Suffering is indeed a mystery, as Dorothy Day says below. How are we, how am I to understand it? I copied her “Meditation” because it provides an answer of sorts and an image. English teachers love images. This one seems to be apt, for the moment: the image is essentially that of a fruit tree, a garden image, a Biblical image. If you cut a branch off of a fruit tree, the branch will wither and die and fail to bear fruit. If, however, the branch remains on the heathy tree, it will eventually bear fruit, as we all know.
I remember how in the home where I grew up in Tiffin, Ohio we had a Concord grape vine [“tree”] just off the walk to the garage. Originally there were two arbors, one on either side of the walk to the garage; then for some reason, my father removed the arbor to the left of the walk, but he kept the one to the right of the walk. That arbor was the strongest and most fruitful, for the grapes it bore were in large clusters and were delicious. However, each fall, if my memory doesn’t fail me, he and I, once I was old enough, would have to prune the branches down to two knobs that were like knuckles on the growing vine, the purpose being to let the vine grow a new and healthy extension in the coming spring so that it would produce large, healthy clusters of delicious grapes the following year. And it always did, but the pruning was necessary. The result manifested itself in an abundant harvest of grapes that my mother would turn into delicious grape pies and that my father would, with the help of my mother and me, turn into sweet wine. All of the grapes for wine went into a large round ceramic container, a very large crock pot! Then the three of us, like the three witches in Macbeth possibly, would sit around the container picking grapes off the clusters; once that was done we would reach into the pot and squeeze and squeeze and squeeze. Beyond that my memory fails me. I remember a large white cloth bag that had turned purple and was dripping juice, and I remember a very large 30 gallon barrel into which the juice, water, and sugar would go for the fermentation process, but my father took care of all those things. My father and mother and their friends enjoyed my father’s wine; each year it was a little different, some years better than others.
The last thing I remember about the wine was that after my father died, the Church which he and my mother attended, the United Church of Christ, requested some bottles of his wine for use in one of their communion services. They had been a strictly grape juice church for a long time, but in later years apparently they had one communion service in a smaller room where they used my father’s wine instead of grape juice. I let them take as much as they wanted out of the bottles that were left. For years and years the pruning paid off. And now I am the one being pruned. The process hurts and it makes me dependent on other people to do for me the things I can no longer do for myself. Finally, I suppose, it makes me dependent on God, though frequently I feel a bit like Job who also had to deal with, or rather accept, the mystery of suffering in the end. There is purpose in suffering. I can see that though I hardly ever understand it. But then, that’s why it is a mystery. All I can do finally is trust in God to bring good out of it. Fortitude.
“The Grace to Accept Being Pruned
The only answer to the mystery of suffering is this: every soul seeks happiness either in creatures (where it cannot be satisfied in the long run) or in God. God made us for himself. We must die to the natural to achieve the supernatural, a slow death or a quick one. It is universal. Unless the grain of wheat fall into the ground and die, it remains alone, but if it dies, it bears much fruit. All must die; it is a universal law very hard for us to realize.
If this mind or this flesh is an obstacle, we will suffer the more when this tremendous lover tries to tear from us all veils which separate us. Some suffering is more visible, some hidden. The more we long for love, the more all human love will be pruned…. It is a pruning, a cutting away of love so that it will grow strong and bear much fruit…. But still, suffering is a mystery as well as a penalty which we pay for others as well as for ourselves. How gigantic was that first sin, that turning from God! All nature travails and groans even until now because of it, Saint Paul says….
The mystery of suffering. I feel presumptuous in writing of so high and lofty a thing. It is because I am not now suffering that I can write, but it is also because I have suffered in the past that I can write. I write to comfort others as I have been comforted. The word comfort too means to be strong together, to have fortitude together. There is the reminder of community. Once when I suffered and sat in church in a misery while waves and billows passed over me, I suddenly thought, with exultation, “I am sharing suffering,” and it was immediately lightened.”
Servant of God Dorothy Day
Dorothy Day († 1980) was a convert to Catholicism and the co-founder of the Catholic Worker movement. / From On Pilgrimage.© 1999, William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, Grand Rapids, MI. Used with permission.
Images: Concord grapes In clusters. Second image: ripe Concord grapes in crock pot; unripe grapes behind the crock. “Ripe grapes (foreground) and unripe grapes (background). Unripe grapes can be made into verjuice.”
