Lose the Battle, Win the War

Ingmar Bergman, the director of The Seventh Seal, released a film called Winter Light in 1962 about a priest suffering through despair . The film tells the story of how the priest is called upon by a suicidal man to help him see the light in the world, which is on the verge of nuclear war. The priest can offer no aid to the broken man and ultimately helps remove the man's dead body from the road after he ends his own life. The priest can offer no encouragement because he feels no hope himself and is searching for the light in the world which seems so dark.

At the end of the film the priest is preparing to offer Mass and his sacristan, a broken down man with a hunched back and constant pain, comes to the priest and begins speaking to him and brings a conundrum to him:

"This emphasis on physical pain. It couldn't have been all that bad. It may sound presumptuous of me - but in my humble way, I've suffered as much physical pain as Jesus.... and his torments were rather brief. Lasting some four hours, I gather? I feel that he was tormented far worse on another level. Maybe I've got it all wrong. But just think of Gethsemane, Vicar. Christ's disciples fell asleep. They hadn't understood the meaning of the last supper, or anything. And when the servants of the law appeared, they ran away. And Peter denied him. Christ had known his disciples for three years. They'd lived together day in and day out - but they never grasped what he meant. They abandoned him, to the last man. And he was left alone. That must have been painful. Realizing that no one understands. To be abandoned when you need someone to rely on - that must be excruciatingly painful. But the worst was yet to come. When Jesus was nailed to the cross - and hung there in torment - he cried out - "God, my God! Why hast thou forsaken me?" He cried out as loud as he could. He thought that his heavenly father had abandoned him... The moments before he died, Christ was seized by doubt. Surely that must have been his greatest hardship... God's silence." 

When the winter sets in and the cold touches my body I feel a great deal of joint pain and can barely walk. I have been blessed by God to be without ulcers for many winters, but this winter I have not been so lucky. There is a foolish idea amongst Christians who believe that awareness of God is emotional ecstasy that praying will make things better, that if I simply ask God with tearful eyes and faith He will take my pain away. Rather, I have found, that when I pray for God to give me rest He allows me yet more pain.

Friedrich Nietzsche once said, quite aptly, that the thought of suicide helps many men through many a sleepless night. If you awoke every morning for two years and were tortured for 12 of the 24 hours of the day and then after two years you were asked if you wanted to suffer the torture for five more days or end it by ending your life... which would you choose? You are told that there is a possibility that you will suffer after your death, but you were guaranteed to suffer for five more days if you lived... would you not choose to end the pain you are sure of? I am not advocating that as the right choice, do not get me wrong, but one has to admit to the appeal of the choice.

Physical suffering is terrible and the longer one has to live through it the more the pain seeps into a person's emotional and spiritual life. It is easy to come to the conclusion, when the pain has reached our souls and brought us to despair, that the way to beat suffering is to stop your body from having the ability to suffer.

Paramore, a rock/pop band who is known for writing the pop hit CrushCrushCrush, released a song this past week, a much more mature anthem than previous works, which contains the words: "lose the battle, win the war." I believe that that is the mentality one should have when faced with endless suffering. We are usually beat by our own physical limitations and emotional instability, but when we allow those things to simply be and realize that in losing this I gain something more we grow in strength. "For that which doesn't kill us only makes us stronger."

As much as we feel abandoned by our friends, our families, and our God simply think of Christ on the cross. In Christ's terrible suffering he was ultimately beat to death by the men he came to save... a loss if there ever was one. But, only in losing the battle did Christ win the war. We are not Christ and we are not here to save men from sin. Our suffering really does not make sense in any way to us, except in that we are taking part in Christ's suffering and being tried by fire to be pure like diamonds, but when we look at the death of Christ we see three things: Peter (Christ's friend), who stood up and drew His sword to protect Christ, even at the price of his own life; the Blessed Virgin Mary (Christ's family), who watched with her heart being shattered as her son was beaten and crucified, the most humiliating death; and the Father (God), who watched from Heaven, who allowed His son to be fully man and to experience human pain fully, and watched His son reach the peak of physical, emotional, and spiritual suffering...

One is never abandoned, sometimes no one can help us, but they never stop watching and being pushed to great emotional pain by seeing our suffering... they want to watch us win, but sometimes in order to win we have to lose.