P. Gorazd Cetkovský, O.Carm.
This article was created by slightly modifying a contribution prepared for the conference "Christian Healthcare Worker in Social Services," which took place on October 25, 2008, at the House of St. Antonin in Moravian Budějovice. The theme of the conference was "Comfort and Hope." To keep it sufficiently concise, I decided to focus primarily on the first of these concepts. I am convinced that true comfort is always related to hope.
I am not an expert in biblical studies or in understanding the lives of people in the ancient Orient. However, over the pages of Scripture it seems to me that in the time of the Old and New Testament, life situations were much more ritualized than today. Pain and grief were expressed through specific and conspicuous outward manifestations (sackcloth, tearing of garments, weeping and mourning, letting hair down, etc.). And expressing one’s sorrow outwardly to such a degree was to some extent "mandatory," as people around expected it as something entirely appropriate at that moment. Acting otherwise was perceived as incomprehensible and provocative; when someone suppressed or muted their wailing, people around required an explanation from the suffering individual.
A corresponding response from the surroundings to the grief of the individual in question was comfort, that is, behavior toward them, which probably took the form of a certain ritual (specific, established customs). This is worth noting because, for us today, the terms "comfort" and "to comfort someone" have a more vague content. Providing comfort was also considered a "duty" in biblical times, not just a courtesy or even merely an extraordinary "good deed." Of course, this obligation was connected to how close the relationship between the comforter and the sufferer was (whether marriage, blood relation, affiliation within the tribe, etc.).
Today is a time of general decline of rituals. Sometimes this happens inadvertently — with changing life circumstances and the increasing pace of life, we forget rituals; other times, it is intentional — they are regarded as theatrical formalities and are intentionally overlooked with this justification. (But it is often more complicated: we have lost spontaneity, we feel awkward during them, etc.) In this regard, the words of Cardinal Schönborn from his book on the Christian attitude toward death keep coming to mind: "Is it not coincidental that the transition from this world to the next, from temporality to eternity, has been particularly intensely ritualized? What is more remarkable is that our time stands so helplessly before this decisive moment of life’s transformation."1 It seems to me that this helplessness and confusion weigh on us not only when accompanying the dying, but equally in experiencing pain and grief and in the effort to provide comfort to another. The rituals that people once relied on in such moments, which they leaned on, are largely forgotten today.
The Basic Idea – To Face the Fact That the Suffering Person's World Becomes Constricted
Based on my experience, illness and old age often shrink the world of the afflicted person and distort its contours. The suffering person thinks only of their pain, their sorrows. They become estranged from others; many things, events, and stimuli they previously experienced or that surround them now go unnoticed.
I see this expressed succinctly in the verses of Jiří Wolker, a poet who, in his youth, had to confront tuberculosis and the associated threat of death. A poem from his legacy titled The Sick includes among other verses:
Outside the windows, the earth roars — the things sing in peace,
and yet you, illness, — so tiny against it all,
block my world.
And the poem ends with the lines:
O, the weight of illness — the heaviest of your wounds,
is that pain ties a person to themselves
and in the stumbling days, which go unknown where,
one is surrounded by oneself and painfully alone.
Therefore, one of the ways I seek to encourage a suffering person is in the effort to break that limitation of their inner world and open their view beyond themselves. (Chesterton says somewhere: if we are moving in a vicious circle, it won’t help to try to move even faster; we need to step out of the circle...)
Evoking Grateful Thinking
Among the many ways to direct the thoughts of the sick or suffering person, I will focus on how to guide their thoughts to something for which they can feel gratitude, to experience gratitude. Even if it pertains to the past, to something that “is long gone,” which (superficially viewed) “is no longer,” I still believe that from beautiful memories or thoughts, everyone can draw encouragement for the present and hope for the future. A soothing of wailing.
I particularly want to emphasize: notice that for such thinking, it is not a condition for the person to believe in God. These thoughts can provide comfort even to a non-believer: they are grateful, because they too realize or intuitively perceive how great a gift life is. They just do not think it through to the existence of the Giver – God. It is, of course, about our goodwill to direct the suffering person’s thoughts toward what is positive and indisputable. For our efforts to be successful, it is crucial how well we manage to engage the sick person in conversation, how willing they are to cooperate, to adopt thoughts we present and to make them their own, to develop them themselves. To find themselves in them. We can try to evoke a sense of gratitude in the other person through various means.
Pointing Out the Past Experienced Personally
First of all to the beautiful past, whereby I understand the word "beautiful" as noble and dear to them, whatever that may be. It is wonderful when a suffering person begins to talk and additional and additional beautiful experiences come to mind.
For us believers, it’s good to remind ourselves that the Old Testament often invites people to praise God through repeated recounting of all the good they have received from Him. With great humility, such gratitude is beautifully expressed in one prayer from Jewish home Passover liturgy:2
For how many good deeds we owe to the Lord!
If He had brought us out of Egypt
and had not executed justice against our enemies,
it would have been enough for us.
