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THE ILLS OF LIFE
All that which infringes upon the happiness of our bodily life we call ills. And yet the whole of our life is a gradual process of delivering our soul from that which constitutes the happiness of our body. Therefore for him who comprehends life as it really is there are no ills.
I.
That Which We Call Suffering is a Necessary
Condition of Life
1. It is a blessing to man to bear the misfortunes of this earthly life because this leads him into the sacred solitude of his heart, where he finds himself as it were an exile from his native soil, obliged to trust to no earthly joys. It is also a blessing to him to encounter contradictions and reproaches, when others think evil of him, though his intentions be pure and his actions righteous, for this serves to keep him in humility and is an antidote to vain glory.
These things are blessed mainly because they enable us to commune with the witness within us who is God, and we may commune with Him when the world spurns us, holds us in contempt and deprives us of love.
Thomas й Kempis,
2. When Francis of Assisi was returning with a disciple from Perugia to Porciunculo one bitterly cold and stormy day he discussed with his disciple herein consists perfect joy. He said that perfect joy is not in being praised of the people for virtues, nor in possessing the gift of healing the sick, making deaf to hear, giving sight to the blind, nor in foreseeing and foretelling the future, nor in fathoming the course of the stars and« the properties o£ ^\k t^V^s^^^
and animals, nor even in the conversion of all men to the one trae faith. "Wherein is then perfect joy?" inquired the disciple. And Francis replied: "When we reach the monastery wet, filthy, shivering with the cold and starving and knock at the gate, and the gatekeeper asks: "Who are ye?' and we say: 'Brothers,' and he should reply: 'You lie, you are vagabonds strollii^ over the face of the world, enticing the people, stealing alms. Get you gone, I will not let you in.' If then, benumbed with the cold and starving, we shall receive these words in humility and love and shall say to ourselves that the gatekeeper was right and that evidently God had put it into his heart to treat us like this, only then shall we know the perfection of joy."
Only receive every task and every injury with love towards him who imposes the task and does us the injury, and every task and every injury will be transformed into joy. And this joy is perfect because every other joy can be destroyed, but nothing can destroy this joy, for it is always within our power.
3. If some divinity offered us to eliminate out of our life all sorrows and all that causes sorrows our first impulse would strongly tempt us to accept such an offer. When burdensome tasks and necessities oppress us, when ^(mies of pain consume us, when anxieties wring our heart, we are bound to feel that there is nothing preferable to life without toil, life of rest, security, peace and plenty. But I think that after a brief experience of such a life we should ask that divinity to restore us to our former life with its toil, necessities, sorrows and anxieties. A life entirely free from sorrows and anxieties would prove not only uninteresting but intolerable. For together with the sorrows and the causes of sorrow, all dangers, obstacles and failures would disappear from life, and with them all effort and striving
and the excitement of peril and the strain of battle and the triumph of victory. Only the unhindered realization of plans, success without obstacles would remain. We should soon tire of a game of which we know in advance that we must win. Fr, Paulson.
II.
Sufferings Stimulate Man's Spiritual Life
1. Man is the spirit of God clothed in a body.
In the beginnii^ of life man is ignorant of this and imagines that his life is in the body. But the longer he lives the more clearly he realizes that his true life is in the spirit and not in the body. Man's whole life is in the increasing recc^nition of this fact. This knowlec^ is most easily and clearly attained through the sufferings of the body, so that such sufferings make our life such as it should be—a spiritual life.
2. The physical growth is merely a storing up of supplies for the spiritual growth which commences as the body begins to decline.
3. A man lives for his body and says: All things are evil. Another hves for his soul and says: No, all things are good. That which you call evil is the very whetstone with-out which my soul—the most precious thing that is in me— would be dulled and rusted.
4. All the misfortunes of mankind as a whole and of individuals lead, thoi^h indirectly, to the same goal which is set before man: the constantly increasing manifestation of the spiritual principle in each individual and in mankind at large.
5. "For I came down from heaven not to do my own will, but the will of my Father who asiA тел-, ■»Л'Скл"-«^
the Father's will which hath sent me, that of all which be hath given me I should lose nothing." This we read in John VI, 38-39. That is we must preserve, cultivate and develop to the highest possible degree that spark of divinity which was g^ven us, which was entrusted to us as a child is entrusted to its nurse. And what is needful to achieve this purpose ? Not the giatiHcation of passions, not the glory of men, not a life of repose, but on the contrary, abstinence, humility, labor, struggle, privations, sufferings, humiliations and persecutions, even as many times stated in the New Testament. And all these needful visitations are sent us in all sorts of forms, on a small or on a large scale. Oh, that we knew how to receive them as needful and therefore gladsome tasks, instead of as annoyances that trespass upon that animal existence which we mistake for our life and the improvement of which we count happiness.
6. Even if man could escape the fear of death and ignore it, the sufferings alone, to which he is subject, terrible, purposeless, utterly unjustified and inevitable as they are, would sufHce to controvert all rational meanii^ that is ascribed to life—so say some.
I am engaged in a good and indubitably useful occupation, and suddenly I am stricken with disease, my task is interrupted, and I am suffering agonies without any sense or purpose. A screw in the rail is rusty and it happens to slip out just as a train is passing with a loving mother on board and her children are crushed before her very eyes. An earthquake must shake the very spot on which a city is founded, say Lisbon or Vemy, and guiltless people are buried alive and die in terrible agony. Why all these things and thousands of other senseless dreadful accidents and calamities which strike terror into the hearts of pet^le? Where is the sense oi them ?
The answer is that all these arguments are absolutely right for the people who do not acknowledge a sfHritual life. And for such people human life indeed has no sense. But the fact is that the life of people who do not acknowledge a spiritual life can not be otherwise but senseless and calamitous. For if people who do not believe in a sfHritual life only drew the logical conclusions which inevitably follow a merely material view of life, those people who regard life as a merely physical existence would not consent to live a moment longer. What laborer would consent to work for a master who when hiring the laborer would stipulate the right at will to roast the laborer alive or over a slow 6re, or to flay him alive, or to pull out his vans and do all sorts of terrible things, just as he does without any rhyme or reason with his other laborers in full view of the man he would hire? If men really understood life as they claim to do, that is as a mere material existence, not one should consent to live in this world for very fear of these agonizing and inexplicable sufferings which he sees all around and which may befall him at any moment.
Yet they continue to live, complaining and wailii^ over their misfortunes and still keep on living.