The Work of Mercy: Comfort the Afflicted, Part 1

As I was writing this book, I got an earache. I don’t mean a little twingy pain, like a headache or a sore toe. I mean the Most Excruciating Pain I Have Felt in Three Decades. Up there with the Great Wisdom Tooth Agony of ’78; worse than the Line Drive to the Groin of ’69. We’re talking debilitating anguish here, unable-to-function- or-think levels of pain. I didn’t know it was possible to hurt that much from a simple infection to the ear canal. I will never forget it. It makes me marvel at how the human race could have maintained its sanity without ciprofloxacin, hydrocodone, and ibuprofen (all thanks be to God for these marvelous gifts!).

I mentioned my agonies on my blog (because sitting at a keyboard distracting myself from the eye-watering pain was less excruciating than lying down at five one morning). Lots of people replied with kind offers of prayer. And they did something else: In addition to the home remedies and medical tips, many shared their own stories of ear anguish to console me. It was all as natural as breathing—and curious when you think about it.

Why are we compelled, when we can do nothing else, to tell the afflicted of our afflictions? And why are we comforted by such tales? The fact that other people once howled in agony with their earaches should not, it would seem, make me feel any better. Indeed, by a certain logic, it should only make me feel worse—for them. But in fact, there is something comforting about knowing others have felt what we feel and, conversely, there is something offensive when those who have not been there presume to stoop down and tell us to buck up.

Of course, this sort of identity politics will get you only so far in dealing with suffering. Because at the end of the day, what actually healed my earache was not the empathy of fellow earache sufferers. It was a competent physician, who, while he may never have felt my pain, knew which drugs would kill the bacteria and relieve my pain. That doesn’t mean empathy is worthless. It means that there is more than one dimension to comforting the afflicted. Identifying with the sufferer is great. God did it when he sent his only begotten Son to identify with us in our sufferings. As Hebrews says:

It was fitting that he, for whom and by whom all things exist, in bringing many sons to glory, should make the pioneer of their salvation perfect through suffering.… Therefore he had to be made like his brethren in every respect, so that he might become a merciful and faithful high priest in the service of God, to make expiation for the sins of the people. For because he himself has suffered and been tempted, he is able to help those who are tempted. (Hebrews 2:10, 17–18)

It is therefore priestly to let one’s sufferings be a sort of mediating agent between the sufferings of Christ crucified and the sufferings of our neighbor. As St. Paul says, God “comforts us in all our affliction, so that we may be able to comfort those who are in any affliction, with the comfort with which we ourselves are comforted by God. For as we share abundantly in Christ’s sufferings, so through Christ we share abundantly in comfort too. If we are afflicted, it is for your comfort and salvation; and if we are comforted, it is for your comfort, which you experience when you patiently endure the same sufferings that we suffer” (2 Corinthians 1:4–6).

But there is also a danger here. For we can take our status as victims, disconnect it from Christ crucified, and turn it into the source of our identity. When we do that, we become idolaters and quickly descend into a particularly silly sort of sin that grants only members of the approved victim class any right to speak to matters affecting the common good. So some claim that only women can address abortion, only soldiers can discuss war, only gay people can discuss gay marriage, only terminally ill people can address euthanasia, and the like.

This is nonsense. When I get treatment for an earache, I don’t want somebody who once had an earache to treat me. I want somebody who knows how to treat an earache. When we want to rightly order human society, we should consult with the human race about the common good, because the common good is common and affects us all, not only the approved victims. Moreover, we want to hear from those with the relevant knowledge, not merely from grievance groups with parochial agendas. We look to tradition and, more than that, sacred tradition, because it gives God’s perspective as well as that of millions of ordinary people down through the ages in what Chesterton aptly called “the democracy of the dead.”

This is part of the genius of the Catholic tradition in comforting the afflicted. On the one hand, it’s comforting to hear from fellow victims, living and dead. If that cloud of witnesses could make it, so can you. It is even more comforting to know that God the Son endured the worst suffering and won through to the Resurrection, promising that same grace and power to us, if we will remain in him. But here’s the paradox: The other part of the gospel’s comfort is the strange doctrine that God the Father is “impassible.” That is, he is not subject to suffering or affliction and cannot be moved by the emotions that move us.

That seems problematic. Doesn’t it contradict what I just said about the bureaucrat without experience sitting in a far-off room? Strangely, no. Because comfort comes from knowing not merely that others have suffered as you have but that they have come through their suffering to the place where “the dwelling of God is with men. He will dwell with them, and they shall be his people, and God himself will be with them; he will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning nor crying nor pain any more, for the former things have passed away” (Revelation 21:3–4). In our affliction, what we want is not only to have somebody suffering beside us but to know that there is someplace where all this pain and horror loses its power. Sam Gamgee is a comfort to Frodo in his affliction because, like Christ, he stands beside him and even carries him in the struggle across the Plains of Gorgoroth and up the purgatorial slopes of Mount Doom. But Sam’s comfort comes when, like Christ, he casts his gaze on the place where the troubles of this world cannot reach:

Far above the Ephel Duath in the West the night-sky was still dim and pale. There, peeping among the cloud-wrack above a dark tor high up in the mountains, Sam saw a white star twinkle for a while. The beauty of it smote his heart, as he looked up out of the forsaken land, and hope returned to him.For like a shaft, clear and cold, the thought pierced him that in the end the Shadow was only a small and passing thing: there was light and high beauty forever beyond its reach.1

The good news of the “impassibility” of God is like that. There is a perfect happiness in God that the devil cannot ever harm or even touch. To be sure, God incarnate “was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities; upon him was the chastisement that made us whole, and with his stripes we are healed” (Isaiah 53:5). Yet the miracle of the thing is that it was for the joy that was set before him—the joy of the impassible Father who is pure happiness— that Jesus endured the cross, despising the shame, and now he is seated at the right hand of the throne of God (see Hebrews 12:2).

Something in our nature conforms to this. We are comforted in our affliction by shared suffering. But we require as well the anchor of hope that there is, somewhere, a place far above the cloud-wrack where we shall find the joy that is not—and cannot be—touched by the suffering we face here. It is exactly that paradox that moves St. Paul to remind us, “I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us” (Romans 8:18).

Of which more next time.

(For more information, see my book THE WORK OF MERCY: BEING THE HANDS AND HEART OF CHRIST (available here, signed by me, or in Kindle format here, or as an audiobook here).