begged for independent corroboration of Jesus’ divine authority. We found this corroboration in His Resurrection and glory,¹⁸ gift of the Holy Spirit,¹⁹ and miracles by His own authority.²⁰ We concluded from this that it is reasonable and responsible to believe in Jesus’ divine authority to reveal God’s unconditional love as well as His intention to bestow eternal resurrection upon those who are open to His message and call to love (agapē ).

We now confront the third question: If God is unconditional love, then why does He allow suffering and evil in the world? At first glance, suffering seems to contradict God’s unconditional love and the possibility of transcendent happiness, undermining the evidence and analysis given in the previous three volumes of the Quartet. As we shall see, this prima facie judgment does not correspond either to the nature of love or the conditions for personal freedom. Suffering is not opposed to love—it leads to it, to its authenticity and purification; to empathy, humility, forgiveness, compassion, good for the world, and good for the Kingdom. Suffering is not opposed to transcendent happiness; it is an indispensable pathway to it.

This may seem paradoxical, but in light of Jesus’ promise of an unconditionally loving resurrection and our need to embrace empathetic, forgiving, and compassionate love freely, the paradox loosens its grip, allowing divine light to emerge from sufferings’ seeming darkness. Is this merely Christian imagination—or is it the really real? Is it a fiction invented to make God more appealing, and suffering more tolerable, or is it the necessary outcome of the interface of love, freedom, personal identity, and eternal love? Readers will have to decide for themselves, but Jesus’ answer is clear: suffering is the essential path to the optimization of freedom, the purification of love, and an eternal life of love and joy with the Trinity and the Blessed. Hopefully, this volume will shed light on this difficult, yet life-giving divine mystery—light that will help readers to transform their suffering into freedom, love, and eternal salvation.

I. A Personal Lesson from the

Book of Life’s Challenges

Suffering can be a remarkably positive inspiration and power—when we view it within the context of love and eternal life. I did not appreciate this in my earlier years, but have come to realize that it is the high point of wisdom, if we have faith in a loving God. I have struggled with my eyesight since I was thirty years old and can now understand the incredible value and opportunity of that struggle in my journey to come closer to God in love. For many years, when my eyes took another turn for the worse, I would go through yet another bout of frustration and anxiety—frustration, because I made the fatal error of comparing my diminished abilities with what I was once able to do, and anxiety, because I was not certain whether the new level of disability would end my productivity or people’s respect for my capacity to deliver. Looking back on it, I can honestly say that those frustrations were nothing more than an exercise in futility and that the anxieties—in every case—were completely unwarranted.

Let me say for the moment that this initial negative reaction to suffering was really about perspective—how I viewed suffering and challenge, not so much the suffering or the challenge itself. I was not able to help myself. When the next level of disability came, I looked at it from a self-centric point of view. It seemed that the shocking development of one more dreaded decrease in eyesight caused me, despite my faith, to turn into myself. I suppose that this was just human nature, but I have learned one thing—the sooner I get over it, by putting myself into the hands of God and looking for the opportunity that will come through His guidance, the better off I am.

If I did not have faith in a loving God, and hope in eternal life with Him, I don’t think I would have a positive outlook on suffering, and I certainly would not be able to view it as an opportunity. I am not a stoic, so I wouldn’t have been able to see suffering as a way of cultivating strength, courage, self-discipline, self-sufficiency, invulnerability, and autonomy. Some of these stoic benefits of suffering, such as self-sufficiency, invulnerability, and autonomy, run contrary to empathy, compassion, and humility, and so I do not view them as real benefits, but rather as negatives. The other characteristics—strength, self-discipline, and courage—can be positive, but they are not ends in themselves; they are only means to greater ends, such as contribution to others and the common good, to the objectives of love.

So, if stoic benefits of suffering are either elusory or partial, what are its real enduring benefits? I have come to believe that these can only be seen through the lens of love that may be initially defined as a recognition of the unique goodness of individuals that induces a sense of empathy and unity with them, making it just as easy, if not easier, to do the good for them as to do the good for myself. Inasmuch as suffering can lead to greater humility, empathy for the needy, and compassion, it can free us to contribute to others and the common good without counting the cost, which advances the cause of love. I believe this to be a much higher purpose in life than the stoic characteristics mentioned above.

In my life, love alone is not sufficient to make complete sense out of suffering. If suffering is to make complete sense, it would have to lead not only to transitory love, but to enduring and even eternal love; it would have to lead not only to a contribution to others and the common good, but also to the Kingdom of God. If suffering could lead to a permanent freedom from egocentricity, domination, self-absorption, and self-idolatry, and through this, to a permanent appreciation and communion with other people and a supreme Being, then suffering would be far more intelligible, but still not completely intelligible.

