suffering

Dear George
I hear you’re down in the last eighteen for the vacant papacy. Good luck but for selfish reasons I hope you go no further, I don’t want to be addressing these letters to somebody who’s infallible, I already feel that the task’s a bit daunting as it is. Anyway I don’t suppose even you would imagine scaling such heights. An Aussie pope, I don’t know whether it would make me laugh or cry.
This brings me to your recent post for Online Opinion, an encomium of sorts on John Paul 11. In it, you take a passing swipe at the euthanasia debate, and I want to pause on that.
The swipe was made in the context of claiming that secularists don’t value suffering as Christians do (or apparently should do). You claim that, in modern times, suffering is so devalued that we often prefer to eliminate the sufferer.
This is an odd, and if I may say so, a peculiarly insensitive way of characterising the issue. Of course people hate to see others suffer. That’s a natural response to suffering. It’s about empathy and fellow-feeling more than anything. ‘I have suffered with those that I saw suffer,’ as Miranda said in The Tempest. On some occasions the pain and agony may be so bad, and the situation so completely hopeless, that death would be a release. This issue has arisen for we humans from time to time since we first emerged on this planet. It’s always a great dramatic theme in war and adventure movies, with the hero proving his manhood by finishing off his best mate rather than leaving him to the tender mercies of the enemy. Such scenes depend for their dramatic power on questions and concerns that go a little deeper than ‘why not eliminate the sufferer?’ How much more agonising the issue becomes when it’s not a figure on celluloid but your own loved one who’s in such a suffering state.
So it seems you're trying to argue that people should accept suffering rather than death. That we should reject the easy, painless exit and embrace prolonged suffering, if it should happen to come our way. Followed by death of course.
Your reason for pushing this line is a religious one – Jesus suffered horribly but nobly and beautifully and is an example to us all. Suffering ennobles, it teaches us more than all the textbooks we choose to fill our heads with. Catholics and early Christians have taken this message to heart – hair shirts, regular self-flagellation, drinking the pus of the diseased, you name it, they’ve tried it. Perhaps even your clergy’s celibacy is an attempt to impose on themselves just a modicum of Christ’s suffering - though whether he suffered that particular deprivation is very much a moot point.
Now I for one recognise how much we can learn through suffering, but like the vast majority of people I don’t go out of my way to suffer, for learning purposes or for any other reason. Nor do I take a strong line on euthanasia one way or the other. I’m a pragmatist in these matters, and I don’t believe human life is sacred. I believe a human life belongs largely to the person who lives it and that he or she should have the largest say in how it should be brought to an end, as far as that’s possible.
So let’s not get carried away with the concept of suffering, George. We should acknowledge suffering, but I’m not sure what you mean by valuing it. Certainly we shouldn’t glory in it, or wallow in it. We should seek to alleviate it, where we can. I’m not sure, but I imagine even John Paul 11 was dosed up with pain killers on a regular basis. He died with dignity, and I’m sure we all hope that he didn’t suffer too much.
Bye for now, George, and once again, with renewed emphasis, I can only hope your god doesn’t lead you into too much silliness.
your pal, Luigi.