The awakening of compassion is the key to transcending suffering, no matter how severe. Suffering opens us up, it pulls us out of every safe refuge and invites us to look, to question, to become more aware of ourselves and others. It shows us we cannot simply spend our lives pursuing our own self-interest. It shows us the universal frailty of human life. Seeing this frailty can bring us outside ourselves and enable us to respond with compassion.
Therefore suffering, which forces us out of our complacency and pushes us toward awareness, makes possible non-self-interested love, which is based on awareness and cannot exist without it.
We are now approaching the link between suffering and faith. This link is love itself. "Suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope" - the basis of this hope is the knowledge that we have become stronger and better as the result of our suffering. Better: because we are more aware of our own concerns and those of others, and are more responsive to them. Stronger: because knowing what it means to confront ourselves, to endure, and to meet others on the ground of compassion makes us less likely to crumble when we are struck with hard blows. Therefore "hope does not disappoint us, because God's love has been poured into our hearts." The capacity for compassion, leading to non-self-interested love, becomes a source of hope, because this love by its very nature points toward a source of strength, wisdom, and guidance beyond the self and greater than the self.
Faith is the awareness of God's presence in spite of overwhelming testimony to God's absence. If we can respond to suffering with love, we can come to an awareness of God's presence - because God is what we find when we know the kind of love that takes us beyond the self.
The following teaching shows how this love brings the presence of God even though we may not be consciously aware of it:
Then the king will say to those at his right hand:
"Come, you that are blessed by my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world; for I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you gave me clothing, I was sick and you took care of me, I was in prison and you visited me."
Then the righteous will answer him:
"Lord, when was it that we saw you hungry and gave you food, or thirsty and gave you something to drink? And when was it that we saw you a stranger and welcomed you, or naked and gave you clothing? And when was it that we saw you sick or in prison and visited you?"
And the king will answer them:
"Truly I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least of these who are members of my family, you did it to me."
Matthew 25:34-40
God is present in any loving response to suffering that takes us beyond our own self-concern. This does not mean either that God suffers or that God wills us to suffer - such interpretations are based on thinking of God as a person, rather than as Goodness Itself. What it does mean is that the existence of suffering does not make impossible the presence of a higher order, a transcendent presence, that comforts and strengthens us, and from which we derive the energy to respond positively to a life that may not seem to deserve such a response. Suffering does not negate the love that places God's presence at the center of our being; in fact, suffering is its midwife. "The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it" (John 1:5).
The response to suffering that preserves our faith consists of awareness, self-honesty, and love. Of these three love is the greatest, but to come into being it needs both awareness and self-honesty. Love leads us to faith because it gives us something beyond ourselves to live for, even if at first this is nothing more than the compassion we feel for others' pain. This alone takes us beyond ourselves and shows us something greater. If we become more aware, honest with ourselves, and compassionate, we become stronger, less afraid of pain and loss, and better able to stand up to the knowledge that life will not always fulfill our needs. If we can see this strength and love growing within ourselves we will know that life has a meaning deeper than what we find in our immediate experience, and that we are more than just a biological accident.
The awareness and love that bring us beyond ourselves cannot be explained by any theory that denies an ultimate order to life or sees life as merely some self-organizing chaos. Faith is the awareness and conviction of Ultimate Order; it is the sense that things finally make sense. There is no love without awareness, and no awareness without suffering. Therefore suffering does not negate faith; paradoxically, it makes faith possible.
Faith is vitality. It is the energy we need to keep moving forward in life in spite of the obstacles life throws before us. This energy comes from the love that is inside faith. Love moves forward, it takes us beyond ourselves, it makes us see outside ourselves, it makes us aware of a universe much wider than ourselves. This is why, when God spoke to Job out of the whirlwind, God did not answer Job's question about suffering. Instead God showed him the wider universe, from the constellations in the heavens to the leviathan in the depths of the sea. God made Job aware of a creation whose scope he could not come close to imagining. Thus Job, like Jonah, learned to move outside himself; he learned how to love.
When compassion touches the heart - even when the touch is excruciatingly painful - it puts our private concerns in perspective. It shows us a world wider than our doubts and fears. It helps us see others and reach out to them in love. And love's presence strengthens us when we face our own suffering. Therefore love is a source of faith.
The love within us brings us back into the mainstream of life. If we can see others compassionately, with full awareness of their individuality, others often begin to respond to us differently, with greater warmth and affection. This helps us overcome any sense of isolation that suffering may bring. It shows us that through being loving we know that we are loved. We find that we are loved not only by others but also by God, if we can see God's presence in a capacity for compassion that visits us after we have faced our suffering.
"Many waters cannot quench love" (Song of Songs 8:7): love can thrive even in suffering. Love does not ask for a perfect life and is not afraid of life's imperfections and tragedies, even embracing life in spite of them. Love "bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things" (1 Corinthians 13:7).
Finally, we come to the most hopeful and also the most difficult aspect of the faith that is born in love. This is trust. We have seen that confronting our suffering in great depth can lead us to a love that we know is greater than the self. The final step toward redemption comes when we can trust this "greater than" to lead us through our suffering to wherever we need to be. This trust may begin as "dark faith," but it becomes lighter as we begin to see our fulfillment. Even if we have lost everything that gave our life meaning, if we can know the love that is born in suffering as a "greater than" and trust its power, our healing has already begun.