Posted on 01/25/2026 2:34:07 PM PST by CharlesOConnell
Why do we suffer? It's complicated.
It amounts to some issues about the nature of generosity and gratitude. A first principle is that you should never do for others what they can do for themselves, because they will be ungrateful and, moreover, despise the gifts given to them. Then the ingrates will criticize you and, ultimately, turn on you, and maybe even attack you.
Why do we never get an answer,
when we're knocking at the door,
With a thousand million questions,
about hate and death and war?,
'Cause when we stop and look around us,
there is nothing that we need,
In a world of persecution,
that is burning in its greed.
-- Moody Blues, "The Question".
Jesus said, "cast not your pearls before swine, lest they trample them under, and turn to rend you." ("Rend" with their razor-sharp tusks.)
A further development of this is in the fact that, when things are easy, when we have got good things, good health, and everything is wonderful, we neglect to understand the extent to which, "we didn't do that", (President Obama was technically correct), but we have been given everything.
"Every best gift and every perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of lights" (James 1:17).
"What have you got, O man, that you have not received?" (1 Corinthians 4:17.)
The uninterrupted possession of these blessings has unfortunately the effect of making us think light of them.
It were well for us therefore to contemplate the lot of those who are deprived of them, e.g., the blind, the sick, the destitute;
we should then see how favored we are in comparison with these afflicted ones, and our love of God would become greater.
-- Spirago, Francis; The Catechism Explained: An Exhaustive Exposition of the Christian Religion (1899).
Then another issue, pertaining to the nature of generosity and gratitude, is that the greatest philanthropy, after what we do for God's glory and for love of Him, is to give to those who are destitute, who have no possibility of "reciprocating", of giving us something, anything for it.
(In the case of enemies, after we have returned kindness for abuse, even the ultimate kindness, praying for them, if our prayer for them contributes to their becoming converted and saved, we will "heap coals on their heads".)
Nevertheless, it is the recipients of un-repayable benefits who are the ones who actually lead us in the way of getting a balance about generosity and gratitude, in that, the worse off they are, the purer their gratitude tends to be.
This teaches us gratitude in our giving what we have, excess or scantiness, and it is the giving with a truly generous heart, measure overflowing, that also purifies our own generosity, removing all traces of selfishness, the fly in the precious ointment that contaminates it.
(Mother Theresa of Calcutta told a story, that she took a bag of rice to a desperately poor Hindu woman. The woman could hardly perform the minimally requisite, social-ceremonial courtesies for Mother Theresa, when she asked to be permitted to excuse herself, quickly got another bag, divided the bag of rice into two parts, and rushed over to her Muslim neighbor lady who was even poorer than she. So the principle seems to be, that it is the poorest who are the most generous.)
So what does suffering have to do with all this? We hear that Christ came to suffer, from the very moment of his conception, even beyond the Resurrection, "the Lamb Who is Slain from Before the Foundation of the World".
Christ doesn't pay more attention to the smart, the beautiful and the wealthy. He comes first to the poor, who have the greatest potential to truly appreciate what He does for them, in being born to die for them, to open the shut gates of heaven to them.
Now He says, "the world will hate you because it first hated Me." This is involved with the mortifying fear of any suffering, not to mention death, that afflicts, first, the most prosperous, more than those who know suffering.
The hatred of the world for us, as Christ's disciples, is precisely because we are called to suffer with Him. But because the world instinctively responds to suffering as a kind of communicable disease, a contamination that may spread to all the finest and best people, the higher they are, the worse the fear.
(I had two dogs. An old dog had cancer; it was being attacked by a younger dog; it dug out a little niche beneath the foundation of the house, so it could escape the younger dog's constant harassment, the nipping and harrying. The young dog was acting on instinct, because the old dog's illness could be infectious, and in the wild, packs of dogs will display behavior that benefits their group survival. But we aren't dogs.)
It's easy to despise the homeless in this country, because, at least in more temperate areas, they tend to want to be where they are, getting enough food, drugs and sex, without having to do any work. But this gets confused with the situation of the endless legions of migrants from deprived areas, many of them are far worse-off than anyone here, but the situation of which is tainted by the moral shortcomings of the paid, professional "do-gooders" who never seem to make any progress helping the homeless to become more well self-sustaining, but have no incentive to dampen the gravy train flow.
