The Joy of Suffering
Plus: Wobbly songs; solve your problems with one weird trick (it's celibacy)
Creatures, what up? This newsletter is just three short posts in a trenchcoat.
Misery Loves Theology
That’s the saying, right? No, so, I got a free copy of Msgr Lorenzo Albacete’s posthumously-published Cry of the Heart: On the Meaning of Suffering. This sounds like it will be a book about how to suffer (“How did you find your suffering, sir?” “Well, I moved the potatoes and there it was!”) but it isn’t. There’s an afterword where we learn that these essays began as a lecture series for healthcare professionals, and the book’s perspective on suffering is always that of the caregiver—as Msgr Albacete was the caregiver for his brother, who suffered from fairly severe mental illness. He was also deeply influenced by his mother’s suffering from Alzheimer’s, and at one point wrote, “I want to be the priest of the meaning behind her suffering.” So his central question ends up being, “What is the meaning of other people’s suffering?”, which becomes, unexpectedly, a guide to how to suffer when you’re not the one suffering.
The central idea is “co-suffering,” which isn’t about feeling someone else’s physical pain (because: how and also: why?), but about sharing in the doubt and anger and existential loss that suffering can bring: “It is no surprise that, according to some Scripture scholars, the Gospel of John presents Jesus’s suffering as a trial in which God is the accused, Satan is the accuser, and we are the jury. To co-suffer is to be willing to serve on the jury in the trial of God and to risk our own faith by identifying with those who suffer in their questioning of God.”
This idea resonated with me; I’ve found myself in those anguished conversations, where coming alongside the suffering person does feel like a risk of one’s own faith. It’s important that Msgr Albacete doesn’t just sort of leave things there; he isn’t prompting you to become the glib agnostic calling out to the suicidal man on the Golden Gate Bridge, “Well, who can say what’s good or bad?” What he’s talking about is the impossible act of standing within your own faith and within the catastrophe of someone else’s. When they have done you the great honor of inviting you into their shipwreck, this kind of “co-suffering” may be the only way you can invite them into your salvage. Or, as Monsignor puts it, “We can only help the other to ask the question ‘why’ by asking it together—that is, by praying together.” An answer as simple as Alyosha’s kiss: Put God on trial, and then pray anyway.
The biographical afterword is perhaps the most concentrated and practical exploration of the ideas here, since Msgr Albacete’s theology found its source and expression in his life. There are other powerful passages in this slender book, like the idea that a miracle can have “a crucified form,” can even be “a misfortune.” There’s a bit I liked and found provocative, but also easy to parody, since its form is basically, “What if I told you that suffering is an argument for the existence of God?” But mostly Msgr Albacete is trying to invite us into the “world of suffering,” a place where we learn that all suffering is in some way related—like the idea of a “country of illness” in which one sojourns or settles. By “co-suffering,” we even become “a person,” “someone.” We enter into our identity only when we accept our call to co-suffer with someone: “The mission of the Church is to so co-suffer with man so that each person can recognize himself or herself as someone.” “When we take on the questioning of the sufferer, we risk our identity with them. We lend them our identity and so join with them in an inexpressible union that reaches down into the deepest part of the self.”
“In the end, however, our identity is not strong enough to totally restore the identity of the one who suffers.” Only a god could do it.
Two cultural notes: I hate to reopen this wormcan, but—if there’s one recent artistic work this book is “in dialogue with,” you guys, it has got to be Heroes of the Fourth Turning. Emily’s Empathy rides again!
And… you get a real sense of how early Catholic novelists identified “relief of suffering” as a longing for a good, that would lead to grave evil in the form of eugenics and euthanasia: Flannery O’Connor and Walker Percy get name-checked here; A Canticle for Leibowitz doesn’t, but it easily could. And here we still are.
The Cat Likes Cream
Recently finished The Big Red Songbook: 250+ IWW Songs! (yes the exclamation mark is there in the title.) So this thing has some essays as well as a big treasury of songs of the Industrial Workers of the World aka the Wobblies, a radical union that flourished in the first decades of the twentieth century. Some very scattered notes:
# The title of this section is a radical slogan. Join the union to get nice things! The best of these songs show deep knowledge of and attentiveness to the small nice or rotten things in life: the dread of the alarm clock, the pleasure of a pork chop. Why should mere objects pulse with such Hitchcockian emotions of terror and longing? Join the One Big Union and let your alarm clock be just a clock again, let a pork chop be just a pleasure and not a desperate fantasy.
