Learning to Love What Shocks You
Monsignor Lorenzo Albacete’s Cry of the Heart leads the reader past tenderness to find redemption in suffering.
Review by Drea Jenkins
Monsignor Lorenzo Albacete was a Catholic priest, famous in his day for his spiritual wisdom and personal generosity. But like all of us who are born into families, he had trouble at home. His brother, Manuel, struggled with mental illness his whole life. Manuel would have fits of anxiety and sometimes keep his brother awake for long hours into the night, asking him questions or reminiscing about their childhood to calm his nerves. His mother shut down after his father’s death, failing to schedule appointments and refusing visitors, and Albacete had to support his family both financially and emotionally. Years later, his mother was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, and he watched her deteriorate for ten years, visiting her regularly. On top of this, he was a priest and regularly came to the aid of other sufferers, as when he stayed up all night with a woman whose sister died abruptly in a plane crash. Until his death in 2014, he struggled with questions of God’s will and the purpose of suffering.
What good does suffering bring? What is the purpose of suffering in the lives of Albacete’s mother, brother, and everyone else? In Cry of the Heart, Albacete observes that the world tries to minimize suffering and maximize “quality of life.” He thinks about this phenomenon in the life of Mary Anne, a girl who was born with a grotesque tumor on her face, lived under the care of Catholic sisters, and died of cancer at the age of twelve. Flannery O’Connor in her “Introduction to A Memoir of Mary Anne” tells us that the bishop performing her funeral “said that the world would ask why Mary Anne should die,” but she believes that “the world… would not ask why Mary Anne should die but why should she be born in the first place.” The world would ask, why should Mary Anne live just to suffer?
O’Connor says that believing someone like Mary Anne would be better off never being born at all comes from believing in tenderness but with no faith in God. She says tenderness cut off from its divine source ends in “terror… forced labor camps and… the fumes of the gas chamber.” Murder is the logical end when we decide that suffering is not worth living for. Isn’t it wrong that Mary Anne suffered? Shouldn’t we have prevented Mary Anne from suffering? Wouldn’t the only way to prevent her suffering be to end her life before her suffering began, perhaps before her life began? What about other people with cancer–should they suffer, or should we cut their misery short ourselves?
Seeing this spiral of reasoning, Albacete asks, how did we get here? Why do we try to annihilate suffering by going so far as to end human life? He proposes an idea, a quote from Nathaniel Hawthorne’s short story “The Birthmark”: “You cannot love what shocks you.” Albacete believes that shock is how we have stumbled into faithless tenderness. When we see someone who is suffering in a way that horrifies us, we feel the need to eliminate that suffering; we cannot stomach the idea that a human being is experiencing such anguish. We see someone like Mary Anne, suffering with a tumor that she cannot possibly “deserve” (at least not more than anyone else), and we must try to end her suffering, even if we must turn her into an object in the process.
We see suffering as a problem to be solved more than we see the humanity of the sufferer.
As our shock at suffering leads us to objectify sufferers, today’s “quality of life” mindset chips away at the belief that humans have intrinsic value. We go too far to try to end suffering, which is evident in our culture’s increasing rates of assisted suicide and euthanasia. We see suffering as a problem to be solved more than we see the humanity of the sufferer.
Albacete references the gospel to point out how separating, how diabolical, the rejection of suffering can be. When Jesus announces that he will suffer and die, Peter questions and resists him, and Jesus calls him Satan and tells him to go away. I remember reading this and thinking it was extreme, but now I see it in a new light. When we are shocked, we rationalize, we reject, and we panic, focusing only on what we can control. Peter cannot control Jesus’ suffering, so he rejects the concept. We can’t control dementia, but we can somewhat control life or death. In Walter M. Miller, Jr.’s A Canticle for Leibowitz, the survivors of the nuclear apocalypse could not reverse radiation sickness from the fallout, but they could eradicate it by mercifully killing those suffering from it. We can’t eliminate pain, except by eliminating the people feeling it, and those people can come to seem like obstacles on the way to true happiness for the rest of us.
Instead of being shocked, panicking, and trying to reject Jesus’ suffering, what should Peter have done? How should the doctors in A Canticle for Leibowitz have treated hopeless cases of radiation sickness? If we cannot end someone’s suffering, how should we respond? If shock separates us, how can we join with the sufferer? How can we love the sufferer?
Albacete believes we should push past our shock, reject inhumane practices like euthanasia, and accept the sufferer by co-suffering alongside them, crying out to God with them. To co-suffer means to ask the difficult questions with them or for them, the existential questions about a greater purpose that necessarily arise from that consciousness of pain. It means “to walk alongside them towards transcendence,” striving to understand the greater purpose of existence. “Thus the answer to suffering is always grace.”
Albacete has in mind the apostolic letter Salvifici Doloris, or “redemptive suffering,” written by his old friend, Pope John Paul II. In the letter, John Paul II declares that the Christian response to suffering is found in Colossians 1:24, “In my flesh I complete what is lacking in Christ’s afflictions for the sake of His body, that is, the Church.” Jesus suffered death on the cross, and the Church is born out of that suffering. Our primary suffering then, as Christians, is to co-suffer with Christ, to join His suffering by loving him and recognizing the pain, the difference between the world as it is and the world as it should be. Instead of being shocked and rejecting the cross, we accept it and therefore recognize that all suffering has been redeemed by the suffering of Jesus himself.
Albacete himself struggled with questions about his brother, his mother, and the Church, but he never lost contact with God. He questioned God, but his suffering redeemed him, connecting him to Christ. We can push past the shock of suffering by recognizing the suffering of Christ and the Mystery of faith. If we know Christ and co-suffer with him, no suffering will shock us, and our suffering together will “complete what is lacking.”
Drea Jenkins is a software developer in Lebanon, NH. She graduated from Dartmouth in 2020 and loves to spend her free time reading, writing, and coding.
Cry of the Heart: On the Meaning of Suffering was published by Slant Books on February 15, 2023. Fare Forward appreciates their provision of a review copy, and you can purchase your own copy from the publisher here.
