The suffering caused by avoiding suffering

As I was waiting at my doctor’s office for my annual checkup this week, I noticed a crucifix hanging on the wall of the large waiting room. I was going to bless myself in front of it, but something was slightly off about it. Our savior’s hands were no longer nailed to the cross. Instead, they were lifted up symbolizing, I suppose, His victory over death and His resurrection.

It seemed sacrilegious to me, but at the time, I didn’t really understand why. After seeing the doctor and witnessing something at the lab where I needed to give blood, I realized what the problem was that I have with the “resurrected Jesus cross.” In fact, I’ve come to believe that it represents to a good extent the trouble that our society finds itself in nowadays.

We can no longer tolerate seeing a suffering Jesus. Nor can we be bothered by the compunction which tells us to attach our sufferings to His. We do not want death and suffering. We want only the resurrection and joy that his suffering brought us. But we should remember that Jesus did not raise from the dead while still on the cross. He experienced death, was buried and even descended into hell before he rose again. To get the resurrected Jesus cross, we must forcefully pull our Lord’s hands through the nails and pull him off the cross.

And since we are not willing to accompany Jesus in His manifold sorrows, we let things slide. For instance, we allow greed to masquerade as compassion. Progress that promises a time when suffering is obliterated is ample justification for forcing our elderly to live at the mercy of insurance companies. We tell them to kneel at the alter of big pharma and pray to the worldly saints of insurance for permission to take lab tests. We bombard them with requests to “ask your doctor if [insert ridiculous made-up name] is right for you.” And we saddle them with debt that means they may lose their homes or at the very least have nothing left to pass on to their heirs. All in the name of progress. And progress is, by definition, a journey away from suffering.

We allow doctors to kill on a massive scale in order to avoid the suffering that might come from an unwanted child. Mom wouldn’t have a chance to go to college. She might lose her scholarship or chance to play basketball at her university. Mom and dad who aren’t married don’t have any money, so the child would grow up poor. Mom doesn’t know who the dad is, so it wouldn’t be right to make the child suffer without knowing who his or her father is. The child may have a disease and death is better than suffering. Since Roe v. Wade, over 60 million babies have suffered an agonizing death in the U.S. just to avoid one kind of suffering or another.

We use birth control in order to avoid suffering that a child would bring and in order to avoid the physical suffering that self-control demands. As a result, we can no longer tell the difference between homosexuality and heterosexuality. When the procreative function of sex is eliminated, there is no difference between gay sex and straight sex. And in our desire to avoid the suffering that sexual restraint may cause, we open the flood gates to all manner of promiscuity. We are at the point now that pedophilia is normalized and we have no backbone to resist it. Even the mainstream media is defending pedophiles and human traffickers by denigrating the movie “Sound of Freedom” as conspiracy theory.

We allow adults with no moral compass and no inkling of the sacredness of the temple that is the human body to carve up the living flesh of our children, promising to make males into females and females into males but in the end making them neither male nor female but outliers–victims of the lie that we don’t have to bear our own individual crosses, like gender dysphoria. In our sorely misguided attempt to help these kids avoid suffering, we saddle them with body parts that have a semblance of reality but that do not function like real ones and that must be maintained with costly chemicals, the effects of which will be detrimental to their health. The temple is twisted when redemptive suffering is not embraced, when we refuse to allow others their chance to suffer redemptively.

But suffer we must if we are to have part in the heavenly kingdom. It is axiomatic and unavoidable that we will suffer in one way or another. “Suffering is part of human existence from birth until death, and every human person suffers in a variety of ways: physically, psychologically, socially, and spiritually.”¹ Therefore, let our suffering be for righteousness sake, not for complacency or culpability in the sins of others.

For it is better to suffer for doing good, if that should be God’s will, than for doing evil.

1 Peter 3:17

The hospital where I saw the resurrected Jesus cross is a Catholic hospital, in name. We would do well to remember that we didn’t pull Jesus from the cross. We put Him there.