In order for suffering to make perfect sense, it would have to be combined with grace to help us use the suffering to achieve the objective of perfect love. Suffering provides a remarkably powerful inducement to move toward greater empathy, humility, compassion, and purpose in life, but I have always found that I need even more help—more inspiration and guidance to peel back the layers of inauthenticity, egocentricity, and autonomy that impede my freedom to move toward authentic love. This is what I mean by grace. Thus, if suffering is to make perfect sense, it would have to be situated within the context of perfect love, eternal life, and a perfectly loving supreme Being to provide the grace and mercy to help us use suffering to ultimately achieve perfect freedom to love.

When I looked upon these three conditions for perfectly intelligible suffering as a young man, I came face-to-face with the revelation of Jesus Christ. I realized that this is precisely what Jesus promised—it was the core of His message for all of us:

   1. God (His Abba) is unconditional love—the Father of the Prodigal Son.

   2. The Father’s and Jesus’ objective is to bring all of us to eternal life in an unconditionally loving communion with them.

   3. Jesus’ revelation and gift of the Holy Spirit is intended to provide the grace, inspiration, and guidance to attain greater freedom to love.

If Jesus’ revelation is true, then suffering can be (and is) perfectly intelligible.

This implication of Jesus’ teaching led me on a search to confirm the existence of God, the soul, and the historical Jesus. I was able to discover enough evidence of these things when I was younger to incite my desire for transcendent happiness and to make recourse to Jesus’ revelation and the inspiration of the Spirit to find the opportunities in suffering. The rest, as they say, is history.

The reader may have noticed that there is a strong correlation between the three components of my search and the previous two volumes of this Quartet. As noted above, I wrote these two volumes to set out the contemporary evidence for the truth of these three transcendent realities, so that the leap of faith would not have to be across the Grand Canyon. If readers are in anyway skeptical about the unconditionally loving God, His intention to bring us to His Resurrection, and the efficacy of the Spirit in guiding us to it, I would ask them to read these two volumes and also the sources referenced in them. The more we know the reality of God, Jesus, and our transcendence, the better will be our pursuit of transcendent happiness and our conversion of suffering into eternal love.

It should not be thought that evidence alone can lead to faith. There is an indispensable component of intention, decision, and choice involving the heart that must accompany whatever evidence we might use. God gives us room to decide freely to come to Him. In the words of Dostoyevsky, He will not enslave us to a miracle.²¹ Thus, we can never be completely compelled by the evidence, even overwhelming probative evidence, to believe in, seek, and attach ourselves to God. There will always be room to decide—to choose God as the objective of our heart’s desire. If we are to attach ourselves to God, we will have to want this; indeed, we will have to want Him, and the life of unconditional love He promises. This means we will have to detach ourselves from attitudes and ways of life contrary to love—egocentricity, domination, pride, envy, greed, and other vices. Detaching ourselves from these vices does not mean perfect detachment—that would be virtually impossible—but rather intending to detach ourselves from them with the help of God over the course of time. In sum, if the desire to be with God is present, then the above evidence will likely be sufficient to allow reasonable and responsible assent to faith; however, if the desire to be with God is not present, then even the most perfectly probative evidence will not be sufficient to support our faith—we will always find a way to avoid its conclusion.

Let us return to the contention with which we started—if I did not have faith in a loving God, and hope in eternal life with Him, I would not have a positive outlook on suffering, and I certainly would not be able to view it as integral to ultimate meaning, dignity, and destiny. Christian faith can make the difference between an essentially embittered and negative life or a positive life—a life in decline or a life toward transcendence, a nihilistic outlook or an absolutely positive outlook. In light of this overwhelmingly positive transformative power of Christian faith, I will use it as the overarching lens to interpret suffering in this book.

Even if we bring a deep and strong Christian faith to our lives, suffering can still surprise us and, in its initial phases, hit us hard. So we must be patient with our human nature even as we are focusing on bringing our faith to bear on our suffering. It is difficult to fight our human nature. Sometimes, when suffering comes out of the blue, I experience many of the same reactions as someone who just received news about having a terminal illness—undergoing most of the five stages of death and dying (denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance).²² I think all of us have natural negative and defensive reactions to suffering that depend in part on our personalities and the kind of suffering we are undergoing. If you have a personality like mine, you probably would not go through a stage of denial, but move immediately to a stage of frustration (anger and resentment) and anxiety about the future.

You would then experience a bargaining stage—where you make promises to God to be a much better person if He would simply minimize your suffering. You might even get creative and promise major increases in productivity in God’s service, if He would give you a little miracle. And when that doesn’t work, you might feel a temporary impasse. If God does not redress the suffering, you will probably reach a decision point where you will face two options: either give into depression, frustration, apathy, and despair, or turn in faith to God and pray not so much for an alleviation of your suffering, but that this new challenge bring humility, empathy, compassion, faith, and new opportunities to serve others and to serve the Kingdom.

Other personalities will have different natural reactions to suffering. A melancholic personality may be more inclined to phases of depression; a choleric personality might have an extended phase of anger; and a phlegmatic personality might have an earlier sense of resignation. Whatever the case, if we have dealt with suffering on several occasions, we will notice certain natural proclivities that characterize our initial reaction before we turn to the Lord in faith.

