Louis M. Savary - Teilhard de Chardin - Seven Stages of Suffering: A Spiritual Path for Transformation

My sweet young niece, Sandy, the mother of two little girls, is dying of cancer.

My best friend, Nancy, beset with Lyme disease, has been waking up every morning for the past year with headache, nausea, back and neck pain, dizziness, and fatigue.

Daily, for the past eight years, Art, at eighty-four, has been visiting his wife with Alzheimers in a nursing home. In anguish, he says, No matter how hard I try to keep making a connection with Meg, she doesnt recognize me.

Alicia comes home each day after high school classes are over and is afraid to enter her house for fear of being physically abused by her alcoholic father. I have lived many years of my life in fear of him, every day.

Dorothy, a grown woman and the youngest of seven, talks about her father dying of a brain tumor when she was only four. Helplessly, my mother watched the man she loved die over many months, and when he died she raised her kids and ran the farm. I never knew her to have a day when she laughed. She spent the rest of her life deeply depressed.

When Gretchen and her friends get together, they compare their woesarthritis, diabetes, constipation, headaches, lack of balance, high blood pressure, skin disease, bad eyesight, recovering from a stroke. The list of their pains and diminishments goes on and on.

Bob and Carol are raising their son Greg, who is wheelchair-bound with cerebral palsy. They have been doing it for twenty-two years.

Allan, back from a year of volunteer work in East Africa, tells a group of us, You think you have suffering here. Where I was stationed, most kids go to bed crying of hunger almost every night.

These are some of the stories of how people we know are diminished by pain and suffering. You must know people like them, too. Doesnt it make you wonder why people must suffer?

No matter where you turn, no matter where you look, suffering is everywhere.

When people are asked what they think of suffering and how they make sense of it, they offer a variety of responses.

Some are very pessimistic. They say that suffering has no meaning, no purpose; it is a waste of human life, and makes no sense.

Some are quite stoic. They say that whatever pain or suffering comes our way, we should just endure it as best we can and go on with life. Suffering happens, period!

Others say that we deserve to suffer in this life; it is punishment for our sins, or they say that suffering is Gods way of testing our faith. We should be like Jesus, who obediently suffered for us on the cross.

Others, at least in theory, believe that suffering can bring wisdom. They believe that God allows suffering so that we will learn important life lessons from it.

Each of us has our own way of trying to make sense of our own suffering and the pain and suffering of others.

Something New

In 1933, someone asked a French Jesuit priest, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, to write an essay on the meaning of suffering. Teilhard, as we affectionately call him, was not only a theologian, he was a modern scientist who studied geology and the evolution of life on earth. He was also a deeply religious manwhat we might label today a mystic. Near the end of his essay, titled The Meaning and Constructive Value of Suffering, he wrote these astounding words:

Human suffering, the sum total of suffering poured out at each moment over the whole earth, is like an immeasurable ocean. But what makes up this immensity? Is it blackness, emptiness, barren wastes? No, indeed: it is potential energy. Suffering holds hidden within it, in extreme intensity, the ascensional force of the world.

The whole point is to set this force free by making it conscious of what it signifies and of what it is capable. For if all the sick people in the world were simultaneously to turn their sufferings into a single shared longing for the speedy completion of the kingdom of God through the organizing of the earth, what a vast leap toward God the world would thereby make!