Out of Suffering Have Emerged the Strongest Souls

Fr. Emil Kapaun was a Catholic priest and U.S. Army chaplain who served in both World War II and the Korean War—where he died in a POW camp in 1951. Among the many writings and quotes attributed to him, there is one that stands out to me as being of utmost pertinence to our modern times: “Out of suffering have emerged the strongest souls.” Nobody likes to suffer and I realize this is news to no one. Our natural instincts are to avoid suffering because in essence, suffering is contrary to our true nature, as we were created to be in blissful union with God. But we thought we knew better than God and as a result, suffering is the primary consequence. The more prideful we are, the more we suffer because we drift further and further away from God and it is a fascinating phenomenon that those who are furthest from God tend to put on a façade that they are happy when the rest of us can see clearly how angry and lonely they truly are. They live in a hell of their own making yet they’ve convinced themselves that they’re in heaven.

Suffering is a byproduct of our fallen nature and there is nothing that we can do in this life to avoid it or to eradicate it. It is an absolute reality and this is acknowledged in every major religion on earth. But when Fr. Kapaun speaks of suffering as something that makes us stronger, he is addressing something about our true nature, something that fewer and fewer people seem to want to acknowledge nowadays. When we suffer, we are left with two possible reactions: we can either rail against it—and therefore, against God—or we can allow it to temper us and to humble us so that we can find the silver lining or lesson embedded within the temporary discomfort. Too many people today have bought into idealistic utopian fantasies about how if we just do x, y and z as a society, everything will be better. These are delusions.

When I engage in therapy with my clients, I do not mislead them into thinking or hoping for things that aren’t rooted in reality. I don’t say things such as, “I promise things will get better” because that promise is empty and has the potential to set that person up for failure. I provide grounded therapy, rooted in empowerment and driven by the pursuit of solutions, not fantasies. If a client says to me “I just want the pain to go away,” my response is typically something along the lines of “I know you do and I want that for you too, but what if it doesn’t?” The pain doesn’t always go away; in fact, it seldom does. We need to be able to accept that and then we can explore solutions to make the pain more manageable or tolerable. One of the biggest problems with our modern society is that we promote and encourage people to place their hope in the wrong things. Hope should only be placed in the promises of Christ; hope that things will magically get better without any personal investment or buy-in is a futile and delusional pursuit.

Our modern world has increasingly bought into the false notion that suffering is the result of some mythical “other,” some “systemic” something-or-other that just needs to be remedied or eradicated and then everything will magically be blissful and perfect. This is both fascinating and deeply troubling because when we look into the meaning of the name Satan, Hasatan in Hebrew translates to “the accuser.” A perfunctory glance at the world around us makes it painstakingly clear that we live in a society where everyone loves playing the role of the accuser, but nobody wants to take a look at themselves in the mirror to see their own culpability in everything. It’s too easy to blame other people, much more difficult to admit our own guilt. We all share the blame equally for the suffering that exists in this world and the only thing we can do to minimize the suffering of others is to be Christlike to the people we personally encounter daily. As U.S. Navy Vice Admiral William H. McRaven said in a speech to graduates of the University of Texas, “If you want to change the world, start off by making your bed.” This is an oft visited concept in the Bible. In other words, make sure you have your own house in order before you start pointing out the flaws in other people’s houses.  

We often see social crusaders—some of them even pretend to be Christians—who love to reference Jesus flipping over tables, as if he was a madman who never passed a table that he didn’t flip. The only instance of Jesus flipping tables in the Gospels was caused by people desecrating the House of God—I see plenty of that in parishes on Sunday mornings, so maybe I’ll revisit that in the future. Our struggles and sufferings are exacerbated by our increased belief that we can make it on our own, without God. When we start believing that we can somehow turn this world into heaven, we’ve gone completely off the rails. The New Heaven and New Earth will be brought about by Jesus, not by us. Our job in the here and now is to operate from our own unique perspectives in order to understand what each of our roles are in this life. If we rail against the suffering that we must inevitably encounter, we’re destined to go nowhere. If we allow our suffering to humble us and to turn our eyes and hearts toward God to see what He wants from us, that’s when we can help ease the sufferings of others in order to make progress toward our eventual return home to the Kingdom of Heaven.