Love Unleashed through Suffering

Thirty years ago today, Pope John
Paul II released a work so important to him that he
urged all the faithful of the world to “reread and
meditate” upon it. He
told World Youth Day participants that he wanted this work “to
be a guide” for their lives. He even incorporated this document into two
of his most influential encyclicals,
Fides
et Ratio
and Evangelium Vitae
. Protestant philosopher Alvin
Plantinga
called
it
“surely one of the finest documents (outside the Bible) ever written” on
its topic.

This much-vaunted work is not John Paul’s
Catechesis
on Human Love.
It’s Salvifici Doloris, his apostolic letter on what he
called the “Gospel of suffering,” and its message is as needed today as it was thirty
years ago. Perhaps it is even more necessary, given
current
government
efforts
to obstruct the Church’s outreach to the sick, the oppressed, and the outcast.
So it is worth the time to pause and reflect on the letter’s message.

John Paul opens
Salvifici Doloris
with St. Paul’s
mysterious statement to the Colossians: “In my flesh I complete what is lacking
in Christ’s afflictions for the sake of his body, that is, the Church.” He
interprets this statement as a declaration of “the power of salvific suffering”:

These words seem
to be found at the end of the long road that winds through the suffering which
forms part of the history of man and which is illuminated by the Word of God.
These words have as it were the value of a final discovery, which is
accompanied by joy. . . . The joy comes from the discovery of the meaning of
suffering, and this discovery, even if it is most personally shared in by Paul
of Tarsus who wrote these words, is at the same time valid for others. The
Apostle shares his own discovery and rejoices in it because of all those whom
it can help—just as it helped him—to understand
the salvific meaning of suffering.

John Paul had visited this theme before in his first encyclical,
Redemptor Hominis.
There, he sought to show how
Jesus’ earthly life “traced out” each man’s journey: Just as Christ is the way
for each man, each man is the way for the Church, “the way that leads invariably through the mystery of
the Incarnation and the Redemption.” But in
Salvifici Doloris, John Paul began to focus more
deeply on Christ’s presence within a suffering human being, saying that “man in a special fashion becomes
the way for the Church when suffering enters his life.”

Suffering, the pope writes, “seems to belong to
man’s transcendence.” When the suffering believer’s soul is penetrated by
Christ’s presence, Jesus is able to lead “into this Kingdom of the Father,
suffering man, in a certain sense through the very heart of his suffering,”
because suffering “cannot be
transformed and changed by a grace from outside, but from within.”

With that understanding, we can see that St.
Paul’s assertion that he completes “what is lacking in Christ’s afflictions”
does not mean the redemption Jesus won for us is incomplete. “It only means,”
John Paul writes, “that the Redemption,
accomplished through satisfactory love,
remains always open to all love expressed
in
human suffering.” Jesus’ suffering on
the Cross is an expression of love that enables the Christian to experience his
or her own suffering transformed from within so that it becomes a true
communicatio, a sharing in Christ’s own love.

But
it is even more than a sharing. John Paul uses the strongest language possible:
Suffering in Christ “
unleashes”
love—again, both in the sufferer, who is united with Christ at the most
intimate level, and in the one who ministers to him in imitation of Christ.

That insight had such significance for John
Paul that he would return to it fourteen years later in
Fides et Ratio, writing that the chief purpose of theology “is seen
to be the understanding of God’s
kenosis, a grand and mysterious truth for the human mind, which finds it
inconceivable that suffering and death can express a love which gives itself
and seeks nothing in return.”

A prayerful reading of
Salvifici Doloris shows that John Paul not only lived the Gospel of
suffering himself. He left us in that deeply personal letter a road map for our
own “journey
to the Father”
so that every sufferer might, through his suffering, become
a conduit for the love of Christ.

Dawn Eden is the author of My Peace I Give You: Healing Sexual Wounds with the
Help of the Saints
and
is completing a sacred theology licentiate at the Pontifical Faculty of the
Immaculate Conception at the Dominican House of Studies in Washington, D.C. 

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