The intensity with which we go through our natural negative reaction to suffering also depends on the kind of suffering we are enduring. Grief over the passing of a loved one—parent, child, or close friend—generally produces the most intense reaction. Since we are not able to bring our relative or friend back to life, we might skip the bargaining process—and find ourselves in a state of intense loneliness and emptiness. Though these feelings are almost inevitable at first, we cannot afford to prolong them, because they can set us on a self-destructive path. At this juncture we will want to use some of the spontaneous prayers discussed in Chapter 4 to connect us with the loving God and the Holy Spirit. This will help us gain perspective through faith, prayer, and the Lord’s grace.

There are two things to be learned from the above initial reactions to suffering. First, reacting to suffering in a negative (and even self-centered) way is psychologically and physiologically human. It is not a lack or crisis of faith, but only a natural reaction. The Lord understands this reaction, because He created us and knows us through and through. Even when we feel bitter resentment He is not turned off to us, but rather tries to break through to us, help us, and guide us to the eternal opportunities in our suffering.

Secondly, the more quickly we turn to the Lord for help—putting on the perspective of faith to see the divine opportunity within suffering—the better off we will be. When we turn to the Lord in our suffering—through prayer, openness to the Holy Spirit, seeking the Lord’s perspective on the opportunities within our suffering—we will likely feel a sense of deep peace, beyond our capacity to produce. This peace is frequently the beginning of a new journey or adventure with the Lord, who uses our suffering to guide and lead us to new perspectives on happiness and success, to deeper forms of courage and love, and to new opportunities to serve others and the Kingdom. The initial feeling of supernatural peace introduces consolation and light into our initial desolation and darkness—interrupting the process of dwelling on frustration, anxiety, loneliness, emptiness, and the pain intrinsic to it all. This light not only interrupts the darkness; it illuminates the way out of it. When we feel this peace and sense this light, our job is to put our trust in the Lord, to remember that He is leading us ultimately to our transcendent and eternal destiny with Him, and to follow the light as best we can.²³

Following the light is not as easy as it might seem. Sometimes when we are trying to follow the light, we can be drawn back into the darkness because we dwell too much upon it or the events that led up to it. This has the peculiar effect of taking our focus off the supernatural sense of peace, the light, and the Holy Spirit, who is guiding us. Like Peter leaving the boat to come to Jesus, we take our eyes off of Him because we are concerned about the power of the waves beneath us, and we begin to sink. Yet this too is very typical. When I do it, I react very much like Peter, saying, Lord, save me! and Jesus reaches out, restores my sense of peace, and reintroduces me to His light—until I lapse again.

Unfortunately, my reaction is not as quick as Peter’s. When I falter, I generally go through another bout of frustration or resentment, followed by another bout of anxiety about the future, followed by another bout of darkness. Sometimes I talk myself out of asking the Lord for help by thinking to myself, I must be making all of this up—this peace and light is not God’s light, but only the Spitzerian light of ultimate rationalization. Some cynical strand within me fastens onto this negative thought and gives itself over to Murphy’s Law—Whatever can go wrong, will go wrong; and so if I am sensing God’s light in the darkness, it must be me—and not God—because that is the dictate of Murphy’s Law. I can laugh at this logic when I am not overcome by it, but when I am overcome by it, it really puts a damper on my ability to see and follow God’s light—which is really there.

What I’m trying to say here is that seeing God’s light in the darkness is not a simple, one-off event—Oh, now I see God’s light in the darkness—I’ll just follow it, and I will soon be out of the darkness. Would that it were that simple! Unfortunately the complexity of our psychological mindset, emotions, histories, and capacities forces us to do a retake of finding and following the light several times—at least if you are anything like me. However, there is one important note of consolation in all these retakes—every time we do a retake, we do it a little better, because the Lord is really leading us out of the darkness, and when we refocus on His light, He inspires us to see it more clearly and brightly, making it harder to repeat our fall into Murphy’s Law to the same degree and extent. We don’t fall nearly as hard or as long the second, third, and fourth times along the path. Thus, seeing God’s light in the darkness is a bumpy journey—with some pretty good pitfalls along the way—but it is filled with God’s inspiration, guidance, and providential care, coming through our little acts of trust, courage, resoluteness, and hope, amid all the bumps. Make no mistake about it—the light is always pointing toward our eternal salvation with the Lord as well as to our ability to help others move to that salvation as well. If we follow that light—no matter how many bumps we encounter and times we retake—it will lead us to His Kingdom and help us to lead others to it as well.

II. The Purpose of This Book—

Seeing Light in the Darkness

Suffering is darkness, leading to light—if we let it. The darkness of suffering requires no explanation. We have all felt it in times of grief, pain, deprivation, physical weakness, psychological anxiety, setbacks, loss, and failure. Most nonmasochists do not rejoice in the darkness of suffering. In its initial moments, it hurts, distresses, enervates, isolates, threatens, and discourages—obscuring and even eclipsing the light of love, joy, and peace that calls us to our true home.