# The biggest IWW contribution to American language is possibly the word “hijack,” but otherwise the phrase “pie in the sky,” as in, Don’t agitate for better conditions now, because you’ll get pie in the sky when you die. It’s from Joe Hill’s song “The Preacher and the Slave.” It’s invaluable; it’s also, you know, a marker of the songs’ insistent atheism. One area where they were perhaps insufficiently attentive to the longings of suffering people.
# Speaking of, it’s startling to see wage workers so often called “slaves” here (including in at least one song by an African-American Wobbly), and consider that many of these people’s parents, if not they themselves, could remember the Civil War. The charge of wage slavery maybe had even more weight so close in time to the Emancipation Proclamation.
# One of the essays is a reminiscence by a man involved in UAW labor politics in the 1950s. And he describes this era, which appears in pop sociology as the unions’ Golden Age, instead as a time of defeat. Unions were accepted by the boss because they’d become acceptable to him. Militancy and mistrust were replaced by McCarthyism and m….inimal demands? I’m having a hard time finding another m-word. ANYWAY I definitely don’t know enough labor history to assess this perspective, I just thought it was an interesting counterpoint to the conventional wisdom.
# My final thought is just that we need more songs you sing with people. Write a song for a thing today!
Image for this post is an IWW Songbook cover, via the State Library of Victoria (AU) and used under a Creative Commons license.
The Celibacy Recession Again
There’s a depressing pattern that emerges in a lot of related contexts nowadays: in discussions of the “loneliness epidemic,” or women’s decision not to have children, etc. The trad side says marriage and family are good for you. The prog side says everybody gets to determine the meaning of their own life. The trads sound smug (“Vitamin C protects against scurvy!” I say, as I bite into an entire unpeeled lemon in front of a dying sailor) and kind of like they’d tell Emily Dickinson what she really needs is a man. Meanwhile the progs are spending their one wild and precious life defending their right to have fewer connections, fewer duties: less love.
Honoring celibacy would solve your problems! What if we asked how we can support a wide range of forms of love, including intentional community, monastic love, chosen family? What if we asked what love looks like in the life of a teacher, a nurse, or an artist, and asked how we can make it easier for them to love and give care?
What if we insisted that all of us are made for love—and for mystical union with God, above all? It isn’t our choices but God’s choice of us which secures our personhood; you get to do weird things, your weirdness may even be why you’re here, but that weirdness is intended to help you love.
Or maybe I’m tripping! When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like not getting nailed….
icymi
I watched a lot of movies! Includes That Romanian Abortion Movie, two of the like four lesbian films of the 1990s, and a true-crime doc featuring an extremely sketchy apparition of Our Lady and also the intrinsic dignity of all human beings.
Now Playing
Violent Femmes, “Do You Really Want to Hurt Me?” His sweat like blood came down like teeeeeeeeaaaars!
Appreciate your commentary as always, Eve. My knowledge of labor history is admittedly skewed, as I'm active in a pre-majority union organized through CWA, but I hope this comment is of some value despite its biases. I think the movement's tendencies toward atheism make it that much more necessary for Catholics to engage with labor rights in a meaningful way. (Personally as a bi Catholic who's active in labor, I see a lot of parallels with mainstream Catholic hostility toward both the labor and LGBTQ+ movements in the US, but I think this will be a long enough comment without getting too far into it.) I think, too, that the UAW perspective you're describing is shared by many of the organizers I know as well. Established unions can tend toward a minimal-effort service model that upholds existing power structures while keeping workers complacent through some light wealth redistribution and basic job security (all the while trading rights for those small concessions), and from my understanding this model was largely established in the 1950s in the United States: more a workplace (white, straight) men's club than something truly reflecting solidarity. It takes a lot of honesty and hard conversations to grow unions that value and reflect the perspectives of marginalized workers, but I believe it's a goal worth working toward. (In the meantime, though, I'll keep singing along to all the classic union tunes, except perhaps the ones where the movement's atheism and misogyny are most rampant.)