The problem of suffering is really about faith. No matter how devastating, suffering destroys us only if it destroys our faith. So to understand how to deal with this problem, we need to understand faith.
The faith that overcomes tragedy must be more than belief in some religious doctrine. Belief alone does not provide the strength of character necessary to overcome catastrophe. Without the foundation that true faith provides, beliefs may crumble under suffering's weight. Just by itself, belief leads to rigid rather than creative responses.
Faith is more than belief. It is an internalized conviction that ultimately things make sense. Faith is a sense of order in spite of the appearance of disorder. The confidence of faith is the confidence to move forward in life because, in spite of the risks involved, we count on something in life that will support our movement.
The most rudimentary form of faith is trust, the trust children have that enables them to explore their environment and try to master parts of it. They learn to trust the order they find in the world, which enables them to live in it with some degree of safety and predictability. They trust the presence of their parents, who will catch them if they fall. Everyone has faith to some degree, since if we completely lacked faith we could not live; fear would overwhelm us to the point of immobilization.
There are many levels of faith. The first level is the child's basic trust, a type of faith hardly anyone develops to perfection. Perfect basic trust is impossible, since one's own parents are not perfect, and accidents will happen as part of the very process of living. Even if one has the best of parents, one does not have them forever. If one does not lose them through death, one loses them simply through growing up and becoming aware of their frailty. A child's faith must therefore change if one is to continue to live with confidence. As we grow older we acquire other sources of faith: faith in parental substitutes, such as teachers or other role models, and faith in our own abilities. Later on in life we seek faith in lasting relationships, marriage and the family, which provide a safe structure that continues to nurture our growth.
All these sources of faith are, however, finite, fragile, and fallible. They do not provide perfect security, and on some level of consciousness we know it. The time may come when we lose them, once more finding ourselves thrown back against the need for a faith that will give us a sense of order and meaning sufficient to keep us standing even in the midst of crisis and tragedy. Such faith is our only protection against being swallowed up by fears of the danger and chaos inherent in human experience.
One who asks the question of suffering therefore seeks not a tidy theological explanation of divine justice, but rather a sustaining faith in God, an awareness of Ultimate Order, that can withstand the threats life makes against any finite source of faith.
Often the faith we do have is not strong enough to withstand these threats. We don't always respond to our suffering with courage and perseverance. Often we react with anxiety, despair, even depression and emotional paralysis. If we are hit hard enough we may even lose the will to live. What determines whether our response to suffering will be positive or negative, perhaps so negative as to lead to the loss of all hope and enthusiasm for life?
Suffering can sap our vitality to the point of changing our perception of the world from a place of love, support, and goodness to one of chaos and life-threatening danger. In other words, suffering destroys our faith by awakening a very basic fear. We all have this fear as children, but it is softened in those of us fortunate enough to have experienced the world not entirely as a dangerous place but as orderly, even supportive and loving.
To a young child this basic fear is the fear of abandonment. This fear never entirely disappears. It can surface later as the fear of losing the sources of meaning in one's life: one's relationships, one's health, one's work, one's roots, one's connection to life's mainstream. This fear may lie dormant as long as these sources of meaning remain intact, but if it should ever awaken and take hold of us it can rob us of the sense of order we need to function competently and confidently in life. Instead of experiencing the world as loving and supportive, we come to see it as foreign and hostile. Life seems so precarious that we feel we can count on nothing; our experiences lack order, reliability, and even meaning. To see the world this way is overwhelming. It drains us of the strength we need to respond constructively. This is what it means to live without faith.
Whether or not they profess belief in God, those who know this fear ask the question of suffering sincerely. Those who either have not experienced it or who avoid it, though they may be theologically sophisticated, have no real acquaintance with the problem. The theologies they create can even be destructive to those who are sensitive to it. Such theologies often justify God by blaming the sufferer, and so use God's name to undermine the sufferer's faith.
Theologies encouraging the idea that suffering is a punishment for one's sins, or a consequence of entertaining wrong thoughts, only promote self-condemnation and a sense of defeat in people if they find their most strenuous efforts to transform themselves failing. These theologies are "false comforters" just as were the friends of Job. Those whose faith has been undermined by their suffering need an outlook that will restore and strengthen faith, not one that only increases despair by presenting an unattainable ideal of the perfect spiritual life. This is also true of the new "medical theologies" that encourage patients to believe they can cure themselves of serious diseases through the power of their own minds. For many it will not be so, adding to the stress of the original illness a sense of personal inadequacy and moral failure.
The real question, then, is whether it is possible to respond to suffering in a way that preserves faith. Phrasing the question this way helps define its scope. The question does not ask: How can we eliminate suffering? This clearly cannot be done, and theologies that promise it, especially metaphysical theologies that suggest we can eliminate suffering by controlling our thoughts, offer false hope. We cannot do away with pain, so to find faith we must first accept the tragic character of human life. We cannot "justify" the existence of suffering; the suffering of innocent people, especially in the extreme forms we have witnessed over the century that has passed, is beyond justification. Theodicy that seeks to justify the existence of suffering is a futile enterprise.
What we seek, then, is a way of understanding suffering that respects our experience of it but that does not rule out the existence of Ultimate Order, the possibility that all our trials ultimately do make sense. Intellectual speculation about the role suffering plays in the cosmic scheme of things will not help. We cannot completely demystify suffering, but we may be able to pick up just enough clues to the mystery to keep our faith intact. We seek a way of meeting suffering that allows faith to survive, perhaps even to grow, so that we continue moving forward in life in spite of the hardships we must face.
If we can find such a response then we can also ask, What is the God who survives our asking and confronting the question of suffering? How different is this God from the one we questioned when we first began struggling with this problem?