Hideous and Dreadful; Lovely and Sweet: the Paschal Mystery of Suffering

I rather often get asked to give talks about suffering, because – and I’ll say a bit more about this a little later -  it was the topic of my PhD thesis. And, when I do,

people are sometimes surprised by what I don’t say, so I felt I should prepare you in advance. I’m not – which I hope will be a relief rather than a disappointment – going to try  to solve what C S Lewis, in what was perhaps not his finest apologetic hour – called the problem of pain; I’m not, that is, attempting to explain how and why an omnipotently good God allows overwhelmingly bad things to happen. I’m not doing that, partly because I don’t believe it can entirely be done (and there’s evidence to suggest that some of the greatest theological heavyweights of our Church, including St Thomas Aquinas would have agreed) and most attempts to do so are embarrassing at best. But more importantly, I’m not going to do it because I’m not convinced that even if it could be done, it would be as much help as we might expect. Suffering would still be suffering, pain would still hurt.

Instead, I’m hoping to explore how some of the riches – liturgical, paraliturgical and artistic – of our tradition, especially those on which we focus at this time of year, might give us, and those to whom we minister – slightly unexpected resources of consolation when we – or those for whom we care are suffering. In one sense, of course, I’m not going to be saying anything remotely new, least of all to this audience, perhaps, but I hope that nonetheless, hearing it said in a different voice and accent might stimulate thought and prayer. But before that, I’m going to suggest that there are two – apparently very different, but actually disconcertingly similar  - ways of getting our thinking and praying about suffering wrong, which, however pious they may sometimes sound, have very little to do with the paschal mystery.

The first is to say, effectively: pain is inevitable, suffering is optional, on the assumption that pain is what happens to us, whereas suffering is what we make of it.  Whatever, in other words, life throws at us, it is always and simply wrong, and culpably wrong to fail to rise above it: It is  always and simply a sign of insufficient confidence in God and concern for others, and  it will always and simply, therefore,  be vulnerable to our attempts to fight it so long as we are truly committed to the struggle.  On this account, if we were really living the Christian life as it should be lived, there would be no room for sadness, except sadness for sin, including the sin of not telling suffering where to go. Now, there are venerable and valuable aspects of our tradition that could certainly be read to suggest something like that, but I do think it would be a misreading. The Desert Fathers, for instance, do often speak of a kind of sadness which results from our deliberately insulating ourselves from the effects of God’s grace, describing this as the evil thought of sadness. But this is far from the whole story. Those who are clinically depressed, the bereaved, those struggling with a terminal diagnosis, those who are broken down by the sufferings of those they love; none of these are culpable for their pain, none of them are succumbing to the evil thought of sadness.  There may well be a kind of sadness  for which we bear personal responsibility. But the  last thing those who are suffering the hell of depression, or failing to thrive emotionally after the death of a loved one, need is well meaning Christian friends telling them that it is somehow their fault, and that it would go away if only they would try hard enough – even, perhaps even especially, incidentally, if we try to take the Pelagian edge of this by adding that, of course, we mean trying hard enough to trust in God’s grace.

As I have said, I rather often get asked to give talks on suffering, and preparing for one such some years ago, I did a quick internet search and discovered large numbers of articles on websites of various Christian traditions addressing the question “is it a sin to be sad”, or, even more heartbreakingly, “is it a sin to be depressed?” Encouragingly, the vast majority of responses to these queries, at least of those I could bring myself to read, were concerned to reassure their readers that no, it is not a sin to be sad, and that Christians who are depressed should seek professional help without any suggestion that in doing so they are somehow letting the side down. But it is distressing that such questions need to be asked, though, from my own pastoral and personal experience, not, alas, entirely surprising.  At least equally alarmingly, there was the person who posted a question on a Catholic website to ask how it could be the case that Our Lady suffered at the sight of Jesus on the Cross, if she was immaculately conceived and therefore free from sin, including the sin of suffering. Something has surely gone very, very wrong when committed Catholics are even tempted to see compassion as somehow incompatible with holiness.

