Only Through Suffering!

I recently re-watched an old movie, “The Song of Bernadette,” about a young French girl from Lourdes who sees visions of “a beautiful lady” which bring her nothing but trouble. The story itself doesn't really grab me, though the film is a perfect example of the epics of its era, around 1943. If you like to study how creative things are done, as I do, it's a great teacher. It also has a lot to say about the misuse of power.

I'm always fascinated by one particular supporting character, a bitter nun named Sister Vauzous who spends most of the film making life hard for Bernadette for no apparently good reason. She claims to disbelieve in Bernadette's visions, and it only becomes clear toward the end that she does indeed believe her, and that this is the cause of her enmity toward the girl. The screenplay gives us a hint about the conflict right up front, when the nun declaims to a bunch of elementary students her belief that what makes a Christian holy isn't faith so much as suffering. The more you suffer, the more chance you have of achieving holiness. Her problem with Bernadette is really transferred anger at God: Here she has tormented herself with suffering and self-denial, undergone mortification of the flesh and mind for decades and gotten nothing for it, but God (or the Virgin, or whoever) has granted holy visions to this little girl who never suffered a minute in her life. Of course the film undercuts her complaints by relentlessly assaulting us with the ways the girl suffers, which to me is a script weakness since it seems to bolster the nun's rather perverse approach to a Christian life, but no matter. I'm fascinated by this notion that one must suffer to achieve holiness, or any other sort of worthiness - that suffering, in itself, for its own sake, is a necessary component of a worthy life. I've never believed that.

Of course a certain amount of suffering - in the sense of endurance - is necessary for the development of a complete life, but not because pain in itself imparts any sort of wisdom or worthiness. It simply teaches the complete person how to endure unpleasant things; how to complete tasks well. If you want water to flow to your cabin year-round, you have to dig a trench for the water line. This is tedious and strenuous and altogether unpleasant, and while you're doing it you can and will think of all sorts of excellent reasons to stop. You'll get sweat in your eyes, your back will hurt, and your hands will form blisters around every imperfection in the shovel's handle. Plus, it's boring. But if you want water to gush out of that pipe in the dead of winter, you'll bloody well keep your eyes on that prize and just do it. This is something life as a city-bred cubicle rat won't teach you – at least it didn't teach it to me - but it's necessary to learn it. Sometimes life has to suck for a while, but the suckage has a purpose – to give you something that, in the long run, will help your life to suck less. Every athlete in training knows this. In training an athlete puts himself through hell with difficult and repetitive tasks that actually break his body down and force it to heal stronger. But he isn't doing it because he loves suffering, he's doing it because he wants the pleasure of beating the pants off everybody else on the field. “No pain, no gain” - the old cliché implies that there really is some tangible gain involved, and that the participant knows precisely what it is.

Pain is a part of the vocation of athletics, or of ditch-digging, or of winter survival or whatever. But pain isn't the point of the exercise – it's only a tool. A lot of people enjoy cooking, and all cooks own spatulas, but no cook lives for his spatula. Living in pain for its own sake, actually seeking out opportunities to suffer, makes as much sense as taking up gourmet cooking as an excuse to have a spatula collection.

So far I'm writing in theoretical terms, really. Yes, there are religious people who practice mortification of the flesh, imagining that somehow by these means they'll earn passage to heaven or whatever it is they're after. But they're rare beasts these days: I've never actually met one, and if you have you've had a rare – and probably not all that wonderful – experience. Nevertheless, say what you will about such people as may still exist, at least they're only doing it to themselves. And they're doing it voluntarily. It's been a long time since The Church was in a position to impose “self”-sacrifice. But that impulse - to impose “self”-denial and sacrifice on others for its own sake - is very far from dead, and it has been co-opted by voices more sinister and damaging than that of some obscure Spanish Opus Dei saint.

The sinister voices come, as such things tend to, from our own government. Our would-be masters have determined that we, as a collective, are simply not suffering enough for our own good. As the possessors of all the organized guns, they feel themselves in a position to do something about that.

