Here is the idea. Maybe suffering doesn't make sense because it's like one of those paintings that don't make sense.
As I write, I am looking at one of Paul Signac's pointillist paintings of the harbor at Marseille. I observe that there are a lot of mustard-yellow blobs in the middle of what is presumably the sea. Maybe they represent the sunlight on the waves or something. But then what are the lavender blobs supposed to be? And the red blobs are completely inexcusable. This sea, I think to myself, is full of blobs. It is all blobs and no sea. What an exceedingly defective painting.
Only, when you stand back, it actually looks rather good.
I like pointillist paintings because they capture the fragmentation of life, the sense that life is a drawer full of odd socks. Within the madness, within the ugliness, within the suffering, our hope may yet hang on the big picture, which we do not yet see.
In this same vein, think of how discord is used in a piece of music to tell a bigger story. In the end, somehow, the awful noise may yet resolve into an unexpected harmony. Musical people may be able to sense that a resolution is coming. Yet our location within the unfolding drama of the music is always in media res. No one can know ahead of time how the piece will end.
In the Christian story, sorrow will be “redeemed.” This is God's promise, no more and no less.
When we say in common English that a person has “redeemed” herself, we don't mean that she has erased the past. Rather, her earlier actions are recontextualized or reevaluated in light of her later ones. In the light of the whole story, even the memory of the past is transformed.
Christianity does not offer an answer to the problem of suffering, but it does offer two things. One is a present imperative, a call-to-arms, to imitate Jesus Christ in the terrible, beautiful, transformative mission of suffering for others' sake. The other is the future hope of seeing the winter of our suffering redeemed and transformed. It is the hope of spring.
Et gloria in excelsis Deo.
Stephen G. Mackereth '15 is a joint mathematics and philosophy concentrator in Mather House.