It is, of course, hard to see how such views can be harmonised with the narrative at the centre of our faith, the  story of the first Holy Week, where we see God’s perfect love for us manifested most powerfully in the mental anguish as well as the physical pain of Jesus, but the notion that sadness is inevitably culpable is perhaps a particularly tempting analysis in our culture, chiming with some very prevalent attitudes which suggest that to be unhappy is to be a failure, indeed that weakness is a failure, per se and a moral failure at that. And, however counter-cultural we may believe ourselves to be as Christians, we are never entirely immune to the spirit of the age.     One way in which contemporary Christians sometimes attempt to have this particular slice of cake and eat it, to be both disciples of Christ and children of our own time, is to view the Passion through the lens of the stiff upper lip: we know, as St Peter tells us in his first epistle, that Christ suffered for us, leaving us an example,  and, on this account, that example is above all the example of keeping calm and carrying on.

The trouble with that reading, of course, is that it is seriously inattentive to how Our Lord actually behaves in Gethsemane, on the way of the Cross, and at Calvary itself: he prays in anguish to be spared his Passion (and specifically describes himself as sad, sorrowful) he accepts the assistance of Simon of Cyrene – presumably because he needs it – he cries out from the Cross. All of this is an example for us – everything that Christ does and suffers is to teach us, and that includes these moments of unimaginable dereliction and vulnerability. Whatever else we might want to say about sadness and suffering, surely we have to say that just dismissing it as sinful capitulation to weakness won’t do. Christ suffered and was sad; Our Lady suffered and was sad.  As Catholic Christians we believe them both to be sinless. There are, then, at least some forms of sadness that are in no way blameworthy, indeed they might even be meritorious: after all, it can’t be a bad thing, can it, to be like Jesus and Mary?

And this brings me to the second attitude that I think we would do well to avoid.  I suspect it might in fact come as a surprise to many of our secular contemporaries to know that Christians, perhaps especially Catholics, are ever tempted to see sadness as inherently sinful.  A more common caricature of our faith, after all, would probably be one that sees it as a matter of unrelieved gloom, pathologically obsessed with pain, maybe puritanically avoiding pleasure, viewing sadness and suffering, therefore, as altogether a good thing. And, though this is a caricature, and we’re rightly distressed by it, there is perhaps something in the criticism that deserves our attention. After all, one of the central images of our faith is indeed Jesus suffering on the Cross, with his grief stricken mother beside him. If to be holy is to be like Jesus and Mary, and Jesus is above all the man of sorrows, acquainted with grief, and Mary above all his Sorrowful Mother, does that mean that the sadder we are the holier we are, because the more we will then resemble Jesus and Mary?

The problems with this approach are fairly obvious.  After all, if it is good, and holy to suffer, why should I be concerned to alleviate the sufferings of others? Aren’t I doing them a favour by leaving them in their misery? Mightn’t it even be a good thing for us to seek out suffering, and encourage others to do so?

There are I think undeniably some strands of Catholic spirituality which are not altogether immune to this terrible temptation; exaggerated emphasis on bodily penance, for instance, which, though it is sometimes described as “Medieval”, or belonging to the so-called “Dark Ages” is sadly still observable in some quarters today, but it should be just as unthinkable to Catholics as the attitude that sees all sadness as sinful, and for rather similar reasons. This approach too seems to view the events of Holy Week somewhat selectively. We might say that whereas the advocates of what I called the stiff upper lip approach have sidelined Good Friday, those who place suffering exclusively centre stage in our spiritual life are at risk of ignoring Easter, forgetting that Jesus did not simply come to suffer, not even to teach us how to suffer and to offer our suffering in union with his, though this is a beautiful and important theme in Catholic piety, when it’s rightly understood. No, he came to bring us with him through suffering to joy, through death to resurrection. Suffering and sadness was not an end in itself for Jesus: it was for the joy that was set before him that he endured the Cross - and it should never be an end in itself for those who are his followers and friends.  

