To Help Carry the Suffering of an Other

The loneliness of suffering targets each person individually. When you suffer, no one can really experience what it is like for you. Beneath this isolation of the individual, is there some way in which suffering contributes to the light and creativity of creation? The poet and theologian Charles Williams had a theory of “co-inherence.” He understood creation as a web of order and dependency between all of us and God: “the web of diagrammatised glory.” Within this belonging a secret exchange of Spirit continually flows between us. A person has, then, the choice to take on the sufferings of another and carry them.

In modern times, this courageous kindness is exemplified in the action of Maximilian Kolbe, a Polish priest who was a prisoner in Auschwitz. A prisoner had escaped from Block 14. The Lagerkommandant said that ten would die for the one who had escaped. He chose ten men. One of them cried as he was chosen; he knew he would never see his wife and children again. Maximilian Kolbe stepped up and asked the commandant if he could take the man’s place. He was allowed. They were thrown in a death cell where he was tortured and eventually starved to death. This is a powerful story of the courage and kindness of taking the cross from the shoulder of another.

The Celtic tradition had similar beliefs. For instance, when a woman was in the throes and torture of childbirth, she might offer a waistcoat or some other item of her clothing to her man in the belief that she could transfer her pains to him. Or alternatively, the man might go out onto the farm and do some excruciatingly hard work in order to take some of the pain from his woman. Creation seems to have a secret symmetry in which we all participate without being aware of it. Suffering seems to awaken this and break our belonging. Yet, perhaps ironically, we are nearest then to the heart of intimacy.