If He had executed justice against them,
and not against their gods,
it would have been enough for us.
If He had executed justice against their gods,
and had not divided the sea for us,
it would have been enough for us.
If He had divided the sea for us,
and had not brought us through it on dry ground,
it would have been enough for us.
If He had brought us through on dry ground,
and had not taken care of our needs for forty years in the desert,
it would have been enough for us.
If He had taken care of our needs for forty years in the desert,
and had not brought us to Mount Sinai,
it would have been enough for us.
If He had brought us to Mount Sinai,
and had not given us the Law,
it would have been enough for us.
If He had given us the Law,
and had not let us enter the land of Israel,
it would have been enough for us.
I will share with you: one of my favorite and perhaps also most effective themes through which I seek to evoke beautiful memories in another person is to ask them where they come from: what is the land of their youth, their city or village, their family, or possibly even the parish in which they were born or grew up. How close this topic is to us, I will show by the beginning of one of Wolker's poems, aptly titled At Our Place:
At our place, the land
is as flat as a table,
covered with a festive green tablecloth.
When I walk on it,
it always smells,
like before lunch:...
From those verses wafts an enchanting enthusiasm for the land, which is at least understandable, if not even somewhat contagious... – and yet the Haná plain is usually not considered a beautiful or interesting landscape by most people.
Surprisingly, memories of a difficult and painful past can sometimes evoke gratitude in a person's heart as well. Very often, the individual themselves will redirect the course of their memories this way. The main emphasis when recounting a difficult past is that they astonishingly survived it all, and that despite all the horrors, it did not destroy them. Sometimes they can even retrospectively assess that even the difficult times yielded some valuable fruit. And we can remember that such an experience is often expressed in Scripture as well. Thus, God encourages His chosen nation at the end of a long journey of Israel through the desert (Dt 8:2-5):
“Remember the whole way that the Lord your God has led you for these forty years in the wilderness, that He might humble you, testing you to know what was in your heart, whether you would keep His commandments or not. He humbled you and let you hunger and fed you with manna, which you did not know, nor did your fathers know, that He might make you know that man does not live by bread alone, but man lives by every word that comes from the mouth of the Lord. Your clothing did not wear out on you, and your foot did not swell these forty years. Know then in your heart that, as a man disciplines his son, the Lord your God disciplines you.”
Pointing Out the "Foreign" Past, but Beneficial or Instructive for Everyone
If the suffering person can look beyond themselves, we do not have to stick only to thoughts and memories that directly concern them, but it is also possible to point to events that took place and, although they did not happen directly to them, have a positive impact on their life, can now be a comfort and a source of hope.
For a believing Christian, these include primarily:
- the sufferings of Jesus Christ, possibly also of the Virgin Mary: this theme was especially developed by devotion in the Middle Ages but remains very alive today (images of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, the Heart of Mary, scenes from the Passion, veneration of Our Lady of Sorrows); anyone who has accompanied a larger number of believing people in their illness or old age has been able to ascertain how powerfully effective the example of the suffering of the Lord Jesus and the Virgin Mary truly is;
- the Resurrection of the Lord Jesus, his going to the Father in heaven, where He prays for us and is preparing a place for us there; here comfort closely ties with hope;
- in the prayers that the Church has been using since the Middle Ages at the bedside of the dying, there is an interesting litany that enumerates various liberating acts of God, captured in the Bible, and by pointing them out accompanies the plea for the release of the now-dying person from eternal death:3
God, free your servant (your servant),
as you saved Noah from the flood.
Amen.
God, free your servant (your servant),
as you brought Abraham out of the Chaldean city of Ur.
Amen.
God, free your servant (your servant),
as you freed Moses from Pharaoh's power.
Amen.
God, free your servant (your servant),
as you saved Daniel from the lion's den.
Amen.
God, free your servant (your servant),
as you freed the three young men from the fiery furnace and from the hands of the cruel king.
Amen.
God, free your servant (your servant),
as you cleansed Susanna from false accusations.
Amen.
God, free your servant (your servant),
as you saved David from the hands of Goliath and King Saul.
Amen.
God, free your servant (your servant),
as you freed Peter and Paul from prison.
Amen.
God, free your servant (your servant)
through our Savior Jesus Christ,
who for us suffered bitter death and gained us eternal life.
Amen.
It is not hard to understand that this litany is meant to provide comfort to the dying and give them hope. And it can do so even if they are only vaguely aware of it.
Pointing Out the Beautiful Things in the Present
In this case as well, the most natural thing is to start from what immediately surrounds the suffering person. This is what Wolker's poem expresses:
Outside the windows, the earth roars — the things sing in peace,
in the cited poem. Jiří Wolker is a poet who has an extraordinary sensitivity for the objects around us — let us remember how in his famous poem A Heavy Hour he implores things to stand by him at the important moment of his inner transformation:
Dear letter, lamp, friend’s book,
things born of love, light, and faith,
stand by me today and be three times more faithful...