So, no Easter without Good Friday, but equally, no Good Friday without Easter. But there’s more to be said about the shape of Holy Week that is relevant here – and this brings me back to the topic of my thesis and how I came to write it.

I’m a convert, born into a culturally Anglican but non-practising family. When I tell the story of my soul I tend to say that the Church of England was the Church which, as a family, we didn’t go to: we were putters down of CofE on census forms and the like; my brother and I were baptized in infancy – I suspect largely to please my grandmother -  and that was about it. When my father died very suddenly – I was fourteen at the time - and the meaning of life kind of questions teenagers tend to ask were somewhat sharpened for me by his death, I began exploring Christianity and was confirmed in the Church of England at university. My later decision to seek full communion with the Catholic Church has a complicated backstory, which is not especially relevant right now, except for one thing.  I was working on a postgraduate diploma in theology, and my studies were taking place against the landscape of protracted, complicated grief for my father, and, related to that, a raft of undiagnosed - hindsight is 20.20 -  mental health issues, so God’s relationship to human suffering wasn’t just a fascinating but abstract question. I was definitely not concerned to solve the problem of pain, only to know how not to crumble in the face of the mystery of suffering.   And, in this context, through the recommendation of Catholic friends, I came across the writings of several authors of  - for want of better words -  popular spirituality from the mid-20^th century, whose approach to suffering, set against the backdrop of the particularly obvious affliction caused by the Second World War was quite unlike anything I had ever come across before.

My Church of England practice had been fairly“high” – I would certainly have self-identified as a Catholic in the Anglican tradition; I’m sure if I’d been asked, I would have said that I was familiar with Catholic spirituality, and in many ways that would have been true. But what was new in this material was an emphasis on how the sufferings of Christians were related to the sufferings of Christ: the notion that because in baptism we are made members of the Body of Christ we can say, in a nuanced but true way, that what we undergo, Christ undergoes, and it blew me away.  I was particularly struck – as I still am – by the writings of Caryll Houselander; if you don’t know her already, I recommend that you get to know her: she is a truly extraordinary figure, and it would take you a couple of hours to read her enchanting autobiography, A Rocking Horse Catholic – so called because, though she wasn’t a cradle Catholic, her mother converted, and brought her children with her into the Church, when Caryll was a toddler.  One anecdote from that autobiography encapsulates her intense awareness of the reality of the Christian’s identity, especially the suffering Christian’s identity, with Christ, and it’s worth spending a little time with it now.

Houselander tells of a deeply mysterious childhood experience, an experience that she tells us lasted for little more than a minute, evades full description and easy explanation, but set the course for the rest of her life as sculptress, artist, poet, mystic, and therapist and spiritual director to those bruised and scarred by their own crucifying experiences of suffering.

The episode took place when Houselander was around ten years old, at the height of the First World War. Most of the sisters at her convent school in Birmingham were either French or Belgian; one, just one, was German. Ostracized by the other sisters on account of her nationality, deprived of news from home, this woman, already pushed to the margins of her community by language difficulties and what Houselander quite frankly describes as her lack of “charm”, descends into an apparently Godforsaken loneliness. One day, Houselander runs across her cleaning the other sisters’ shoes in the scullery, and, as the sister works, believing herself to be alone, the tears stream down her face. Houselander, embarrassed  as children are by adult weeping, initially looks away horrified. What happens next is best described in her own words:

“At last, with an effort I raised my head, and then I saw the nun was crowned with the crown of thorns.

Houselander tried to comfort the nun:  “I wouldn’t cry” she told her, “if I was wearing the crown of thorns, like you are”. The little girl, in other words, was suddenly shown that the suffering of the lonely and mistreated lay sister was part of the suffering of Christ himself, part, therefore, of the suffering that redeemed the world.  However humiliated she may have felt as she was kept at the beck and call of the more socially exalted members of her community, hers was a dignity and a meaningfulness above all other, that could never be taken away from her, because it was the dignity of participating in Christ’s redemption of the world as a member of his Mystical Body the Church.

