Standing Back To See Suffering More Clearly

American Greatness Op-Ed: Standing Back to See More Clearly, by Mike Kerrigan (Hunton Andrews Kurth, Charlotte, NC):

I had occasion recently to reflect on the nature of suffering while consoling a friend grieving the loss of his beautiful young daughter. Like gazing at “A Sunday on La Grande Jatte,” Georges Seurat’s most famous painting in pointillist style, the sense that can be made of suffering requires distance, not of space, but rather of time. …

Where we come from assures us we’re not, to use a great Walker Percy phrase, “lost in the cosmos,” and this helps contextualize suffering. But so does where we’re going. In Mere Christianity, C. S. Lewis, unsurprisingly, said it best: “If I find in myself desires which nothing in this world can satisfy, the only logical explanation is that I was made for another world.” …

Given so glorious a source and a summit—so magnificent a spiritual heritage and destiny—a present that is perpetually plagued by suffering does seem maddening. Trusting it neither always was so nor always will be so is comforting, but such trust hardly relieves the pain of something as tragic as the death of a child. But continuing the metaphor of time, maybe we have to finish life’s book, one in which we ourselves are characters, before we can grasp the fullness of its meaning. …

Perhaps when time and space merge into one, we shall see all lives—those young and old, flourishing and cut short—in their native and restored glory. Perhaps it will be like stepping back from “A Sunday on La Grande Jatte,” to a vantage point where finally we can see ourselves as lovingly interconnected parts of a most splendid whole. Perhaps the greatest suffering in time will seem puny indeed next to the smallest joy in eternity.

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