Suffering v. Love

[troubledgoodangel]

Human existence is strewn with paradoxes and the exact relation between suffering and love is certainly one. I am still grappling with this paradox in my doctoral dissertation I Fondamenti della Dottrina Biblica della Sofferenza nelle Encicliche del Servo di Dio Giovanni Paolo II. We can suffer love, as children often "suffer" the love of their parents. Their suffering is not love per se, but it is the love of their parents for them! We can also suffer for love: this fits the experience of Jesus, Whose Suffering was out of Love for us. But can we say that suffering is love? Evidently, we cannot. Yet we can certainly say that suffering can be love for someone else. The paradox of suffering v. love can perhaps be clarified factoring into the equation the concept of truth. We often say that we love the truth. But not all the truth is lovable. There are indeed truths that are frightful foreshadowings of evil. Such truth about evil may perfectly fit the Avicennas' (Aristotelian) definition of aequatio rei, and of suffering, but it is not Truth as we understand God to be Truth! On the other hand, there is suffering undertaken out of love for Goodness. Such suffering does fit the definition of Truth, and is therefore an aequatio rei, but in a different sense, for in this case the Res is God. Such is the Love of Our Heavenly Father, and such, by analogy, is the love of human parents ... a love that is suffered so that the Truth may win: for the one who inflicts it, it is true love, but for the one who suffers it it is true Hell! Thus, only if we are able to concede that there is evil truth and Good Truth, and that Hell can be true love when God (the Truth) is the Lover (or the parents by analogy), can we grasp the answer to the paradox of suffering v. love! Suffering is Hell, and Hell is the perceived absence of God. Hell is the greatest when this sense of absence is total. But, alas, in truth God is never absent! Thus, the paradox is cancelled when we realize that Hell is the greatest love, when God is the most present. Can we thus say that all that happens to us in the world, good and evil, suffering and death, is Love? We probably can, and we must. It doesn't matter what type is the scourge, and of what type. A child undergoes terminal illness and dies: it is love. Parents suffer the loss of their only child: it's also love. The Babylonian Exile was love. The bubonic plagues were love. The Holocaust was love. In a mysterious design of the Creation, Evil itself is conquerred and destroyed by Evil, and only the Good shall remain in the end! This is the secret of the Cross: in It, all sufferers and all dead, their names like a myriad of sheets of paper caught by a mighty wind, are now funneled towards and affixed to the Cross sure of Redemption! All that we experience as Cross, is Love!