There is no need to remain in the darkness, because we have been told by Jesus that there is light—love, joy, peace, and home—in every kind and instance of suffering, light that can transform us into a perfect reflection of God’s unconditionally loving nature. If we want to overcome the darkness—to transform it into even greater light than we experienced before the darkness—we will have to be able to see the light in the darkness, and then follow it. But this can be a challenge, because the darkness of suffering can be quite overwhelming—and when suffering is particularly acute, the darkness can seem all-encompassing.

Fortunately we are not left alone in our suffering—most of us have friends and family to help and support us, and all of us have Jesus as well as His Father and Holy Spirit. As we shall see throughout this volume, Jesus has made multiple promises to us—and every one of them is true, certainly in my life, and in the lives of those with faith. What are some of these promises?

   ■ Blessed are the sorrowing, for they shall be consoled (Mt 5:4; my translation).

   ■ Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest (Mt 11:28).

   ■ Truly, truly, I say to you, he who hears my word and believes him who sent me, has eternal life (Jn 5:24).

   ■ I am the light of the world; he who follows me will not walk in darkness, but will have the light of life (Jn 8:12).

   ■ Truly, truly, I say to you, you will weep and lament, but the world will rejoice; you will be sorrowful, but your sorrow will turn into joy (Jn 16:20).

If we take Jesus’ promises to heart—if we believe that He will fulfill them now and in His Kingdom—then we will begin to see His light in the darkness: His Spirit guiding us to the fullness of our eternal dignity, identity, and destiny.

The objective of this book is to point to the light in the darkness—the light of Jesus, His Father, and the Holy Spirit—so that we might more easily see and follow it. Jesus’ light uses and transforms the darkness into eternal and perfect love, peace, and joy. Ironically, the path from imperfect to perfect light, as well as imperfect to perfect love, joy, and peace, almost inevitably goes through the darkness, but if we have faith in the promises of Jesus, the light will intensify through the darkness, and it will lead to the love and joy of Jesus Himself. As He assured His disciples before His Crucifixion and death: These things I have spoken to you, that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be full. This is my commandment: love one another as I have loved you (Jn 15:11-12). Yet if we are to experience His perfect and eternal love and joy, we must have faith—trusting in Him, and His Father.

It is one thing to trust in God when life is going well, and quite another to do so when we are suffering. The problem is, at the very moment when we need faith the most, it can seem the most elusive. Though faith can reveal Jesus’ light in the darkness, the darkness can also obscure our faith. The ways in which darkness does this are quite well-known, and we will want to be alert to its influence. If we fall prey to the allies of darkness—resentment, frustration, fear, anxiety, callousness, skepticism, and cynicism—our faith will be weakened and even undermined, leaving us powerless within the darkness. Hence, we will want to note the causes of the allies of darkness so that we can avoid and overcome them. This book addresses these causes at some length—false notions of God, false notions of God’s will in times of suffering, inability to pray, unawareness of the opportunities in suffering, false expectations about happiness and life, superficial definitions of love, being ungrateful for life’s gifts, unawareness of how the Holy Spirit inspires and guides us in times of suffering, and false notions about God’s expectations and desires for us. Notice that these causes of darkness arise out of either a false impression of the truth or unawareness of the truth about God, His love, and His desire to bring us to Himself.

If we are alert to the allies of darkness and their causes—and we strive to avoid and overcome them—then suffering will not undermine faith; our efforts will have precisely the opposite effect, allowing faith to overcome and transform suffering. We will have to be strong in our conviction about God, the soul, and Jesus if suffering is to have this enormously positive effect in our lives. Given the importance of this life-transforming and salvific effect, we need to take time to study the evidence for God, the soul, and Jesus so that our conviction will be like that of the saints who underwent such remarkable transformations in spirit and love that they brought the culture, Church, and world to a whole new level of light and love in Christ.²⁴

The more we are convinced about the truth of God, the soul, and Jesus, the more we will trust in the unconditional love of God, the promise of resurrection, and the goodness, beauty, efficacy, and fulfillment of love—and the more we trust in these truths, the more our suffering will be transformed into love. Suffering will become an indispensable instrument of our freedom to love, detaching us from egocentric attitudes contrary to love. It will become an inspiration and a power to serve others and the Kingdom, an impetus for gratitude, prayer, and trust in the Lord—an invitation to enter into an ever-deeper, more trusting relationship with the Lord, a call to imitate Jesus in His suffering, and the entryway to a life of loving self-sacrifice for others and the Kingdom. Thus, it is imperative to appropriate as much evidence and knowledge as we need to make the truth of Jesus—about the Resurrection, love, and His Father’s unconditional love—come alive in our hearts. If we do this, suffering will no longer be vexing; it will be the indispensable vehicle for transforming us into the reflection of God’s unconditional love—and therefore, the pathway to our eternal salvation, and the eternal salvation of others whom we have been inspired to serve.

