Ross Douthat and Father James Martin on God’s role in suffering

I was especially happy to interview the author and New York Times columnist Ross Douthat on the latest episode of “The Spiritual Life” for several reasons.

First, unlike many of the guests we have hosted so far, Ross and I have engaged in some spirited conversation and occasional (friendly) disagreements on a variety of topics, most recently on his own podcast, “Interesting Times,” where we discussed the legacy of Pope Francis. (It was recorded just a few days after the pope’s death.) One of the goals of this podcast is to interview a variety of guests, and not just people with whom I agree, to remind listeners and viewers of what ties all our guests together—the essentials of faith in God. And on these essentials, Ross and I agree.

Second, I was interested in discussing his latest two books, one on his experiences with Lyme disease, called The Deep Places: A Memoir of Illness and Discovery, which also reflects on the place of suffering in the Christian life, and his book Belief: Why Everyone Should be Religious, a kind of modern-day apologia for faith.

Our conversation also explored Ross’s background growing up in a religious household, his views on the relationship between personal spiritual experiences and institutional religion and the challenges of maintaining a consistent spiritual practice and deepening one’s spiritual life when church life feels stagnant.

While on my eight-day retreat last week, I came across (I can’t remember where, to be honest) the observation that suffering either “breaks you” or “breaks you open.” For Ross, it has clearly done the latter. Driving home from the retreat house in Gloucester, Mass., I passed the exit for Lyme, Conn., where the tick-borne disease that causes a host of debilitating symptoms takes its name, which prompted me to reflect on our conversation again, which touched on his suffering.

For me, suffering is never something that God “gives us” in order to “teach us.” To me, that is a rather monstrous view of God, even though that language is part of our biblical heritage and spiritual tradition. During my retreat, for example, I prayed with Revelation 3, where God says, “Those whom I love, I reprove and chastise.” By the same token, it is clear from the Gospels that suffering is not a punishment. Jesus firmly rejects that line of thought in John 9, in the story of the “man born blind.” Who sinned, Jesus is asked, that this man was born blind? “No one sinned,” Jesus says. 

God does not make us suffer in order to teach us lessons. Rather, if we are open to it, and with God’s grace, we will learn from experiences of suffering. In other words, lessons are the “what” of suffering, not the “why.”

During times of suffering, we are often more open to God because our natural defenses are down. Now, occasionally you hear people critique others who “find God” during difficult times, as if God were a kind of imaginary crutch. But again, while God is always knocking at our door (the very next line from Revelation 3), our doors are sometimes more open when we are “up against it,” as Sister Helen Prejean once put it to me.

During our conversation, I asked Ross what he felt he had learned.

 “I was certainly sure that I wasn’t supposed to just suffer,” he told me. “There was something I was supposed to learn about the world, maybe, or about my own capacities, or about the nature of medicine, or something. You know, I’m still not sure exactly what it was, but I did learn a number of things through the process of going to weird doctors and trying weird things and meeting people who were suffering in similar ways, and sort of comparing our journeys to one another. All of that added up to the sense that, had God just healed me on Day One, then it would’ve been worse for me in some way. Right? And that’s easier to say because I did eventually get better.”

I sensed that Ross seems to have learned to rely on God more and, through a variety of experiences, to trust that God was truly with him. Still, he would, as anyone would have, preferred not to have contracted Lyme disease and suffer for so long, if at all. I can understand that. A few years ago, after an operation, I told my friend Myles Sheehan, S.J., a Jesuit priest and physician, that I felt that I had learned a lot about life, about gratitude and about the human condition. But, I said bluntly, I wish I could have learned it without going through all that. “You wouldn’t have learned it,” he said calmly.

My conversation with Ross doesn’t solve, of course, the mystery of suffering, which to my mind has no satisfactory explanation. (Imagine any explanation being said to the parent of a sick child.) But I hope you find that it opens one person’s experience and helps you to confront the challenges, difficulties and suffering that are all part of the human condition.