On Tragedy in the Christian Life

Some time ago, not long after I briefly studied Buddhism in a comparative religion class, I got into an AIM discussion (that should provide some dates) with a Catholic friend about suffering.  He tried to depict suffering as an evil to be avoided at nearly all costs.  Pointing to the cross, I tried to argue that as a Christian, running from suffering makes no sense.



Around that time, I realized a great difference between Christianity and Buddhism.  (This realization probably ruined me forever to all those “all religions are really just the same and express things differently” philosophies that run rampant today.)  Buddhism’s goal is to eliminate suffering; Christianity makes sense of suffering.

The theology of martyrdom is just one way
that Catholicism makes sense of suffering.

Christianity (especially Catholicism -- “Christianity” encompasses a wide range of theologies) provides suffering a place and a framework in the world.  While it doesn’t always alleviate suffering or even explain it satisfactorily, it tells us how to do it and what to do with it.  I never thought of these insights as particularly unique,  but merely enjoyed the way that Catholicism makes sense of real life.

Today, Leah Libresco of Unequally Yoked pointed her readers to an article on Catholicism and tragedy.  The writer, Elizabeth Stoker Bruenig, makes a similar, and much more insightful and nuanced, case for the way that Christianity gives a place to tragedy.  As an example, she uses a situation where virtuous living means that a person will always have a deep, unmet need or desire.

Her article made me think of the situation that bothers me most in discussions about divorce, remarriage, and Catholicism: a moment where one partner has abandon virtue, faith, and the marriage, while the other remains devoted to all three.  It is one thing to explicate what the virtuous action would be and why; it is quite another to acknowledge emotionally and spiritually what this will mean for the faithful spouse.  It is quite another thing to experience that particular ache of being human in a fallen world.

Bruenig confronts this ache and offers tragedy a real place in the Christian worldview:

Yes, the Christian frame agrees, there are tragic situations: but the needs which must go un-met or the desires un-fulfilled have no finitude because human life itself continues. Desires and needs that conflict with the good and the good of others are the result of a temporary disturbed order, but with God order is undisturbed, and the Christian hope points to eventual unity with that order. The un-met need, I mean to say, is only the primary ethical concern when you imagine need-meeting to be the totalizing, final frame of human existing.