Part Two: The Light of Objective Truth
Last time I suggested that when we find ourselves in the midst of the darkest grief and anguish, perhaps all we can do is hang on desperately to our Lord’s hand in faith. But at the same time, this does not have to be “blind faith.”
What I meant was, when times of tribulation subside (and even better: before such times ever strike us and knock us down at all!), if we ponder and meditate on the truth of what God has revealed to His people, we can actually discover that there are very good reasons to put our trust in Him, to have faith that, as St. Paul put it “all things work for good for those who love God” (Rom 8:28 NAB). “ALL things”: even that deadly cancer that kills your loved one, even that horrible car accident, even that relentless bullying and persecution of an innocent child, “ALL things,” St. Paul promised, can work together for good, if we love our Lord and entrust it all to Him. And what I want to try to show in this series of articles is that there are very good reasons to believe this. We don’t have to walk through the darkness with blind faith. Our faith can be guided by the light. We may not be able to rehearse all the reasons for our faith during times of terrible trial and darkness, but those firmly established, objective truths of the faith can remain in our hearts and minds and sustain us all along the way, a light that radiates within us and helps us to journey on, and not to lose hope.
Of course, one of the ways we know this is from personal experience: our own experience, or that of others, of hanging on in faith through the darkest times, and seeing this in the end work out for the best. So, for example, that car accident in which I was a victim (the one that I told about in the first article in this series): that was certainly a horrible experience. And yet, over time, I came to see at least one way that our Lord was able to bring good out of it. The fact is, because the car that struck me was a police car, insured by the city of New York, they had to settle with my family’s insurance company for $30,000, and that money ultimately was one of the things that enabled me, years later, to afford to do doctoral study, and to serve our Lord and His Church as a theologian — an experience I would never have traded for anything in the world!
Now, don’t get me wrong: I am not saying that God deliberately caused that car accident, as if He could not think of any better way of providing me with scholarship money! But He permitted it. He did not stop it from happening. He let the free-will He gave to the driver of that police car, and to the others in that situation run its course, and then, as we say He “wrote straight with crooked lines.” As a great Anglican theologian, Austin Farrer, once said: “His own divine way is to bring unthought-of goods out of permitted evils, and so to triumph by new creation.”
This series of articles, however, will not primarily be a series of such “glory stories.” Sharing these kinds of personal testimonies helps light the way for us, and builds up our faith, to be sure, but it is not nearly enough. The reason it is not enough is that for every inspiring “glory story” we know, from our own lives or from the lives of others, of how God’s providence was clearly bringing good out of human suffering, there are at least as many (if not more!) experiences of sorrow and loss in our lives where we cannot see—and have never been able to see—how God was working out His good purposes in it all. For example, for every inspiring story of the triumph of faith amid the horrors of the Nazi concentration camps (for example, the witness of Corey Ten Boom, or the martyrdom of love of St. Maximillian Kolbe) there were hundreds, if not thousands of faithful believers who were brutally tortured, and whose lives were seemingly cut off without hope, without evident triumph of any kind, or any discernible good arising from their misery.
After all, St. Paul promised that “All things work for good for those who love God,” but he did not promise that we would always be able to see how all things were being used for good for His children. Much of the time, in this life at any rate, we merely “see in a mirror dimly.” Only when we see Him “face to face” in heaven will we be able to “understand fully, even as [we] have been fully understood” (I Cor 13:12). We walk by faith, not by clear and universal sight.
Beyond what we can glean from our own personal faith-experiences, and the testimonies of others, therefore, we need something more. Again, there is a light of objective truth that we need constantly shining within us, if we are to make it through the worst times of human misery and darkness. That is one reason why Jesus promised” “I am the Light of the world” (Jn 8:12), and He never hinted that this light could ever be extinguished, even temporarily. So in this series, we are going to focus on the light. We are going to explore, first of all, what the light of reason—our simple, God-given reasoning capacity—can tell us about the mystery of human suffering in this world.
Then we are going to explore what additional light the biblical story — and especially the Gospel, the “Good News” of God’s love for us in Jesus Christ — can shed on the mystery of human misery.
Most of this will mark ecumenical “common ground” in an authentically Christian approach to the problem of suffering and evil in God’s world
After that, we are going to look at what I like to call “the Catholic extra,” something distinctive about the Catholic Tradition of Christianity: the practice of “offering up” our unavoidable suffering, in union with the suffering of Christ on the Cross. By this special form of prayer, we open the floodgates to more of the graces that Our Savior won for us on the Cross, and that He wants to pour out upon the Church and the World.
Finally, I am going to offer a second, historic Catholic “extra” to ponder in this regard. In this latter case, there is no reason to believe that our Protestant brothers and sisters could not embrace this doctrinal and spiritual tradition too…. but for now, just for fun, I will keep this last item a secret and a surprise.
Robert Stackpole, STD
Mere Christian Fellowship
Next time: First Steps Toward the Light of Reason
