Coping with misery

OUR human condition cannot avoid misery in one form or

another. A quick look around would reveal cases upon cases of human

misery blighting our world today. Poverty, hunger, ignorance, illness,

injustice abound, their stench practically filling the air.

            Beggars proliferate in the streets. Homeless families,

with little children all dirty and practically naked, stay and sleep

on sidewalks or under bridges and flyovers. Many moneyless sick and

those with disabilities waste away in some public hospitals or in some

corners.

            There still are other forms of human misery that may not

be immediately perceptible because they are more subtle and more

complex. They hide behind the masks of wealth, fame, power, exuding an

air of sophistication and adept in the ways of pretense and deceit,

but they are there nonetheless, and in fact, are more disturbing, more

dangerous, more pitiable.

            In the face of all these, we need to learn what to think

and do about them. We should not be casual and cavalier about them. We

simply cannot depend on our spontaneous impulses, since these can take

only the external aspects and miss the real issues, and can lead us to

depression, to get scandalized and fall into self-pity, frozen into

inaction.

            This is where we have to have recourse to our core

beliefs. If we don’t have faith, then we would just be at the mercy of

our instincts and impulses, our estimations of things, both personal

and collective, of some social trends and political consensus, etc.

These, at best, can give us only a tentative, partial view and some

passing relief, but they can never totally cope with human misery.

            Our Christian faith offers us a global picture of this

phenomenon, explaining to us its origin and causes, its forms and

ways, its remedies, both temporal and eternal, both immediate and

ultimate.

            We need to enliven this faith in this regard, so that even

as we go through the unavoidable experience of human misery, we can

still find meaning and hope in them, we can still afford to find peace

and joy through them. In fact, we can still derive not only some good,

but rather our true, ultimate good—our salvation.

            That is why we need to know very closely the doctrine of

our faith regarding evil and sin, the misuse of our freedom, our

disloyalty to God, etc., to have a good idea of the causes of human

misery. These indeed are the root causes of human misery.

            Such knowledge would somehow calm down our worries about

why human misery exists. It would lead us to focus our attention more

on what to do with it. We avoid wasting time, simply feeling bad and

lamenting.

            Then we have to know how to deal with human misery. In

this regard, we just have to look more closely at Christ. He showed us

the way. He was full of compassion. If need be, he had to perform

miracles, healing the sick, recovering the sight to the blind, hearing

to the deaf, and even life to the dead.

            These miracles only show that we too should be

compassionate with one another, doing everything to solve whatever

misery we have. Before having recourse to Christ for some

extraordinary interventions as in some miraculous cures, we have to

exhaust all human means to do this.

            But he never failed to underscore the importance of faith

in all this. That’s why he always told the beneficiaries of his

miraculous cures that it was their faith that made them merit such

miracles. The unbelievers did not receive any miracles.

            He neither failed to preach about the faith. It was as if

he wanted to disabuse us from totally relying on our human and natural

means, or on some stroke of luck and superstitious practices. The

human and natural means, of course, are always necessary, but always

at the instance of faith, and never without it. So we have to be

careful because we tend to be held captive by human and natural means

alone, if not by some superstition.

            When all human and natural means have been used and still

no relief is attained, Christ showed us how to about that predicament.

It is simply to bear everything, even up to death, because as long as

we unite our suffering and death with his, we too can expect to

resurrect with him.

            Besides, our human miseries already have some beneficial

effects. They tend to purify and strengthen us, and to lead our path

toward God. These truths should always be in our mind as we go through

our miseries.