One major truth lies at the foundation of every chapter of this book—suffering is not incompatible with love; suffering plus Christian faith leads to ever-greater love. As we shall see, suffering in the context of Christian faith is a primary impetus for courage, empathy, generosity, humility, and compassion—all of which are integral to Jesus’ view of love (agapē). Suffering also detaches us from egocentricity, power, the need to dominate, and self-idolatry—and so it can free us to love as Jesus did, with gentleness, humble-heartedness, understanding, forgiveness, and self-sacrifice. In the context of faith, suffering is powerfully positive—so much so that it can cause people to sacrifice themselves completely to serve others and the Kingdom, like Saint Francis of Assisi, Saint Ignatius Loyola, Saint Peter Claver, and Saint Teresa of Calcutta. In the context of faith, there is almost no limit to the good that suffering can produce—and no limit to the suffering that can be alleviated by those who love.

The greater our faith, the more useful this book will be. Therefore, it may be helpful for readers who have doubts about the unconditional love of God—or even doubts about the existence of God—to review the chapters dedicated to these topics in the previous two volumes. This review will make this book particularly useful for recognizing Christ’s light in the darkness—and following it toward eternal salvation. It will also help us to lead others to their salvation.

III. Nine Christian Foundations for Suffering Well

There are nine major Christian foundations for interpreting suffering and growing through it. If we internalize these nine foundations, they will condition the way we encounter suffering. Instead of suffering hitting us, knocking us down, and enervating our spirit, these nine foundations can help us engage the negativity of suffering within a realistic positive Christian context. This can give us insight, inspiration, and strength while forming a conduit for God’s grace to transform suffering from something negative to something profoundly positive within the framework of eternal, unconditional love.

These nine foundations enable suffering to work miracles—opening the way to humility where once there was pride; to compassion where once there was hardness of heart; to gentleness and acceptance where once there was domination and control; to courage where once there was faintness of heart; to transcendent meaning in life where once there was a reduction of self to materialism; to community and common cause where once there was autonomy and self-sufficiency; to an awareness of grace, providence, and the power of the Holy Spirit where once there was mere self-reliance; and to the anticipation of perfect truth, love, goodness, and home where once there was cosmic emptiness, loneliness, and alienation. Yes, suffering is negative—it causes pain, dejection, anxiety, and self-alienation, but it also has incredibly great potential to transform our meaning in life from base superficiality to wise profundity, to move us from the first two levels of happiness to the third and fourth levels of happiness, and to move us out of the profound darkness and falsity of self-idolatry, to surrender to God’s transforming power and guidance. All these transformations will be vital to our life in the Kingdom of Heaven, for Heaven awaits the transformation of our hearts, so that we become more like the One who has loved us first. If suffering can help us to move along that path, then we will be much closer to our goal before we pass into the arms of the loving God.

The nine Christian foundations for suffering well will be presented as follows:

   1. Conviction about eternal life and the resurrection (Chapter 1)

   2. Who God is and is not—according to Jesus (Chapter 2)

   3. God’s presence in our suffering (Chapter 3)

   4. Spontaneous prayers in times of suffering (Chapter 4)

   5. Mitigating fear and choosing consolation (Chapter 5)

   6. The unity of suffering and love in self-sacrifice (Chapter 6)

   7. Awareness of the opportunities of suffering (Chapter 7)

   8. Offering up our suffering as self-sacrifice in imitation of Jesus (Chapter 8)

   9. Following the inspiration and guidance of the Holy Spirit (Chapter 9)

The nine Christian foundations for suffering well can be divided into three phases:

   1. Theological preparation for suffering (foundations 1-3)

   2. Contending with suffering in the short-term (foundations 4-5)

   3. Benefitting from suffering in the long-term (foundations 6-9)

The preparatory phase is meant to help readers strengthen and solidify their faith and hope in the resurrection, and to refine belief in God and His presence in times of suffering. This phase is essential in our increasingly materialistic and agnostic culture. We need empirical, scientific, intuitive, logical, and historical evidence to counteract skepticism about transcendence and resurrection—evidence for both the heart and mind. We need to recapture the unconditionally loving God to avoid the false notions of God that conflict with Jesus’ revelation of His Father as Abba—the Father of the Prodigal Son. We also need to examine carefully Jesus’ teaching about God’s presence in our suffering, so that we do not fall prey to the belief that He uses suffering to punish us or is indifferent to our pain and grief. God can cause suffering to help someone turn from a self-destructive life but this is not punishment—it is Divine Assistance.

If we do not take this preparation seriously, we can lose faith and hope in God when suffering strikes, which could blind us to the reality of His presence, grace, consolation, and redemption. This blindness makes suffering not only a waste, but also an impetus toward darkness and lower levels of meaning. Therefore, the sooner and more seriously we prepare ourselves by engaging in the first three Christians foundations (Chapters 1-3), the more likely we are to benefit from our suffering—in the present and in the eternal future.

