Suffering and affliction - 16 September 2011

Simone Weil was a remarkable young woman who lived in France during the Nazi occupation, and died in 1943 from “malnutrition”, aged 34. She was a Catholic but refused baptism. Much that we know about her is from her correspondence with Father Perrin, a Dominican priest in Marseilles. In one of these letters she writes about the difference between affliction and suffering.

Suffering is universal. We all know suffering, whether it is toothache or the ache and pain of bereavement, the limitations of ageing, the grief of a broken relationship, tragedy and hardship... a multitude of causes of pain. That is suffering. There are usually things we can do about suffering, its causes or its effects. We are not entirely powerless. The Buddhist teachers tell us that accepting it may be the way forward, since it is a basic fact of all life. But we also know that how we react to suffering is profoundly important. We see many examples of people making bad choices in their suffering, hanging on to anger, resentment and hurt, unable or unwilling to forgive or to understand anything or anyone beyond their own pain.

Now, Simone Weil sees another human condition which she labels affliction. She wrote in French, and the French word is malheur, and I’m unsure whether affliction translates it adequately. Affliction, she says, is something apart, specific and irreducible. She gives one example -- slavery, being owned, having no freedom. Under the Nazis, the Jews were experiencing affliction. She calls affliction a more or less attenuated equivalent of death. There is pain in life which cannot be resolved or relieved, or understood. Our mortality is just that, the ultimate loss of both possession and control. Simone Weil notices that often as not a lot of people simply try not to think about it.

Jesus, she says, experienced affliction, he believed he was forsaken by God. One of the greatest mystics, St John of the Cross, has given his classic description of affliction which he calls the Dark Night. There are passages in the Book of Psalms which clearly come out of affliction, such as the extraordinary Psalm 88. Now listen to what I think is Simone Weil’s most insightful passage about this: Affliction makes God appear to be absent for a time... more absent than light in the utter darkness of a cell... The soul has to go on loving in the emptiness, or at least go on wanting to love, though it may be only with an infinitesimal part of itself. Then, one day, God will come to show himself to this soul and to reveal the beauty of the world, as in the case of Job. But if the soul stops loving it falls, even in this life, into something almost equivalent to hell.

In stillness and silence, no longer trying to possess or control, we consent to the way things are. It absolutely does not mean that we withdraw from the fight for justice and peace and change in the world. But for ourselves, we are asking primarily the grace to say yes to life and to death, and to opt deeply and inwardly for love.