By Ephraim Radner, First Things. (Photo: Josiah Nicklas/Unsplash)
I visited a friend of mine a few years ago. He was a deeply faithful theologian, but without much success in his profession. Deeply devoted to each other, he and his wife had yearned for children but were unable to have any. When his wife died unexpectedly, my friend was distraught. We talked, and the accumulated humiliations, disappointments, and losses of his adulthood were recounted with increasing anguish. At one point he blurted out, with a startling passion and anger, “Why me?!”
His question, to be honest, surprised me. It did not seem to fit his Christian faith—not that he should have meekly adopted an Augustinian sense of being part of the great massa damnata, for whom all ills are well-deserved and any smidgeon of good is an unmerited grace. Anyway, plenty of Christians, myself included, have asked the question. Still, “Why me?” expresses a misunderstanding of human identity and its relation to suffering that sits uneasily with a Christian spirit. To be a “me” is to live far beyond the constraints of individual feeling, and to suffer is just what it means to transcend the great burdens of our misconceived and solitary selves. “Why me?” is, alas, uttered from a place outside a true sense of God’s life.
When the self is viewed and felt as solitary, it is hard to live. For this reason, suffering has become the great question of our individualist age. Charles Taylor has famously stressed the modern “moral imperative to reduce suffering.” That imperative now defines our culture’s vision of human life. My seminary students have often noted that their generation thirsts for a true “theology of suffering.” Every generation worries about suffering. But in our age, it is the suffering of the self that is so hard to tolerate. When all of life is bound up with just one person, with just our own being, who can endure it? There have always been selves; there has always been suffering. But when the two are chained together as mutually defining, the world implodes.