The second phase (contending with suffering in the short-term) is meant to give three essential tools to mitigate emotional debilitation as well as loss of meaning, direction, and interpersonal connection during times of suffering:

   1. Spontaneous prayers, which can be immediate conduits of grace

   2. Practical techniques for mitigating fear and anxiety

   3. Practices to help us choose and accept consolation

These tools are indispensable for contending positively with suffering. Without them, we can become overwhelmed by the fear, emptiness, loneliness, darkness, frustration, anger, meaninglessness, anxiety, dissociation, and despondency that can often flood into our consciousness when suffering occurs. The prayers, tools, and techniques (given in the fourth and fifth foundations) not only help to mitigate these negative conditions, but begin the process of positive transformation. Spontaneous prayers can focus us on the opportunities of suffering; natural virtues can help us form backup plans and lifetime associations and friendships that can give our lives new direction; and choosing consolation can deepen our relationship with God—not just during times of suffering, but throughout the rest of our lives.

The third phase (benefitting from suffering in the long-term) focuses us on the opportunities that suffering provides for our and others’ salvation. It does this by calling us out of superficial meaning in life, deepening our faith, and helping us develop in freedom, virtue, love, and personal actualization. Suffering goes far beyond helping us to our salvation—it prepares us to help others, sometimes thousands of others, toward their salvation. It does so by purifying our freedom and love so that it becomes more like that of Jesus, making us more authentic witnesses to His truth and salvation. Yet suffering brings with it another more mystical blessing. As we shall see, it can—when offered to God as loving self-sacrifice in imitation of Jesus—produce incredible grace to strengthen the Mystical Body and help those in most need of mercy.

Suffering is filled with opportunities for us, both individually and interpersonally. It helps us contribute to community, culture, society, church, and the whole order of salvation. If we know what to look for in faith, then darkness can accentuate the light of salvation, refining our freedom and love to ever-greater degrees of authenticity and holiness. The combination of faith and suffering is so powerful, it can transform our whole being into a living and loving self-sacrifice for goodness and salvation. Hence, when we have contended with the debilitating effects of suffering in the short-term, we will want to focus on the opportunities of suffering promised by Jesus in the long-term—opportunities leading to our salvation that make us into grace for others’ salvation.

Hopefully the explanation of these nine foundations of Christian suffering will enable you to discover the inspiration, grace, and power of love in your suffering—and through this, to travel far along the path to your salvation, while leading others to their salvation. This is the light that Christ brought into the darkness—the light of ultimate, eternal, redemptive, salvific love.

PHASE ONE

Theological Preparation for Suffering

Foundations 1-3

Chapter One

In the Twinkling of an Eye

First Foundation: Conviction about the Resurrection

(Eternal Life and Love)

Introduction

In the First Letter to the Corinthians, Saint Paul sums up the Christian vision of suffering by proclaiming the definitive victory of Christ’s Resurrection over death and decay:

Behold! I tell you a mystery. We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound, and the dead will be raised imperishable, and we shall be changed. For this perishable nature must put on the imperishable, and this mortal nature must put on immortality. When the perishable puts on the imperishable, and the mortal puts on immortality, then shall come to pass the saying that is written: Death is swallowed up in victory. O death, where is your victory? O death, where is your sting? (15:51-55)

At the end of this verse, Saint Paul cites a text from Isaiah 25:8: [God] will swallow up death for ever, which refers to a prophecy about the coming of the Kingdom of God. Isaiah compares God’s Kingdom to a messianic banquet,¹ which points not only to the overcoming of death, but to the redemption of all suffering—physical, psychological, and spiritual:

[God] will swallow up death for ever, and the Lord God will wipe away tears from all faces, and the reproach of his people he will take away from all the earth, for the Lord has spoken. It will be said on that day, Behold, this is our God; we have waited for him, that he might save us. This is the Lord; we have waited for him; let us be glad and rejoice in his salvation. (25:8-9)

For Saint Paul, Jesus’ Resurrection is the fulfillment of Isaiah’s prophecy, and therefore, the redemption of all suffering where every tear will be wiped away and transformed into joy.

For this reason, Paul and all the disciples situate the Resurrection at the center of Christian doctrine because virtually every dimension of Christian life draws its strength and fulfillment from it. Saint Paul is so adamant about the foundational status of the Resurrection that he declares:

But if there is no resurrection of the dead, then Christ has not been raised; if Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is in vain and your faith is in vain. We are even found to be misrepresenting God, because we testified of God that he raised Christ, whom he did not raise if it is true that the dead are not raised. For if the dead are not raised, then Christ has not been raised. If Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins. Then those also who have fallen asleep in Christ have perished. If for this life only we have hoped in Christ, we are of all men most to be pitied. (1 Cor 15:13-19)

Inasmuch as the Resurrection provides the context for the whole of Christian life, it also provides the context through which Christians suffer. This connection between suffering (the Cross) and the Resurrection is particularly important, because the Resurrection provides meaning and redemption to the seeming negativity of suffering, transforming it into a pathway toward unconditional love and eternal joy.

