My friend Scott Cairns has authored a new book entitled The End of Suffering: Finding Purpose in Pain. Its sudden appearance in the mail was timely: I had just been reading about the “protest theism” of writers like Twain and Melville and was preparing for the funeral of one of my uncles.
The small book is a long essay which considers the purpose of suffering in its capacity to awaken us to certain realities; namely, the illusion of control, the grace of having the self “stripped away”, the gift of being alive to God and alive to life and the beauty of a heart that is turned toward others. Scott borrows from the wisdom of poets and ascetics to discover what can be learned in the land of suffering. He gives special attention to the insights of Elder Zosimas in Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov. For the past fifteen years, Scott has been in the habit of rereading the book at the end of the school year. He writes,
Generally, in late May, when administrative and teaching duties have concluded for the year and university life is winding down for the summer, I take up that weighty Russian novel for another go. For the most part, I manage to move through it steadily enough, except for the several passages having to do with Elder Zosimas, where I prefer to proceed slowly, deliberately, with increased attention to every word, and ever on the lookout for further illuminating connotation.” (47)
This practice caught my eye as I spent a semester studying The Brothers Karamazov under the tutelage of Eugene Peterson at Regent College. I did a guided study on the pastoral life and the practice of spiritual direction. One of Dostoevsky’s central characters, the Father Zosimas, received much of our attention. In his chapter on “Complicity”, Scott mentions the wisdom of Zosimas as it concerns our common humanity and shared culpability:
There is only one salvation for you,” he says to his gathered brotherhood: “take yourself up, and make yourself responsible for all the sins of men. For indeed it is so, my friends, and the moment you make yourself sincerely responsible for everything and everyone, you will see at once that it is really so, that it is you who are guilty on behalf of all and for all.” (60)
Even as Scott lays out what is wrong with the world, he ends his essay by probing the mystery of God’s way of being in the world, a presence that is life-giving, recovering bodies and repairing persons. He writes,
The God-created world is an exceedingly wild place. Its weathers and its very makeup – its famously cranky geology – remain notoriously unpredictable. Bad things happen to good people; good things happen to bad. And even setting aside the simply bad, there is also no shortage of downright evil, from which the good do not appear to be uniformly protected…
What kind of God is this?
Whether or not you think the world was initially created as the shaky sphere is is – a notoriously unstable crust skidding over a roiling swirl of molten rock – there’s no arguing that it isn’t something of a crapshoot now. Earthquakes, hurricanes, tornadoes, landslides, volcanic eruptions, tsunamis, famine, flood – take your pick. And lest we forget the human hand in our crapshoot’s wealth of crap, we must remember to add to that wild mix our own pathological history of aggression, murder, war, and genocide.
And where, exactly, is our God in all of this?
Well, the story goes that He has descended into the very thick of it.
The story goes that He remains in the very thick of it.” (108).
Cairns book is also a descent into the thick of it. His reflections on the purpose of suffering in helping us to become fully human call to mind what fellow writer Anne Lamott has described as the writer’s task:
The writer’s job is to see what’s behind it, to see the bleak unspeakable stuff, and to turn the unspeakable into words; not just into any words but if we can, into rhythm and blues (Bird by Bird).
Scott has done his job. The End of Suffering is an honest look at the unbearable and unspeakable stuff. Thankfully, though, it is more than that. It a hopeful song with some soul in it – or perhaps even better, some Body.
Paraclete Press, 144 pages, August 2009