Houselander’s was a unique voice, in one sense, but in another way typical of her age, because this was the era in which the idea of the Church as the Mystical Body dominated Catholic ecclesiology.  People talked about it in wildly divergent and mutually exclusive ways, which is why, in 1943, a year or so before A Rocking Horse Catholic came out, Pope Pius XII published his ecclesiological encyclical, Mystici Corporis Christi, in an attempt to impose a degree of order on the chaos, by asserting what magisterially loyal Catholics were saying when they spoke of the Church in this way. This, fascinating as it is – not least because I think it’s actually a rather important bit of evidence for the defence against the charge of Pius’ collusion with Nazism (ask me about this later, if you’re interested) would definitely be another kind of a talk for another kind of day.  What is important for our purposes right now is that Pius XII drew attention to the fact that, in the midst of what he called a World in flames, Catholics could, indeed, glory in their thorn crowned head, by offering their own sufferings, both those occasioned by, in Pius’ phrase “the circumstances of these present times” and those actively chosen as voluntary penance, for the redemption of the world.

When my Congregation encouraged me to apply to study for a PhD, I was certain that this is where I wanted to focus, partly because the historical circumstances that led to the promulgation of Mystici Corporis Christi were so intriguing, but mostly because  I was convinced – once again, not that I could solve the problem of pain, but that this strain of Catholic ecclesiology, and the offertory spirituality it so clearly promoted, needed to be reawakened – insofar as it was somewhat dormant – precisely as a response to the mystery of suffering. Doctoral theses, of course, undergo sometimes radical transformation, but this did remain at the centre of mine. There were, though, a couple of shifts in emphasis.

Whilst I had been at a very dark period in my own life profoundly consoled by talk of offering my suffering in union with that of Christ, and whilst I continued – and continue -  to be inspired by this idea (and awed by the examples of many who put it into practice) I also began to discover ways in which the notion, and the spirituality it nurtured, could be abused and abusive. I’ve – probably mercifully – forgotten, for instance, in just which dubious corner of the Catholic blogosphere I found extreme physical pain referred to as an experience of being treated with “God’s meat tenderiser”.   As I have said, there can be a perversely alluring quality to suffering as instrument of spiritual growth – who wouldn’t want to be more like Jesus and Mary, after all – and the remedy for this, as I’ve also suggested, is  surely to insist on Easter as well as Good Friday. So that was the first shift.

The second came as I spent time in the course of my research with liturgy, popular devotion and Christian art, and I noticed a puzzling quality common to all three. It’s not just that both Good Friday and Easter can, as one would obviously expect, so often be found in both the Church’s worship, and in religious poetry, painting and music. Often, they are found together, at the same time. I coined (I think; if anyone has come across it in anything published before 2022, please don’t tell me!) the rather pretentious but descriptive phrase “paschal simultaneity” to describe this phenomenon.  The most obvious liturgical example is of course the Mass itself: an invitation both to stand at the foot of the Cross and to recline at the Paschal banquet. But something similar can also be seen in artefacts in various media which depict the events of the Triduum.

It would, of course, be possible to paint a picture of Calvary which was kitsch, evasive or even horribly voyeuristic. But it would be difficult to assert this of, say, a Fra Angelico or a Cimabue crucifixion and something similar can be said of many musical and literary evocations of the Passion as well. We might think, for instance, of the radiant final movements of Bach’s St Matthew Passion, or of the anonymous Old English poem, the Dream of the Rood, in which a mysterious talking tree, simultaneously bejewelled with gorgeous gemstones and drenched with blood tells how it was felled and fashioned into the gallows on which the young Lord who is God almighty climbs to fight and defeat death.

We are reminded, perhaps of that quotation from Julian of Norwich with which we began: there is something here that is lovely and sweet as well as hideous and dreadful.   It is possible to produce beautiful depictions of this abjectly horrible scene, without being in any sense untruthful: there is beauty, as well as horror to be portrayed here. There is a mystery in this, which we often overlook because in one sense it is so familiar: we have all seen, heard, read such artistic images of the Cross.  It is a mystery, too, which needs very careful handling, because the last thing we would want to do is to identify the beauty and the horror, to say that suffering, per se, is beautiful. It is no less pathological to say that the more we suffer the more beautiful we are, than to say that the more we suffer the more like Jesus we are.  I’ll try to say a little more about this at the end, but for now let’s just hold onto this thought: Cross and Resurrection, Easter and Good Friday as two sides of the same coin.