For Jesus, the Cross is inseparable from the Resurrection. In every instance that Jesus predicts His Passion, He also predicts His Resurrection.² Furthermore, in His polemic with the Pharisees, He symbolically connects the two events: Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up (Jn 2:19).³ Perhaps the most telling connection occurs with respect to the Transfiguration. In Mark’s account (which is paralleled by both Matthew and Luke), Jesus makes His first prediction of the Passion (including a prediction of His Resurrection). This is closely followed by Jesus’ teaching about the cost of discipleship—to take up our cross and follow in His steps—which is then followed by another prediction of Jesus’ Resurrection: Truly, I say to you, there are some standing here who will not taste death before they see the kingdom of God come in power (Mk 9:1).⁴ These predictions of the Cross and Resurrection come to a completion in the recounting of the Transfiguration, which is a prefigurement of Jesus’ Resurrection. Apparently, Jesus wanted to assure Peter, James, and John (who were leaders among the disciples) before the occurrence of the Passion that Jesus would in fact rise in glory, and that this would be the ultimate context in which Jesus’ Cross would be interpreted. At the end of the Gospels, Jesus’ Passion and death is followed by the discovery of the empty tomb, after which He appears in glory to His disciples.

Inasmuch as Jesus’ Passion and Resurrection anticipate our own suffering, death, and resurrection (see 1 Cor 15:49), we should view our suffering in the same way that Jesus viewed His—namely, through its inseparable connection to our resurrection in glory with Him.

I. Faith in Our Resurrection

Since the Resurrection is the context through which Christians should view suffering, we will want to be as convinced as possible about its veracity. As we shall see, the more confident we are in our resurrection, the more positive our suffering will become. Though there is a tremendous amount of corroborative evidence for our resurrection (see below), it will never lead to faith unless we are open to God and His will for us. Without this openness, no amount of corroborating evidence will ever convince us, for we will look for every possible way of extricating ourselves from it. The truly great part about God’s gift of freedom is that we can never be forced to believe in something we don’t want (choose) to believe in. If people want to believe in a flat earth, they can still find convincing reasons to do so, even if they are rejected by the entire scientific community.

How can we achieve reasonable and responsible belief in the Resurrection? After all, it happened about two thousand years ago. The basic answer is belief in the apostolic testimony, because the apostles were eyewitnesses to it and are worthy of our trust. Yet for those who cannot cross the threshold of belief on this basis alone, there are four other kinds of evidence directly accessible to us today:

   1. The application of criteria of historicity

   2. Scientific evidence from the Shroud of Turin

   3. Corroboration by medical studies of near-death experiences

   4. Contemporary miracles done in the name of Jesus, or through the intercession of His Mother

Before discussing these four contemporary kinds of evidence, we will want to consider the most basic one: trust in the apostolic testimony.

Those who have read the New Testament with care will probably have discovered the worthiness of its authors. I recall my first careful reading of the New Testament in college when it struck me that the authors of the Gospels could have embellished the accounts of miracles and the Resurrection beyond their rather prosaic form. Indeed, they seemed to underplay these deeds of power so much that the actual event appeared somewhat anticlimactic. What really amazed me was that all three major accounts of Jesus’ risen appearances to the apostles in Matthew, Luke, and John reported doubts! Though these doubts were not absolute (for the apostles clearly witnessed the appearance of a powerful divine reality that they later discovered to be the risen Jesus), it made no sense to me that the authors would be honest enough to plant the seed of doubt in a text attempting to elicit belief. Why would they have done this if they had not intended to tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth?

Furthermore, when I compared the exorcism stories (which were dramatic) to the miracle stories (which were quite subdued), I got the feeling that an editor went through the miracle stories to take out the exciting parts. Why would an author conclude these stories with Go now and don’t tell anybody about this? When I later studied the Gnostic Gospels,⁵ I was struck not only by the hyperbole in them, but also by their departure from the canonical teaching of Jesus. In stark contrast to this, the four canonical evangelists were unbelievably sober, respectful of the oral tradition they received, and faithful to Jesus’ teaching about truth, goodness, and love. The writing of the texts corresponded splendidly with their content, which made them, at least on the surface, believable.

I also marveled at the humility of the authors and the people about whom they wrote. The inclusion of insults leveled at Jesus by the religious authorities (e.g., He casts out demons by the prince of demons [Mt 9:34]), the failings and weaknesses of the apostles (e.g., Peter, Thomas, and Matthew), and the accusation that the apostles stole Jesus’ body from the tomb, and so forth, showed the interest the evangelists had in putting the truth before the reputation of Christianity’s foundational leaders. If those leaders had not had the humility to tell the whole truth, I wondered, wouldn’t they have asked the evangelists to use their editorial pens a little more assiduously? Humility speaks convincingly about the reliability of witnesses and authors.

