suffering and beauty

Violet Horizon; Peter Wileman

Before I proceed, I want to address something from my last post that could easily be misunderstood: I mentioned that in the past, suffering and beauty and love were always intertwined for me. It is very easy for people - Catholics and non-Catholics alike - to misconstrue this as a justification for being miserable or depressed. After meeting a few people who inadvertently follow this logic, and after falling into it myself for awhile, I feel that it is necessary to explicate the notion of beauty and suffering further so that both you and myself can have a fuller understanding of what exactly it means.

I began to liberally quote Pope Benedict XVI's "Contemplation of Beauty," but my summary expanded interminably and ultimately did very little justice to his actual words - so I recommend you read them for yourself. I will principally deal with one quote that summarizes his theology:

"Beauty is truth and truth beauty; but in the suffering Christ man also learns that the beauty of truth also embraces offence, pain, and even the dark mystery of death, and that this can only be found in accepting suffering, not in ignoring it."

It is this that will serve as my launching point: that suffering is inevitable; it is one's reaction to it that varies. Buddhists, for instance, seek to detach themselves from the world in order to escape suffering. Postmodernists also seek to detach themselves from it in a peculiar way - something darker than 'ignoring' it, I think... attacking it with apathy at best, but ultimately degrading both suffering itself and the part of oneself that experiences suffering as worthless and weak, something worthy of abandonment. The rational becomes divorced from the sentimental - conquer and succeed at everything, but emotionally invest in nothing; let organization, hard work, and persona compensate for a lack of genuine love and investment.

A whole society of schismatic characters arise from the chaos, individuals who have been hurt and have decided to be strong, not by embracing the hurt and growing through it, but by discarding it, spitting on it, cutting off the part of them weak enough to be hurt and leaving it behind, or simply building a thick concrete wall around that person, leaving them alone and scarcely alive, and constructing a new one on the outside, a person that others will love, enjoy, find attractive; a person that will succeed.

What one finds, if one is blessed enough to come back from such a hollow existence, is that even in the avoidance of suffering, there is the greatest suffering of all - the terrible endless loneliness of your true self. After all, your true existence is defined by your soul, which cannot help but feel. Your only two options then would be to either live in a state of awareness that you have silenced an essential part of your being (a state which would cause insurmountable pain, cynicism, or bitterness), which would of course defeat the purpose of escaping from pain - or you can even cut yourself off from the soul-consciousness that you are even in pain - completing the severance and leaving the individual with an undefinable, scarcely audible sense of being hopelessly lost, or not knowing who oneself is.

It is for this reason that I say that suffering and beauty used to be intertwined for me, and that this was a blessing - not that the suffering by itself was a cause for joy, but that my own reaction to an inevitable hurt was a full embrace of love; not rejecting the part of myself that feels, but rather recognizing it as the part of myself that can truly be redeemed; learning and remembering in my very biological composition (90% of one's memories are hardwired before the age of 7), in the roots of my soul, that a movement into suffering with love and trust results in a beautiful - tragically so, but beautiful nonetheless - testament to the true essence of Life, of Love, and of Beauty itself... that moving into suffering with Love changes knives into instruments... that we are like blocks of wood in the hands of the Maker, carved by suffering into something beautiful if we only trust. We cannot lose faith halfway and harden our wood in resistance, feeling the cuts ever more crude and brutal, to run away, only half-hewn and rough, taking half-finished work to be hideous scars, and resolving never to return to the brutal Artist who sought to mutilate us and left us so ugly, so lost, so broken. It is only through patience, trust, surrender, waiting, waiting, waiting, until the Artist is totally finished, trusting until the very moment of our death, that the lifetime of carving will finally be revealed as something beautiful... I had the tragically beautiful blessing to see those final moments, see the final work of art before it was whisked away, and to know, to know, that God does not abandon those that trust in Him - and despite everything, to hold fast, to plunge into every suffering with love, and know that He is making us into a Masterpiece.