How to change our attitude to suffering

Writer Maggie O'Farrell, who contracted viral encephalitis, a sudden swelling of the brain, when she was eight years old, having to learn to walk again and to talk clearly

What a friend shared to many recently has made me sensitive to what people say about their suffering - whether there is a stance with regards that experience other than cursing God. I quickly found a surprising consensus. My friend suffered a vicious attack in 2014. This is the sharing:

What I’m about to say will most likely be misunderstood, or for some, hard to hear. Recently I watched a TV show on the Disney Channel (I know, I’m really a child at heart). The show is called Secrets of Sulphur Springs. It’s about some children who have found a portal to go back in time and they are working to change something bad that happened. After finishing several episodes I started thinking, if I found a portal and could go back in time, to May 19, 2014, would I change things? And as hard as it is to say (and I’m sure for you to understand) I came to the conclusion that I would not change things. Although I still deal with grief and lingering trauma…I would not change things.  [...] even I’m surprised by my response.

What situation in your life do you believe Jesus has mismanaged for you? What I’ve learned is that Jesus is willing to be misunderstood by us in order to do good things for us. I don’t understand or have all the answers but I know that He works all things together for our good...and, oh, there was a time I could not stand to hear that verse…but it is such a powerful (hard to understand) truth.

Within days of this, the Guardian website had an interview with Irish-British writer Maggie O’Farrell, who has won a prize for her novel Hamnet, about the death of Shakespeare's son. The interview relates...

her own experience of viral encephalitis as an eight-year-old, when she woke up one summer morning with a headache and “the world looked different”. Later in hospital, she overheard the nurse whisper to another child: “Hush, there’s a little girl dying in there,” and was shocked to discover that she was talking about her. “I think anyone who has been through a really severe illness knows that it completely refigures you,” she says. “It is a bit like passing through a fire.”

A journalist recently asked her if she could turn back time would she erase the illness. She replied: “No, because it is who I am. It made me who I am in a lot of ways.” She credits the long convalescence (endless audio books, reading and rereading), and the resulting stammer (thinking hard about every word), helped her to nurture writerly habits.

The Guardian piece tells how O'Farrell is well acquanted with suffering: 

Her offbeat memoir I Am, I Am, I Am – which documents her own 17 brushes with mortality, including a binoculars-wielding strangler, a couple of near-drownings, a botched caesarean, and acute encephalitis as a child – was a surprise bestseller in 2017.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Finally, my reading turned up more on suffering, this time  from Russian writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who died in 2008 after being held in prison camps by the Communist regime, and exiled. An American writer has this to say about Solzhenitsyn's insights:

In his masterwork, The Gulag Archipelago, Solzhenitsyn reveals how he and his fellow inmates were beaten, humiliated, made to live in filth and freezing temperatures. and to endure many other grotesque manifestations of Communism’s determination to create heaven on earth.

That’s why nothing in that epochal book’s pages shocks more than these lines:

"And that is why I turn back to the years of my imprisonment and say, sometimes to the astonishment of those about me: 'Bless you, prison! ... Bless you, prison, for having been in my life!'”

Solzhenitsyn’s audacious claim was that suffering taught him to love. There is nothing in the Gospels that requires Christians to seek out suffering. The Word of God is not a prescription for masochism. But the life of Christ, as well as the Old Testament’s example of the prophets, compels believers to accept that suffering, if rightly received, can be a gift.

“Accepting suffering is the beginning of our liberation,” he says. “Suffering can be the source of great strength. It gives us the power to resist - a gift from God that invites us to change.”