We must reject secular culture’s nihilism and its terror of life’s mysterious alchemy of love and pain

“Unfortunately, our mother left us some time ago,” said my atheist brother to a crowd of geriatrics assembled to celebrate another year in the life of my father. “Through death,” I clarified, lest they thought she ran off with the milkman.

The occasion of my father’s 90th birthday threw up some interesting observations. “Come on,” Dad said, standing by my mother’s grave where his own plot awaits. “Let’s get a picture so that you can do a before and after.” We are a family of Irish Catholics. Laughing and crying together over death is very much our milieu, except, that is, for my brother. His rejection of the faith of his forefathers brought with it a sense of unease around suffering and death, and the abandonment of ritual has left him, like all atheists, grappling for ways to deal with the apparent meaninglessness of it all.

With life reduced to the material, and purpose replaced with comfort, one conclusion is to avoid the subject altogether. If there can be no value in suffering, or meaning in death, why would anyone want to talk about it, let alone see it?

Why would anyone choose to give their life for a stranger as St Maximillian Kolbe did, choose to give birth to a disabled child, or to stay alive following a fatal diagnosis? The culture of death is the inevitable consequence of a society absent from Christ.

But as Catholics we know that life is not the result of blind chance, a bunch of cells hanging around waiting to return to the oblivion whence they arose.

We also know that death is an aberration, the result of the Fall; it was not meant to be this way. It is our recognition that God sent His Son into our brokenness – “by His wounds we are healed.” This means we can hold two things to be true at the same time. We experience the sadness of suffering and loss, but we do so with the joy of knowing that the battle has been won.

“O death, where is thy victory? O grave, where is thy sting?” (1 Cor 15:55-56). Christ’s death and resurrection gives  sense to the senselessness, brings hope in despair, joy in pain and life that will never end. Only Christians can truly understand that there is value in suffering and meaning in death, such that we can – in my best Dolly Parton – “laugh through the tears”.

“I do not wish you suffering” Peter Kreeft writes in a letter to his children – before adding an important caveat. “I wish you joy. But I wish you also the strange and beautiful sweetness of joy in suffering. It can come only from a suffering that comes from love and trust, a suffering that you know is God’s will for you and that you therefore accept in the simple trust that (1) He loves you and therefore wishes only your deepest joy, (2) that He knows exactly what He is doing and exactly what you need, and (3) that He is in control of every atom in the universe He created.

“When you know this, and when you turn to what you know, instead of ignoring it, God will sometimes give you the grace of a supernatural joy, a joy that seems to be irrational, a joy without a cause, an utterly unexpected and unexplainable gift.”

I saw this joy in the sufferings of my mother after she was diagnosed with brain cancer and given six months to live. As her body failed, she united her suffering to Christ’s, asking Him to do that thing only He can do; transform it into something good. So, He took the sacrifice of a woman who loved her lost daughter and used it to bring me home. My mother’s faith saved me once in her womb, and again at her death. This is the transformative power of a suffering and death joined to the wood of the cross.

She gave me a gift that advocates of euthanasia seek to rob us of. She allowed me to see her vulnerable, to assist her as she stumbled like a child. She inserted Veronica, Simon of Cyrene, Mary and the beloved disciple into a heart that would otherwise have looked away.

“Love and pain are a package deal,” Kreeft says. “The only way to avoid pain is to avoid love, to give your heart to no one, to put a security system around it. It will be safe there in the freezer. But it will not beat.”

The death of my mother and the lives of the saints are incomprehensible to the atheist whose heart is safe in the freezer. Euthanasia and euphemisms for death form part of the security system which keep it there.

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In his apostolic letter Salvifici Doloris (1984) Pope St John Paul II explores the Christian meaning of human suffering. In it he writes:

“As a result of Christ’s salvific work, man exists on earth with the hope of eternal life and holiness. And even though the victory over sin and death achieved by Christ in His Cross and Resurrection does not abolish temporal suffering from human life, nor free from suffering the whole historical dimension of human existence, it nevertheless throws a new light upon this dimension and upon every suffering: the light of salvation.

“Man ‘perishes’ when he loses ‘eternal life’. The opposite of salvation is not, therefore, only temporal suffering, any kind of suffering, but the definitive suffering: the loss of eternal life, being rejected by God, damnation.

“The only-begotten Son was given to humanity primarily to protect man against this definitive evil and against definitive suffering. In His salvific mission, the Son must therefore strike evil right at its transcendental roots from which it develops in human history.

“These transcendental roots of evil are grounded in sin and death: for they are at the basis of the loss of eternal life.”

After being shot by gunman Mehmet Ali Ağca in St Pet-er’s Square in 1981, John Paul II preached continuously about the power of linking human suffering with Christ’s crucifixion. During the 1990s, with his health declining, he called upon those who suffered to not only see themselves as closer to Christ, but to be sources of strength for those around them. During the final two months of his life, John Paul II provided a powerful symbolic homily to the world.

It was a message that summarised his position on suffering, and the dignity of human life. As his biographers Carl Bernstein and Marco Politi put it: “it is as if suffering was fated to become for Wojtyła a permanent sign of his pontificate.”

John Paul II saw the true nature of suffering as a way of coming closer to Christ, rather than as a punishment. In the latter stages of his papacy he railed against a “culture of death” that sanctioned, among other things, euthanasia.

As I brought the speeches at my father’s 90th birthday to a close, I told everyone that I’d save the best stuff for the funeral. Dad laughed in a way that only a Christian can, because he knows, as John Paul II knew, that death is not the end. 

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Photo: ‘Pietà’, painted by Oleg Supereco, oil on canvas; screenshot from christian.art.

This article appears in the Summer Special July/August 2024 issue of the Catholic Herald. To subscribe to our award-winning, thought-provoking magazine and have independent and high-calibre counter-cultural Catholic journalism delivered to your door anywhere in the world click HERE.

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