ViewPoints 22
catholicnewsherald.com | August 5, 2022 CATHOLIC NEWS HERALD
Deacon Matthew Newsome
Happiness and suffering
M
y son had just finished a word game on his phone, the aim of which was to solve a puzzle to decipher a phrase. “What do you think of this, Dad?” he asked as he slid the phone across the table to me. The solution to the puzzle had revealed a quote by French-Algerian philosopher Albert Camus: “For who would dare to assert that eternal happiness can compensate for a single moment’s human suffering?” I told my son I didn’t think the author really understood the concepts of eternal happiness or suffering. Albert Camus was a Nobel Prize-winning writer and philosopher who was certainly familiar with suffering. He lived through the Nazi invasion of France and was twice divorced. But, as an atheist and consummate pessimist, he was perhaps less familiar with happiness. Camus is often labeled as an existentialist philosopher, a label he, himself, rejected. His writings contributed to the rise of absurdism, the philosophical school of thought that would deny life any meaning. To the absurdist, both happiness and suffering are meaningless in the end, but happiness at least affords us pleasure in the here and now. The above quote comes from Camus’ 1947 novel “The Plague,” in which a narrator chronicles an illness sweeping through a French-Algerian city. We should read it, therefore, as a sentiment expressed by a fictional character witnessing great suffering, and not necessarily reflective of Camus’ philosophy as a whole. Nevertheless, it provides us with an interesting opportunity to explore the relationship between happiness and suffering. We might assume happiness and suffering to be diametrically opposed, but that assumption deserves to be questioned. The Latin word “suffere,” from which the word “suffer” is derived, literally means to endure. We endure things we perceive as burdensome, but this is not always a bad thing. Just as wax suffers the pressure of the seal or clay suffers the hands of the potter, any formative process involves endurance and therefore suffering. Whether that suffering be for good or ill depends on what we are being formed into. We willingly accept suffering to achieve a goal, though we may not think of it as such. Students suffer to have their minds molded by study. Athletes suffer to have their bodies molded by exercise. In truth, we are all being unwittingly molded every day by the experiences we have, the films we watch, the music we listen to, the books we read and the company we keep. This, too, is a form of suffering. We are all in the process of being formed, becoming something that we were not before. We all suffer because that’s what it means to grow. Whether our suffering has value or not depends on what we grow into. This is where happiness comes into
“Saint Francis Embracing Christ on the Cross” by Bartolomé Esteban Murillo (1668-1669)
‘The happiest people you will ever meet are those who have learned to suffer well. This is what made the witness of the early martyrs so attractive.’ play. Happiness is one of those terms we think we understand better than we do. The word comes from the Old Norse “happ,” which means “luck” (hence the word “happenstance”). But the word has evolved to take on a deeper meaning, one evoked by the framers of the Declaration of Independence when they wrote of the “pursuit of happiness.” They were not
speaking of the pursuit of luck, but of a sense of self-worth and dignity that comes from a life of meaning. This deeper sense of the word “happiness” is tied to the idea of purpose. The athlete is happy when he wins the race because he knows the suffering of his training has been worth it. The musician is happy playing the piano as she enjoys
the fruits of her long hours of rehearsal. The teacher is happy when he is teaching, and happier still when his students do well. Parents are happy knowing they have raised good children. These vocations, like all vocations, require sacrifice and suffering as we give ourselves to a greater purpose. The happiness we experience knowing our lives have meaning goes well beyond physical pleasure. The word we give to this elevated and enduring happiness is “blessed.” This helps explain the seeming paradox of the beatitudes (see, for example, Mt 5:3-12) and Jesus’ assertion that whoever would save his life must lose it (see Mt 16:25). The happiest people you will ever meet are those who have learned to suffer well. This is what made the witness of the early martyrs so attractive. Pagan Roman observers were astonished not just that these Christians were willing to give their lives for Christ, but that they did so with songs of praise on their lips and joy in their hearts. By contrast, selfish people are invariably unhappy. Counterintuitively, their unwillingness to suffer makes them miserable. I offer the above vocational examples to illustrate the principle that achieving happiness requires a willingness to endure suffering, but we should not think of the purpose of our lives in strictly utilitarian terms. The most meaningful things in life are not task-oriented but relationshiporiented; time spent with God, family, friends and neighbors. God did not place us on this earth to check items off a to-do list, but to know, love and serve Him, as manifested in our love of God (prayer and worship) and love of neighbor (works of mercy). Love involves suffering because love means giving yourself away. Poets and songwriters know that the best way to demonstrate love is not to say how much I desire you but to show how much I’m willing to suffer for you. We may wonder, if love is the source of such great suffering, why would anyone choose it? Because love is also the source of our greatest joy. It’s what we were made for, and we cannot be happy without it. What lovers know intuitively, God declares definitively from the cross. What looks like death from this side of the veil is revealed as the gateway to glory and eternal life. As we are being pressed and molded by the Potter’s hand into the very image of love, we will experience suffering. So if love is real, then Camus is wrong, and eternal happiness not only compensates for temporary suffering, but is quite unobtainable without it. DEACON MATTHEW NEWSOME is the Catholic campus minister at Western Carolina University and the regional faith formation coordinator for the Smoky Mountain Vicariate.
