WHY DO WE SUFFER?

On 8^th March, 2006 I received the sad news of the untimely death of my sister-in-law. She left behind her loving husband and three little kids and her in-laws. She died within six hours of her third delivery with some complications. As soon as I received the news, I rushed to the chapel,  full of anger, crying questioned God, “Why did You let this happen?” I was angry with God. This is not only my reaction but also the reaction of hundreds of thousands when a sudden terror strikes. One of my friends was narrating a similar experience. He lost his father when he was very young, then his mother and sister due to tuberculosis within a period of six months at the age ten. Now became totally orphaned. He was angry at God till he was fifty years old.

My niece, Lavita who could not see her mother  

Whenever some disasters strike, we scold God as if He is the one who is responsible for it. It may be because we are formed in that way. It is a perennial problem that why there is suffering. In philosophical language this is called the ‘Problem of Evil.’

The problem of evil can be stated as follows. God is good, all powerful, Omnipotent, Omnipresent etc. He knows everything – our past, present and future. At the same time evil is a reality. Sufferings do exist. Why then the all powerful, all knowing God allows suffering?

If God allows sufferings and evil to take place, then God is not powerful. Therefore, it is either God is powerful; if not evil is powerful. For years the philosophers, theologians and scholars in various capacities have tried to answer. None could answer satisfactorily.

According to Hinduism the present life is the fruit of our past Karma:  Greater the sin in the previous life, greater the sufferings and slower the mukti (salvation). Better live this life and not escape the suffering. Escaping would be postponing the salvation. Thus sufferings are salvific.

According to Plato human being is basically a soul. Body is a prison of the soul. Soul existed in the ideal or perfect world. Due to some wrong committed by the soul, it came to the earth and took a body. Therefore, the human being has to suffer and the ideal thing is ‘death’ where the soul is liberated from all sufferings. Plotinus, a neo-Platonist once remarked, “I wish I had no body.”  St. Augustine too had this kind of notion in mind when he wrote his book, The City of God in which advocates that the body as something negative. For him, we are evil people, sinners, do not know what we are.

One of the answers given by the Christian mystics for our sufferings is ‘our sins,’ that we have gravely sinned and therefore is this condition. If so, what sin has that child committed to take away its mother in the birth itself, who could not even taste even a drop of mother’s milk? What mistake is that ten year old child has committed to remain his whole life orphaned? Further what sin that aborted child committed to be deprived off from heavenly glory and remain in the ‘limbo.’ For St. Augustine the children who died before the baptism go to the ‘Limbo.’ Therefore, for me it is not the sin of commission for which we are suffering. More than this it is the sin of omission, we are guilty of. Sin of Omission is the sin we collectively are committing: the degradation of nature, pollution, unjust distribution of wealth, unjust wages we give to our workers, our lack of love and concern for the much needed person, our unfaithfulness to our commitments etc.

In order to console the person in distress, some people say, “God thought it was best thing for you. He has a purpose in it.” Can a good God who loves his people so much will take away the happiness one has? For me, if so, he is not God at all. God suffers when his child is in danger. Consider a mother whose child is sick. How much pain and suffering the mother undergoes for the child? Why? Just because, she love her child. Love leads one to suffer. If I love, I need to suffer. The Good Shepherd goes in search of a lost sheep leaving behind the ninety nine;  just because,  the Shepherd was in distress, in agony, in pain. Therefore, our suffering is not a best thing for God, neither a good thing nor He has a purpose for me in it.

Most of our problems are created by us. When a smoker gets a Lung cancer, it is the disease which he himself demanded. When a drunkard gets multiple organ failure in his unripe age, it is his own fault. When a prostitute gets an AIDS, it is again the fault of the victim as well as of the society. When a man dies of hunger in the street, it is the fault of our society who does not like to share its food. Thus most of the sufferings are either the result of the sins of commission or of omission.

Certain problems are co-incidental (kakataleeya). A Man was walking and suddenly a tree fell on him and he dies on the spot. What is the reason? It just happened so. It is not because of the presence of Rahu or Gulika or any other stars. Often people go to check with astrologers about the problem who not only bring some more problems both psychologically but also economically. These soothe-sayers fill their pocket by misleading the innocent people. Thus some things happen because of our stupidity.

There are some natural calamities taking place in the universe. Fall of comets, eclipses and movements of planets and stars affect the earth and due to which there are tsunami like situations, extreme weather conditions  etc. Landslides, lightning and thunders, flood etc are natural happenings.  There is a law of nature behind these activities. I cannot ascribe these activities to God. They happen according to the law of nature.  Some things by nature have to be like that. For example, a tree cannot walk and should not walk and it is not meant to walk. It is the beauty of creation.

Often we ask wrong questions and get trapped there. Instead of asking “why did God take away my sister-in-law” I should have asked, “why did it happen, what is the reason?” Obviously the reason is clear. She had a long medical history. She was sick when she was a child. Her parents did not take care well due to poverty and lack of medical facilities in the village. Her liver got damaged, her kidneys got affected. Parents without knowing these things married her to my brother. Accordingto the doctors, “with these conditions, she should not have had pregnancies.” But still, she was pregnant thrice. Is it not the blessing of God that she survived in the previous two deliveries? If God is allowing to become my brother a widower, she should have died in her first delivery itself. God does not want someone to suffer; rather wants someone to live happily which we, the human beings do not understand.

During one of my retreats, a preacher answering the problem of evil said to a nun who questioned God for taking away her mother, “God took away your mother, so that you can be a good mother for many who have lost their mothers and are looking for mothers love. You can be a good daughter to those mothers who cry for their daughters’ untimely death, who cry for their children who have abandoned them.” Religious vocation is this, ‘to be mothers, sisters, fathers, brothers to many.’  Religiously this may give some relief to our convictions and the vocation we live. But what is the reality of death itself?

Death is inbuilt in us. Every material being which has a beginning has to have an end. Death is that end. One cannot stop it. The mere fact that God created me an embodied person, I need to suffer, feel pain, experience heat etc. However, God gives me freedom. It is up to me to use or misuse.

Another common mistake we commit is, “it is written in my fore-head” meaning to say that God has already decided to happen so and so. Everything is finalized. We are just puppets in the hands of God. God plays the strings as he likes whether we like it or not, just dance. This is a narrow understanding. Of course God knows. God by knowing himself, knows everything. We by knowing something, know something else. To know the temperature of today, I need to experience what heat is and how it changes. I cannot know the future nor can determine the future. If I can predict the future, I make it to happen. God predetermines what and who we are, but he does not work each and every details of our life. These details are left for us to work. That’s why the consciousness and freedom is given to us and to no other beings this faculty is given.

I am indebted to St. Irenaeus for giving me a dynamic world view against St. Augustine’s Static world view. For Augustine, God created everything perfect, beautiful. Human beings are the  most perfect creatures created by God on the earth. But human beings failed and therefore, sinned. This sin is the original sin which we still bear the consequence. For St. Irenaeus, God neither created human beings perfect, nor as mature. We are created to become perfect and mature and we become so by loving. We grow towards perfection by becoming fully human and fully alive. Eating the apple at the Garden of Eden is like child stealing a chocolate or jam when the parents are away. Children see porn. It is not bad. It is bad just because they are not yet matured to see it. Once they become mature, they can see it.  Is this Original Sin, a sin to be condemned generation to generation? Driving out of paradise is not a punishment rather it is a way of correcting the person to become mature, to be fully human and alive. We have to learn in the process. By learning we grow and mature.

Fr. Raju Felix Crasta