This is a more unusual depiction of the crucifixion. The cross isn’t clearly illustrated. In fact nothing is clearly illustrated. It’s a chaotic mess of colours and symbols that swirl around inside the large outlines of teardrops. But allow your eyes roam over the painting, to rest on particular images and to take in the whole, and you can start to make out some of its symbols. Dotted around the painting is the central motif of the cross. But there are also other images borrowed from medieval catholic mysticism (the pelican and the cup) and images from Santeria, the Caribbean religion that blends Catholicism with African animistic religions (those images include forked tongues and daggers). But there is little overall coherence to the painting and that is the first comment it makes about its subject matter. As the title suggests, it depicts suffering and for its painter, Carlos Alfonzo, suffering was something chaotic, overwhelming, meaningless and messy.
Alfonzo was a Cuban artist, born in Havana in 1950. This painting reflects the violence that he experienced in Cuba before he fled with the 125,000 refugees, exiled by Fidel Castro in 1980. So it reflects the trauma of injury and dislocation. It is a lament of exile. Alfonzo described himself as being in shock at having to leave Cuba and it took him more than a year to start painting again.
The Cuban refugees were not welcomed in America. They were treated with suspicion and contempt, regarded even as Cuban spies. But Alfonzo’s trauma ran deeper than that too. He was gay, and arriving in New York in the 1980s he was confronted with the advent of the AIDS epidemic and all the suspicion there was of gay people at the time when AIDS was thought to be only a gay man’s disease. Alfonzo himself died of AIDS five years after completing this painting.
So the images we have here reflect the feelings of isolation and stigmatisation Alfonzo felt in the painful and lonely years before his death. The images you can make out of tongues pierced by knives or nails are Santerian charms against gossip and images of eyes and teardrops were believed to fend of the “evil eye”. So swirling around in Alfonzo’s suffering is the judgement of others – their unkind words and hateful stares. This painting depicts a man’s suffering and illness, made worse by a lack of sympathy and the condemnation on the part of others. This is isolation, fear and despair, and within it we find the image of the cross of Christ.
As we meditate on this image, I want us to think for a while about suffering in our lives, how we face it on our own, how we face it with others, and how we face it in the light of the cross of Christ.
Suffering is actually a difficult thing to define. It’s one of those things where we know it when we’ve got it, but it’s not as obvious as we might think. It is certainly pain of one kind or another – physical or mental. But it’s pain that takes place within a context that shapes our feelings about it and our ability to deal with it. So when a baby cries out, her mother comforts her and she is surrounded with sympathy and love which means that her discomfort does not become suffering.
However, suffering arises when the context of our pain is less sympathetic and more isolated. And perhaps the more isolated our context feels, the worse the suffering becomes. Pain causes suffering, but part of what it is that we’re suffering is not merely the pain itself, but our fears about that pain. Will this ever go away? Does anyone actually understand how bad this is? What if I reach a point where I can’t bear this anymore? These are the feelings of isolation that turn pain into suffering. Or in the case of a bereavement, there is the raw aching loss of a loved one simply not being there any longer. But it becomes an even worse suffering as we feel more isolated in our grief which is actually what always happens as the initial sympathy wears off. Does anyone really understand how much this person meant to me? Are my work colleagues actually a little resentful that I have taken this time off as compassionate leave? Will anyone apart from me even remember this person after a year or so?
These fears that arise through isolation and lack of sympathy (what turns pain into suffering), made up the experience of Alfonzo and thousands of other AIDS sufferers. They experienced the pain of being ill and the increasing certainty of death. But all made a hundred times more difficult by the context of their suffering: a context of fear about how HIV could be passed on; a context of malevolence for many who lost friends or partners but could not publicly acknowledge their grief; and of course, the context that we all remember of blame and shame. “Well they’ve brought it on themselves. That’s the price of living that sort of lifestyle.” And even today when AIDS has revealed itself to be a global pandemic affecting every people of every race and sexual orientation, there are still those who would rather pass judgement on the lifestyles of its sufferers than take the urgent pragmatic actions required to counter it. The Church preaches its ideals of chastity and fidelity. But as we do that we need to remember the story we find in John’s Gospel of Jesus writing in the dust before the woman caught in adultery. He does not judge her but looks at her with compassion and tells her moralising, idealist accusers that if they have never committed a sin in their lives then they can throw the first stone at her.