A final shift came when I realized that one could in fact discern two forms of paschal simultaneity. It is possible, to put it simply, either to view the Cross through the lens of the Resurrection, or vice versa. The NT record itself suggests as much of course: Jesus reigns from the Cross and rises with his scars visible and tangible.  And  - in yet another bit of somewhat affected neologizing – I referred to these respectively as retrojective and projective paschal simultaneity, according as the radiance of Easter is thrown back, as it were, onto the gloom of Good Friday (Jesus reigns on Calvary) or as the horror of Good Friday is sent forward to Easter (he shows his scars in the Upper Room) And each form has its own potential for offering consolation.

It’s easier to find examples of the first, retrojective form in both art and worship, whether official liturgy or popular devotion. It’s what Fra Angelico, Bach et al are doing, but it can also be seen in, for example, the moment – to western Christians inevitably something of a liturgical culture shock – when exultant alleluias ring out in the Byzantine rite’s service of the burial of Jesus on Good Friday. More subtly, perhaps, we can also glimpse it in the closing moments of the office of Tenebrae when the so-called Jesus candle is brought out of its momentary hiding and restored to a sanctuary in which every other light has been extinguished, allowing almost no hiatus between the starkest possible visual symbolism of death and resurrection.   Maybe it even explains both the advocacy in some quarters, and the lack of enthusiasm in others, for a 15^th Station of the Cross: both positions are in different ways, a recognition of the inseparability of Good Friday from Easter.   It’s perhaps obvious just why this is the more common form of Paschal Simultaneity, offering an assurance that whatever crucifying horror we are undergoing will not be the last word for us, any more than it was for the Lord:  Good Friday will be followed by Easter. And the potential for consolation in thus seeing one’s sufferings as already suffused with paschal light is evident. But, of course, such assurance is not automatic.

This is perhaps where what I have been calling projective paschal simultaneity comes into the picture.  There is less immediately evident appeal in viewing Easter in the light of Good Friday than vice versa and certainly fewer texts, artworks and devotional practices (at least in the contemporary Church) in which this perspective is unambiguously present. We are probably far more used to seeing depictions of the crucifixion which suggest that Easter is on the way, than images of the resurrection that remind us that Good Friday has already happened.  This too is surely predictable. Amnesia and denial, personal and communal, in the face of suffering is a widespread and well attested phenomenon, after all, and wouldn’t we all prefer to think of the various Good Fridays of our lives as nightmarish illusions from which we awake into the reality of Easter?  But what if April persists in being the cruellest month, if we  find our inner climate out of season with springtime loveliness, burdened by depression or grief or guilt; broken by relationships in ruin, wretchedly nervous about our future or the futures of those we love, the future of a country and a world we love? What if, despite our best endeavours on Easter Sunday morning, we cannot feel the warmth of resurrection sunshine and our voices crack when we try to sing a song of paschal triumph and paschal joy?

Perhaps there, where grief and trauma are most intense and most abiding, seeing Easter through the lens of Good Friday might have a particularly important consolatory contribution to make precisely because it forbids us from seeing the Cross as simply a reversible blip, and forbids us also therefore from using the Resurrection as a stick to beat either ourselves or others with when we – or they – are overwhelmed with pain or sorrow: get a grip, you’ll rise again in three days’ time like he did; how bad can it be?

I think there might be real value in reflecting here on a practice which, I’m guessing none of us here have experienced at first hand but which, for our ancestors in the faith, would have formed a regular part of their experience of the Triduum.