And there's no compassion for the home-born African-Americans, who didn't come here on their own initiative, but whose ancestors were stolen-to here, who suffer a lowering of the unskilled wage rates when "the people who know better than you" dictate that we have to have open borders, but who don't get "the compassion" the cross-border migrants can come to expect.
All this is familiar, but it doesn't do anything to solve the problems about generosity and gratitude, in part because it's not philanthropy of any kind when you suffer involuntary taxation to have your hard-earned gains given out to people who expect it and who might be prone to providing a poor example of gratitude and its complement, generosity.
Philanthropy is hard work, in the sense that it is very difficult to manage to do it effectively, with good results and a proper intention. The first thing someone wanting to volunteer and make a difference has to do, is learn to ignore the rampant ingratitude and sense of entitlement. They have to persevere through many disappointments, to find the scarce experience of a truly grateful, and implicitly generous, person for whom they can make a difference.
(There used to be a fantasy that was the opposite of The Ritchie Rich cartoon, that if we won a $1 billion lottery, like on the t.v. Show The Millionaire [CBS, 1955–1960], in which a fabulously wealthy, unseen benefactor gives $1 million (an enormous sum at the time) to a different person in each episode; ... the fantasy that we could envision ourselves first tightening our belts and dampening our appetite for comfort and luxuries; then we'd establish a foundation in a poor foreign country, somehow manage to navigate the shoals of fraud and self-seeking, and find some desperate, "worthy poor" to whom we would anonymously spread our windfall. But all this is mere fantasy; in our ordinary lives, we persist in just gratifying ourselves every day, keeping up with the Joneses, falling into conventional class values in which we envy those above us as models for our aspirations, and despise those less off than us as shirkers who are poor because that's what they decide to do.)
A reason behind Christ's suffering, and His call for us to participate in it, is that we might bypass all these traps, and through re-focus of our values, attain purity.
It′s a highway to heaven,
None can walk up there,
but the pure in heart,
It's a highway to heaven,
Walkin′ up the King's highway.
-- Mahalia Jackson
There's no other way. It's the way God designed it from before the beginning.
Why would He do such a thing? If you or I had been in charge, we would have designed things very differently, so that the wealthy are the good people and the poor are the bad people, and we would end up with something like an imaginary theology in which God is in effect a slave-master, which is basically the content of a religion very widespread in the world.
But God is God, and we're not, as Jesus told St. Theresa of Avila.
God doesn't think about things the way we do.
His ways are not our ways.
This-all wasn't an accident, it was God's purposeful design from before He created anything, outside of time.
We'd better get with the program, if we expect any eternal happiness and peace.
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“A first principle is that you should never do for others what they can do for themselves, because they will be ungrateful and, moreover, despise the gifts given to them. Then the ingrates will criticize you and, ultimately, turn on you, and maybe even attack you.”
I sure wish I had learned this lesson young. It’s been my fatal mistake. A doctor friend told me years ago that I was a “compulsive giver”. Well I have a surprise for all the vampires in my family... IT’S ALL GONE. LOL
I’ll throw this out one more time.
If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?” - Aleksander Solzhenitsyn
“IT’S ALL GONE.”
There are difficulties in being a recipient. In some cultures, any implication that you need help, is a mortal insult.
There was a story that an African tribe was despoiled of its land. Their ancient, self-reliant, agricultural way of life was destroyed for “improvements”.
There was a government plan to feed them. One member of each family was given vouchers, to walk to a distant location to get food for their whole families.
Some people were observed on the return trip, gobbling all the food down, then vomiting it up, so that there wouldn’t be anything for the other family members.
So fragile are bonds of relation and ancient traditions.
Chapter and verse on Jesus telling St. Theresa of Avila.
Probably Solzhenitsyn's greatest writing, also his most accessible, is "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hOEPmltff6A&t=2s
A "zek", a prisoner in a gulag, is a semi-skilled mason. Despite all the deprivations, he gets tremendous satisfaction from performing his work with fine craft, which they can't take away from him.
The story takes the reader through 24 hours of a horrible day, from pre-dawn waking to permanent blizzard conditions, through falling asleep exhausted and, seeming, dissipated, awaiting another day.
The best, most religious prisoners, were't the Orthodox, the Latins or the Muslims, they were the odd men out, the Pentecostals, who were the most devout and, even, charitable.
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