Jesus himself was the victim of the same judgemental, moralising people. They disapproved of the people he spent his time with, the prostitutes, the tax-collectors, the people of different races. And when Jesus’ moment of real sorrow comes, his pain, like Alfonzo, is made into suffering by the isolation in which he finds himself. His disciples leave him, even deny him. And when he stands before Pilate he is trapped in that burden of isolation. In St Luke’s Gospel he says “If I tell you who I am, you will not believe me, and if I question you, you will not answer.” Jesus is on his own. There is no one to empathise. And the next day when he hangs on the cross, he is totally alone in his sufferings. The crowd mock him, even those who are crucified with him taunt him. No wonder Jesus cries out in dereliction and despair, “My God, my God, what have you forsaken me?”
So I am sure this is why we find that the cross of Jesus Christ is at the heart of Alfonzo’s painting. For Alfonzo, here is a man who shares his isolation. Here is a man who, in the silence of his suffering, shares his experience of being stigmatised and shamed. Here is a man who is silently alongside a lonely suffering man, is silently with him in the horror of it all.
Although there were particular reasons why Alfonzo’s experience was so isolating, that is how Basil Hume viewed the experience of suffering and grief in general. It’s one of inescapable isolation and, in fact, nothing that anyone else says or does goes very far toward helping. What comforts us is the silent presence of the crucified one. Hume writes:
Grief cannot be shared for it is mine alone.
Grief is a dying within me,
a great emptiness,
a frightening void.
It is loneliness,
a sickening sorrow at night,
on awakening a terrible dread.
Another’s words do not help.
A reasoned argument explains little
for having tried too much.
Silence is the best response to another’s grief.
Not the silence that is a pause in speech,
awkward and unwanted,
but one that unites heart to heart.
Love, speaking in silence is the way into
the void of another’s grief.
The best of all love comes silently,
and slowly too, to soften the pain of grief,
and begin to dispel the sadness.
It is the love of God, warm and true,
which will touch the grieving heart and heal it.
He looks at the grieving person and has pity,
for grief is a great pain.
He came among us to learn about grief,
and much else too, this Man of Sorrows.
He knows. He understands.
Grief will yield to peace – in time.
So this brings us to think that, yes, suffering is always an isolating experience. But it is possible for us to lessen the suffering of others by being the silent companion, by getting alongside the sufferer in their suffering. The Church’s calling – the calling of every Christian – is always and everywhere to be Christ to others. And that is most especially in being alongside those who are suffering. As Cardinal Hume says, that is not primarily in offering them any clever philosophical or theological answers. I remember a couple of years ago hearing Rowan Williams interviewed on the Today programme the day after the Beslan massacre where hundreds of children had been killed in a school gymnasium by Chechen terrorists. And, of course, as Archbishop of Canterbury and a leading philosophical theologian, he explained that God does not create us as robots. That being free to love means being free to inflict and experience suffering. And that’s true and needs to be said. But where he really spoke to me was in sharing his gut-wrenching horror at what had happened, as a dad who loves his own children. He too was silently appalled, silently crying out to God for justice and deliverance. He was standing alongside the families of Beslan with the isolated and suffering Jesus on the cross.
So suffering is an isolated experience which only the sufferer can confront, perhaps like Alfonzo in the company of the suffering Jesus. But it is also an experience of being isolated which need not necessarily be so, and part of our vocation as Christians is somehow to inhabit that space that Christ entered in being alongside the isolated and rejected. That’s true I think, not just in the experiences of terrible hardship that people face – the loss of a partner or the treatment for cancer. It’s also true in the day by day feelings of pain and loneliness that so many people in our society experience. I sometimes think churches can be very good at rallying round when there is a crisis, but not so good at actually modelling a way of living together that holds and sustains one another in the more mundane times.