However, far more valuable and not a given value is the love of other people, which they show to the suffering person in their illness, old age, or other afflictions. It is good to persistently help them to be aware of it, to be sincerely grateful for it, and to allow themselves and others the chance to express their gratitude without reproaching themselves for being “a burden.” At this moment, — for us disciples of the Lord Jesus — let’s emphasize: the most fundamental attitude of a Christian towards life is gratitude. For redemption, for the Redeemer, but also for the fact that with each day we receive from God even the “daily bread” in the form of many small things that belong to it. We "train" for this daily gratitude throughout our lives and in times of suffering and mourning it becomes evident that we have practiced — that we do not lose the ability to view our situation in such a way even in difficult days.
Here too, I will confide: in my ministry as a confessor, I like to assign as penance to perform such a prayer: to name to God for what we thank Him for from the recent past (and in the same detail as we have examined our conscience). So that we can see again that our God is not a God who cares only about our sins, but a God who continually surrounds us with His goodness! And I experience that such a prayer guides us towards conversion as effectively as God's reproaches...
Therefore, I intentionally use the word "gratitude" in this reflection and not "thankfulness." I do not want to highlight a general, abstract quality, but to encourage us to help the suffering person experience specific, repeated, and frequent acts of gratitude, individual grateful reflections, and individual thanks — "gratitudes."
Pointing Out God Himself
To a truly believing person, it is possible to point to God Himself. That He is still here (not just the experienced suffering). This is enough for a believing person to leave the vicious circle into which their pain confines them and open themselves outward. But again, it is about the offer of thoughts that he himself should embrace and develop. Our concern will remain to observe how this suffering person thinks and speaks about God, because they may also be tempted to accuse God, rebel, or lament.
I think a valuable aid in this regard is to remember the conclusion of the Book of Job. Job falls silent before God's authority—not because God has convinced him, i.e., explained everything to him and he understood the meaning of his suffering, but he is silent because God is great, and a person does not have the right to accuse Him of injustice. Respect for the mystery is a very important attitude that we must be able to take towards God Himself and towards those His intentions that are painful for us and that we cannot change.
Interesting Testimonies (and Warnings)
Anne Frank, even though she was only 15 years old, sharply criticizes the way of comforting that we all tend to use...4
(Thursday, March 2, 1944)
While washing, Bep spoke with Mother and Mrs. van Daan about her feeling of despondency. How can those two understand her? Our tactless mother especially helps a person sink even deeper into problems. Do you know what our Bep was advised? She should think of all the people who are dying in this world! Who does the thought of misfortune help when one feels unhappy themselves? That is what I said. However, I received the answer that I had no business in such matters.
How foolish and stupid adults are!
As if Peter, Margot, Bep, and I do not all feel the same! But here only maternal love or the love of truly good friends can help. But both mothers do not understand us at all. Mrs. van Daan perhaps understands us a little more than our mother. Oh, how I would like to say something to poor Bep that I know from experience helps! But then Father came in and very rudely chased me away. They are all so stupid!...
...Only great, self-sacrificing love can help Peter, Bep, Margot, and me, which we are lacking here...
And we believe that we have received such great, self-sacrificing love through the Lord Jesus!
Equally remarkable are the words of Etty Hillesum, a Jewish girl who, amid Nazi oppression and the expectation of death in a concentration camp, matured from youthful irresponsibility and practical atheism to great life wisdom and admirable faith in God. This faith was her source of comfort and awareness of security.
(Sunday morning prayer, July 12, 1942)5
(God,)... until the last breath we must protect your dwelling in our innermost being. There are indeed people who, at the last moment, hide their vacuum cleaner or silverware instead of protecting you, my God. And there are people who desperately try to save their bodies, which are nothing more than shells of a thousand fears and bitterness. And they say: “They won't get me.” And they forget that a person is not in anyone's claws when they are in your embrace.
Another quote shows that striving to live one's entire life well (thus there is again a stepping out from the tight circle of immediate presence) can give a person the strength to cope even with the reality of anticipated death, so there is no need to fearfully cover up the prospect of the end of earthly life.
(July 3, 1942)6
The possibility that I will die is absolutely present for me; my life has made a significant experience of what it means to look death and ruin in the eye — I accept it as a part of life. One cannot prematurely sacrifice a part of their life to death by being afraid of it and resisting it. Resistance and fear leave us only a sadly shriveled remnant of life, it can hardly be called life at all. It sounds almost paradoxical: if a person tries to push death out of their life, they never live meaningfully; if they manage to accept it into their life, it enlarges and enriches it.
With What One Deals, One Also Loses...
If we manage to help the suffering person look at life and the world around them with gratitude, we have helped them a lot. And in encouraging another in such a way, it may occur to us how we ourselves are doing with gratitude. Whether in this moment we are guiding another to something we have within ourselves or to something we ourselves owe much. And thus, our sincere contact with people who suffer helps us to be more of what we want to help them to be in their difficult situation.