We are, of course, accustomed to venerating the cross on Good Friday in the liturgy of the Lord’s Passion. In late Medieval England, this ceremony was reprised before the Easter Sunday Mass: there’s a reference to it, for instance, in the 14^th century poem Piers Plowman, where the narrator speaks of creeping to the Cross and kissing it like a jewel on Easter morning. I think this is rather too easily read as a refusal to let go of suffering; just what you might expect of those miserable Medieval types, after all.  In fact, this second veneration of the Cross was itself a victory celebration.

The Cross used in the Sunday morning ceremony had typically been buried from Good Friday evening in the parish’s or religious community’s Easter Sepulchre. It was from there that it was raised and installed in the body of the church mimicking simply but graphically the resurrection of Christ himself. But it was nevertheless, the Cross that was venerated, so worshippers were insistently confronted with the manner and mode of the Lord’s death, even as they hailed his triumph over the grave. 

Moreover, often, though not universally, the crucifix that was entombed on Good Friday was actually a monstrance, containing a host consecrated on Holy Thursday, reminding worshippers of the costliness of the Easter Eucharist in which they were about to participate: Jesus had died in order to pass through death and give them his risen body to be the food for their own journey to and through the grave. But it also assured them that the one who was with them in the Easter Mass knew what it was to suffer as they suffered, to endure crucifying pain and misery.

So I think it would be more generous, and more accurate, to see all of this not as a perverse wallowing in pain, but precisely as  projective paschal simultaneity, in which the memory of what happened on Good Friday is not obliterated by the joy of Easter, but “sent forward” to remain a continued source of consolation to those whose suffering does not obediently disappear in line with the liturgical calendar.

There’s a lot more that could be said all of this. Once one has started to notice it, paschal simultaneity can be found all over the place in art, in devotion, in liturgy. But I suspect that this is because it actually coheres with something that is a commonplace experience in all of our lives. The relationship between suffering and joy is not quite as binary as perhaps we sometimes imagine it to be. There are, of course, times when we laugh so hard that we cry, and there are certainly times when we force a laugh in order not to cry. But there is also the phenomenon that a dear priest friend of mine calls simply laugh-crying, in which laughter and tears are inextricably entwined. Any of us who have ever experienced grief at the loss of a friend or loved one, will perhaps know what I mean: we are recalling the one who has left us, and a memory of an in-joke, or a shared meal makes us smile; we are attending for the first time an annual  family celebration without someone we have lost, and, amid the festivity there is the stab of pain. Again, Good Friday and Easter Day experienced not sequentially but simultaneously.

 But more than this, even: the experience of accompanying each other in pain is also less binary than we might sometimes dare to admit. Julian of Norwich’s claim that the Cross  is lovely and sweet is rightly horrifying at first sight, because it does sound pathological and masochistic to a degree. But she also tells us that it is hideous and dreadful, that she cannot bear to look at it, or at the extraordinarily graphic picture the Lord gives her of his dying (interestingly, she never actually sees him die).  She is not attracted to the Cross in any straightforward way, and so when she tells us that she hears Jesus telling her from the Cross that it is a joy and an endless bliss to suffer for her, that if he could suffer more he would, her account of the experience   does perhaps have a certain moral authority: she is not in love with suffering for its own sake, and she’s not accusing the Lord of such a pathology either. Rather, I think, Julian’s Christ is speaking of something that we too know from our own experience as members of his body.  Both when we ourselves are suffering, and when we are called to minister compassion to others in their pain, there is I think often enough a kind of chiaroscuro quality, as the art historians put it, a kind of interplay of light and dark, shadow and brightness in our encounters like that of a baroque painting.  I’m sure that you will sometimes have spoken out of your pastoral experience, of the privilege of accompanying those who come to us in their suffering, and I know this isn’t just empty rhetoric; when we ourselves find ourselves apologising to friends for bothering them with our troubles, and they assure us that they wouldn’t have it any other way, we should probably pay them the compliment of believing that they mean what they say. No one is happy that those they care for are suffering, but there can be joy, real, healthy and sometimes overwhelming joy in being present with those we care for in their suffering, and it’s the healthy, overwhelming joy of love, paschal joy, the joy of resurrection.