If so, read Bob Schuchts’s new book.
Bob Schuchts, a marriage and family therapist, is the author of Be Healed and the new Real Suffering. The founder of the John Paul II Healing Center in Tallahassee, Fla., he talks about faith and suffering. — KJL
Kathryn Jean Lopez: Why a book on suffering? If you’re experiencing it acutely, it might just be the last thing you want to read about? Why is that perhaps precisely the reader you wrote this book for?
Bob Schuchts: I had a woman tell me she didn’t want to pick the book up because she was already suffering enough and didn’t want to be depressed. Eventually, she picked it up and began to read. She said it brought her a lot of joy and hope. I wrote the book for all of us — because we all suffer and we need to see the good that can come from it.
Real Suffering validates the reality of what we all experience. We all need to be validated that our suffering is real and that it hurts. More importantly, we all need to find hope and healing in the midst of it. It does no good to validate the reality of our suffering unless there is hope. And that hope is often in the healing that we find through our suffering and in the relief of its root causes.
Lopez: You dedicate your book to your wife, Margie, “who left a legacy of love even through her most difficult suffering.” What does it mean to leave a legacy of love? What did you learn most from the way she suffered?
Schuchts: “Legacy of love” is the phrase my son-in-law Stephen used to describe Margie’s impact after listening to those who shared at her wake. She touched many people by her acts of love. We all experienced it profoundly throughout her illness and dying process. I learned not to be afraid of the things that you would normally fear the most — the people you love becoming incapacitated and dying. Love casts out fear. Experiencing her love and God’s love and all of our love for her and each other lessened the fearful things and turned them into something memorable.
Lopez: Is being “transformed” by suffering always for the better?
Schuchts: In the way the Church uses the word “transformation,” yes. It is always for the better, we are transformed in Christ, and that is always for our good — even when it doesn’t feel good.
Lopez: “During this life, each of us suffers physically, emotionally, and spiritually.” Even those who do not consider themselves spiritual or religious?
Schuchts: Yes, everybody’s body decays and hurts, everybody suffers loss, everyone experiences guilt (unless they completely block out the reality). It has nothing to do with being spiritual or religious. It has to do with being a human being in a fallen world.
Lopez: “We also share in the suffering of those around us, both near and far.” You mention “myriad examples of human suffering that bombard our sensibilities on a daily basis.” You’ve got refugees, abandoned children, racial tension, sexual abuse, just to name a few. What is this doing to us? I often think we are traumatized people by it? What can we do about it?
Schuchts: I agree it is traumatizing. I believe the bombardment causes many of us to harden ourselves so that it doesn’t affect us, which makes us more insensitive to people in general. If we allow ourselves to take it in, we feel compassion, but also perhaps it triggers an incapacitating fear and helplessness. I don’t watch the news for that reason. I experience enough suffering in the people I interact with on a daily basis, and I can still respond compassionately in prayer and response without hearing about it constantly. We can bring all that we experience into prayer, praying for people and then responding with love and service to the suffering around us. Love overcomes our fear, and our actions overcome our feeling of helplessness.
Lopez: How on earth is “the capacity to feel pain a gift?”
Schuchts: Pain is a signal that something is wrong in our bodies and souls. It is like a fire alarm or a warning signal in your car. If you ignore the alarm, the fire will cause even more destruction. But if you listen to the alarm, you can respond in time to stop the fire or at least minimize its damage. Much of the time, we can do something about our pain, if we are willing to listen to it and find out what is causing it. If we ignore it, the underlying problem gets worse.
Lopez: “One of the most amazing things about God’s grace is that he transforms the most detestable things in life into the greatest of miracles.” How are you so sure these are not the types of things we say to make ourselves feel better?
Schuchts: We can say those things to make ourselves feel better, but if we don’t believe they are true, they don’t really help us feel better. We know at least one miracle — the resurrection that came from something detestable (the crucifixion). I believe we each know things personally that have been transformed from evil to good. It is the promise of the Gospel message. If we believe the Gospel, then we see that God works through every circumstance to bring about a greater good, if we cooperate with his grace.
Lopez: What is the “wholeness” God wants to restore in us?
Schuchts: Wholeness is becoming who God called us to be, what he had in mind in creation and redemption. To be restored to physical, emotional, and spiritual health. Jesus and Mary are the models for our wholeness. Wholeness comes from growing in communion with God.
Wholeness is best expressed in this passage in the Bible: “May the God of peace himself make you perfectly holy and may you entirely, spirit, soul, and body, be preserved blameless for the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ.” (1 Th. 5:23)
Lopez: Your contention is that “in all the places where our hearts have been broken by betrayal and loss, Jesus desires to tenderly minister his healing touch to restore our capacity to give and receive love.” But what if someone has given up on God entirely precisely because of the suffering in the world and, probably, in his or her own life?
Schuchts: Quite a few people do turn away from God because of their suffering. There is an implicit blaming of God due to distorted understanding of who God is. These distortions are often projections from the person’s family life. They end up seeing God as mean, distant, and uncaring, so they don’t turn to God for help because they don’t expect him to meet them. This is where the Scriptures give hope. Jesus (and his followers) respond very differently to suffering and give us a path to follow.
Lopez: “Jesus’s passion, death, and resurrection stand as the centerpiece of all of human history. He came to share in our suffering in order to free us from our misery. Nothing in this life or the next makes any sense apart from these realities.” But to some they sound as unrealistic as it gets. Like escapist fairy tales.
Schuchts: It sounds unreal to all of us until it becomes real in our life. Only when we experience our suffering in light of the Holy Spirit does it make any sense to us. Until then, all we have is escape. Fairy tales are made up, but even fairy tales contain these themes of passion, death, and resurrection. Jesus passion, death, and resurrection are real historical events. They stand at the center of human history. To deny them is to deny reality. To deny our own suffering, dying, and resurrection is also to deny reality.
Lopez: “The entire work of the Holy Spirit in the Church is for this purpose: to heal us through the suffering of our personal crosses so that we can live every more fully in the hope of Christ’s resurrected life.” Do the scandals in the Church right now make more sense through this filter?
Schuchts: The Church scandals are the result of people who have tried to escape their suffering. In doing so they inflicted it on innocent people. Abused people often abuse other people. People who are deeply wounded by these events, both directly and indirectly, have this hope — that all of their suffering can bring them into Christ’s resurrection life, if we enter into with faith and open ourselves to the Holy Spirit.
Lopez: How do you recognize the Holy Spirit at work?
Schuchts: We can recognize the work of the Holy Spirit by His actions and the fruits that come from those actions. The Holy Spirit works in three fundamental ways: 1) He brings us into communion with Jesus and with one another, 2) He works through us to share God’s love with others, and 3) He works in us to transform us and make us holy. He does all this in many different ways: revealing truth, convicting of sin, spiritual gifts such as wisdom, knowledge, prophecy, fear of God, healing, etc. Wherever the Holy Spirit is operating, the fruit will be evident: Love, joy, peace . . . and there will be a capacity to understand spiritual realities.