I will now proceed to rant. Sometimes I wish these people would just come out of their shells and be evil. It would be easier to live under the rule of an honest Boris Badenov than that of a hypocritical Mary Poppins. “Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive,” said C. S. Lewis. “It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.” These people who exhort us day and night to greater acts of “self-sacrifice” in the name of social justice, or the right of other people to 'feel safe,' or climate change, or anti-terrorism, or universal health care or whatever the crisis du jour may be, coerced and enforced by the guns of their ever-present agents, no doubt sleep like babies after a hard day of doing it. Why shouldn't they? They're only doing it for our own good, helping us to be better people - better citizens.

One of my heroes, Lysander Spooner, put it better than I ever could: “The fact is that the government, like a highwayman, says to a man: "Your money, or your life." ... The government does not, indeed, waylay a man in a lonely place, spring upon him from the roadside, and, holding a pistol to his head, proceed to rifle his pockets. But the robbery is none the less a robbery on that account; and it is far more dastardly and shameful.

The highwayman ... does not pretend that he has any rightful claim to your money, or that he intends to use it for your own benefit. ... Furthermore, having taken your money, he leaves you, as you wish him to do. He does not persist in following you on the road, against your will; assuming to be your rightful "sovereign," on account of the "protection" he affords you. ... He is too much of a gentleman to be guilty of such impostures, and insults, and villanies as these. In short, he does not, in addition to robbing you, attempt to make you either his dupe or his slave.” - from “No Treason”.

It's one thing when the government spuriously claims to be safeguarding our corporeal selves from outside enemies, even when it is the reason those people have become enemies in the first place, or when it simply invented the enemies from thin air. That's bad enough. But it's particularly galling when the 'notably ungoverned' people in the government presume to save us from ourselves. Recently Steven Chu, the Administration's Energy Secretary, said, “The American public…just like your teenage kids, aren’t acting in a way that they should act ... The American public has to really understand in their core how important this issue [reducing 'greenhouse gases'] is.” Given that the remedies the administration has prescribed for this global reduction would be so painful as to make the cilice and the flagellant's crop appear as pleasant as a day in the park by comparison, I hesitate to speculate as to what form imposition of this 'understanding' might take.

Our would-be rulers would now have us believe that they can lead us to some sort of secular 'holiness' by forcibly imposing their 'discipline' on us. And too many of us buy what they're selling for them to ever think they won't get their way. Go to any airport and watch people obediently take off their shoes and belts, watch while their possessions are rifled through, stand numbly and allow themselves to be manhandled and probed for contraband before being allowed to go their harmless ways. Building inspectors, zoning 'compliance officers,' tax collectors, law enforcement officers and a thousand other kinds of useless eaters impose themselves on people daily, and are quietly endured. Why shouldn't the people who presume to rule us think they have a mandate to do so? What else have we shown them?

So now let's move on to the next step: Father Visitor Obama and Msgrs. Chu, Sunstein, Daschle, Feinberg, Browner et al will help us all achieve worthiness as good citizens by imposing 'sacrifice' and 'discipline' upon our unworthy souls. We will pay for the health care of the less fortunate. We will squeeze ourselves into sardine can cars (when we can get permission to own one), walk to and from wherever public transportation deigns to pick us up and drop us off, pay through the nose the taxes that will help us more properly appreciate our fuel, our (carefully regulated) vices, our (intrusively monitored) entertainment and communication. We will thank government for the privilege of “owning” property (as long as we pay the annual property tax). We will send our children to be brutalized and slaughtered as we bring the blessings of 'democracy' to foreign lands.

We will hate every minute of it. But that's good! Only Through Suffering can we learn and grow! Only Through Suffering can we become more aware! Only Through Suffering can we develop character, and so become the good and obedient citizens our State requires us to be! And Sister Vauzous will be there every step of the way, steel ruler in hand, waiting to guide us with strict but loving discipline, through suffering, to achieve the greater life that only sacrifice - ours, not hers - can bring.