Intense experiences of suffering are mercifully rare for most of us, but a lower level aching of the heart – melancholia – is something that many people carry around with them for much of their lives, sometimes sharing their pain with very few people. Freud described melancholy as “the effect of an ungrieved loss” , which, as a definition is not so far from my definition of suffering as pain that is experienced in isolation and is not met with the comfort or sympathy of others. Freud perhaps focused too much on how we could overcome melancholy by mourning our own private griefs, on our own or perhaps with some professional counsellor. But as Christians we need to learn that grief is shared. Just as Christ took on our sufferings on the Cross, so should we, day by day, seek to share some of the inner burdens of our brothers and sisters in the Church. In response to melancholia, we need to grieve for one another’s losses. That may be the loss of a loved one in bereavement. But on a more mundane level it is likely to be the loss of our dreams, the loss of our resolve, the loss of our hopes, the loss of our faithfulness. Do we have the courage to share with one another our disappointments, our lack of faith, our deep and intractable sense of low self-esteem? Do we have the courage to take on those losses?
If we did, that would make the church a very counter-cultural kind of community. More than any society that has ever lived, modern Western Europe and North America have accentuated individualism, to the point where we are rarely even aware of one another’s losses. Alexis de Tocqueville warned us of the dangers of this back in 1835:
Individualism is a calm and considered feeling which disposes each citizen to isolate himself from the mass of his fellows and withdraw into the circle of family and friends; with this little society formed to his taste, he gladly leaves the greater society to look after itself… Each man is forever thrown back on himself alone, and there is danger that he may be shut up in the solitude of his own heart.
I encounter far too many people who are shut up in the solitude of their own hearts. If de Tocqueville was worried about it over 150 years ago, I think in our own time the solitude of the heart has become as much of a pandemic as the AIDS that took Alfonzo’s life. And perhaps they’re not entirely separate since, for so many people the draw of casual sex is the craving for intimacy, the constant desire for someone who will take away the losses and disappointments. Those aspirations are frequently expressed in the lyrics of pop music – songs about being “completed” by another person.
But I’m afraid the desire for an intimate relationship that will overcome melancholia – the low level suffering of our age – is also prevalent in so much popular Christianity. We see it in some modern worship songs where “Jesus as an object of loving devotion can slip into Jesus as fantasy partner in a dream of emotional fulfilment” . Unfortunately it doesn’t work like that. Christianity isn’t some spiritual equivalent of Prozac that is the quick fix to our griefs and losses.
Jesus is not the fantasy partner who takes away all our sufferings. But rather, Jesus is one who is silently with all whose lives are broken like his own body. And more than that, Jesus is present in all who relieve the suffering of others. That may be medically, or through providing professional care. Or it may be on a more mundane level in simply taking away someone’s loneliness in a casual conversation, popping round to visit an isolated neighbour, or even just smiling at a homeless person in the street. It will certainly need to be in relinquishing our instincts to be judgemental and suspicious of those who are suffering social stigma and isolation in the way that Carlos Alfonzo experienced in Cuba and New York.
Where is God in suffering? He is beside us suffering on the cross, and he is among those who do what they can to relieve our suffering. Are we prepared to put ourselves in that place? That is what we commit ourselves to as we gather around the Cross of the suffering Christ. It’s what we commit ourselves to when we gather in Church. Good hymns are ones that call our attention to that. They don’t just externalise Jesus as the one who will complete us. They summon us to be Jesus for those who suffer like him. So in “Brother, sister, let me serve you” we sing:
I will hold the Christ light for you
In the night time of your fear.
I will stretch my hand out to you
Speak the peace you long to hear.
This hymn asks us what we are prepared to hold out to those who are suffering. Will it be the branch of hyssop with the sponge of sour wine that the taunting crowd offered to Jesus to intensify his pain? Or will it be the light of Christ himself that brings comfort and hope?
What is the peace that you long to hear? For Alfonzo I imagine it was the peace that he was loved and accepted, that his sufferings were not his punishment and that in this despair there was hope. Perhaps that is the peace that we all long to hear, and it is the peace that we receive today from the Cross of Jesus. And it is the peace that we must offer to one another. That is the peace that reaches us in our sufferings, the peace which passes all understanding, that keeps our hearts and minds in the knowledge and love of God.
Cardinal Basil Hume, in Sebastian Sandys (ed.), Embracing the Mystery, London: SPCK, 1992, p.95f.
Sigmund Freud, Mourning and Melancholia, 1917
Alexis de Tocquville, Democracy in America, London: Penguin, 2003
Rowan Williams, “A History of Faith in Jesus”, in Bockmuehl (ed.) The Cambridge Companion to Jesus, p.231