Most importantly for me, the tone of the Gospel texts seemed just right. The Gospels manifested an interest in my salvation, my soul, and my virtue. The texts were not written in a soft and flattering way to gain my approval, but rather in a challenging, almost off-putting, way to help me toward salvation, to call me out of self-delusion and darkness into the light of Christ’s love. Tough love can dissuade more converts than it persuades. If the evangelists had been more interested in winning converts instead of helping souls, the Gospels would have been written quite differently—avoiding the tough love.

There was something about the collective ethos of the New Testament writers that attracted me, despite its challenging tone, and I wanted to be part of it. Though I knew I was far from the ideal they set, I wanted to be like them, on the same mission as they were, with the same trust and love of the One about whom they were writing. The more I read the New Testament, the more I was confirmed in this truth of the heart—the foundation of my faith.

Though the truth of the heart is the foundation of faith, there may be some who need extra confirmation of the mind to become convinced of the reality of the risen glory to which they are called by Jesus. If you, the reader, are one of these individuals, I would ask that you review the chapters of Volumes II and III mentioned below in the four areas of contemporary evidence for the Resurrection.

The first area of evidence concerns criteria of historicity that can be evaluated just as well today as two thousand years ago. In Volume III, Chapter 4, we explained four kinds of evidence for the historicity of Jesus’ Resurrection:

   1. Saint Paul’s list of witnesses to the Resurrection who were still alive at the time of Paul’s writing—and could be asked for verification. Paul makes clear that they had everything to lose and nothing to gain by testifying to Jesus’ Resurrection (Sections III.A and III.B).

   2. N. T. Wright’s exploration of the failure of first-century messianic movements, and Christianity’s starkly contrasting success. Can this be explained without the Resurrection and gift of the Holy Spirit? (Section IV.A).

   3. N. T. Wright’s examination of the Christian mutations to Second Temple Judaism’s doctrine of Resurrection. How can these be explained without the disciples witnessing the risen Christ in the way reported by the Gospel narratives? (Section IV.B).

   4. The likelihood that Jesus’ tomb was empty and that the religious authorities knew this to be true. Given the unlikelihood that Jesus’ disciples would have stolen His body or that anyone else would have done so, then the question arises: How did His body disappear? (Section V).

The second area of evidence concerns the Shroud of Turin, the purported burial cloth of Jesus. This evidence is assessed in detail in Volume III, Appendix I of the Quartet. Some readers may think that the cloth was debunked by the 1988 carbon testing, but the subsequent work of Dr. Raymond Rogers and others shows that the sample used for the tests was clearly not from the original Shroud, and that the procedure to obtain the sample was seriously flawed.⁶ Moreover, recent dating procedures by Dr. Raymond Rogers and Dr. Giulio Fanti (and his teams) indicate a dating very close to the time of Jesus’ Crucifixion and Resurrection. In four separate dating procedures, these scientists and engineers show that the cloth very probably originated around the time of Jesus’ Crucifixion. Fanti averaged his three tests (Fourier transformed infrared spectroscopy, Raman laser spectroscopy, and mechanical tension compressibility tests) and obtained a mean of 33 B.C. (plus or minus 250 years), with 95 percent confidence (see Section II.B).

There are three other circumstantial dating methods that show almost conclusively that the Shroud could not have originated in thirteenth- or fourteenth-century France (as the 1988 carbon testing supposedly showed):

   ■ Max Frei’s pollen samples (see Section II.C.1),

   ■ Alan Whanger’s digital photography of Roman coins on the eyes of the man in the Shroud (see Section II.C.2), and

   ■ remarkable similarities (120 blood imprints) between the Shroud of Turin and the facecloth of Jesus—the Sudarium of Oviedo (see Section II.C.3).

These three kinds of evidence show an origin of the cloth in Judea (near Jerusalem) before A.D. 600—and very probably near the time of Jesus (the Roman coins on the man’s eyes were minted by Pontius Pilate in Judea in A.D. 29). The combined evidence plus the unique features of Jesus’ Crucifixion on the Shroud indicate that it is very probably His burial cloth.

In addition to the above, there is considerable evidence of a trans-physical light phenomenon (suggestive of Jesus’ transphysical Resurrection) on the cloth. This is explained in detail in Volume III, Appendix I, Section III. The cloth has five enigmas that are very difficult to explain by any known physical process:

   1. The fact that the image is limited to the uppermost surface of the fibrils and does not penetrate to the medulla of the fibers. This implies that the image was not produced by chemicals or vapors of any kind.

   2. The fact that the image is not a scorch (but rather discoloration coming from dehydration). This implies that the image could not have been produced by slowly dissipating radiation (which would have scorched it).

   3. The image is a perfect photographic negative in which the image intensity is related to the distance of the cloth from the body. Thus, the image was present regardless of whether the cloth touched the