What place does faith have when it comes to our regular experience of suffering in this life? Should it have a place?
It would be good to clarify more specifically some details surrounding this topic. What is faith? Faith in what?
A number of people (such as the atheist Sam Harris in Letter to a Christian Nation) have said that faith in a good God like the God of the Bible is at best an ignorant response to suffering in the world. At worst, it is immoral and deluded.
Others, like myself and others I know and have talked to, say that their faith in God is the only thing that allows them to get through the suffering and pain they are facing in life.
But what is faith? In our culture, to be called “a person of faith” implies that one practices some sort of religion and adheres to a set of practices and holds to certain doctrines as truth. So, faith can often be equated in the mind with religion.
However, while this is true, there is still an even more basic way to think about faith. The Merriam-Webster has a definition of faith that says it is “something that is believed especially with strong conviction.”
In other words, any time a person believes something with a strong conviction, he is demonstrating faith.
Faith in what? Does it matter what you are convinced of?
Some people are convinced that gravity is a constant force that will continue to ensure that we do not fly off into space as it has always done (I happen to be one of those people). Some people believe that God made everything out of nothing (I am in this camp too). Some people are adamant that all life (and the whole universe) were ultimately born out of a massive random explosion.
These are all examples of things that people can have faith in.
A lot of people will note an apparent distinction between faith and science. These people tend to believe that science is far more valid than faith when it comes to knowing truth. However, there is an assumption here. The scientific method, wondrous as it is, only works because our world has acted in a consistent way thus far. This means that by observing the way things have always been, we can say that that is the way they will continue because they have never changed.
For example, the earth will continue to orbit the sun because it has always done this. The conviction here is that things will continue the way they have always been. According to our definition above, that is faith.
Without faith in the simple idea that tomorrow will come, it would be impossible to live. How would we plan for tomorrow? How would we cope with the emotional turmoil that life might end with each night? This kind of faith is anything but “blind.” It is a faith that is grounded in experience and tested by observations. This kind of faith is something that each of us uses every day from driving our cars to eating our food to falling asleep.
The function that this faith serves is to enable us to keep living, to keep pushing, and to keep going on with the tasks of life. It is based on the idea that there is an order to the world that is predictable and that can be trusted (trust is an idea that is closely associated with faith).
What is suffering? It is a disruption to that order. Or, it is the introduction of chaos into our orderly lives. And the chaos is often unimaginable and great and lasts for years. Even something as simple as the stomach flu disrupts the order of our lives and in some way proves that our faith in the predictability of tomorrow was dead wrong.
In some other cases, suffering can be so great, that it shakes you to the very core of who you are. It is in these cases where we are presented with two choices. We can either try to find the meaning or the order in this sea of chaos that has emerged in our life, or we can give up and surrender to the waves that crash and roll over us. We can say that life is meaningless and that suffering is therefore explainable as one other meaningless and random occurrence of life.
Many of us, when faced with an enormous loss, experience a sense of denial. This means that we refuse to admit to ourselves that anything has changed. Intellectually, yes, we know it has changed. But there is a deep part of us that refuses to live life as if anything is all that different. And we carry on with our jobs and tasks and entertainments, desperately trying to hold on to the old order of things. This is a kind of faith. It is a faith in our fantasy of the past. Maybe if we pretend hard enough, it will be real. I am all too familiar with this form of faith.
Others of us cope with the pain by turning to distractions. Things like alcohol, excessive TV, video games, drugs, and other addictions consume our time and dull our senses. Again this is a kind of faith. We believe that these behaviors will help us to forget about the chaos that now so defines our life. Forgetting the chaos brings back a sense of order, though temporary.
I am a Christian. I believe that God is in control of everything that happens in my life and in the universe. At least I would say that I believe that. When I am living consistently with that faith, it gives me a response to the chaos of suffering that surpasses any other I know of. It allows me to see clearly that the chaos in my life is a small part of a grander story. I know that He is in control of my suffering and is using it for his good purposes.
This faith does not actually make the chaos in my life go away. But it does do something more profound. It takes the chaos in life, and uses it as an instrument that will bring about greater order and greater meaning. And here is the key: the good that God brings as a result of the suffering, is better than it could have been if the suffering never happened.
Since God is all powerful and can do anything and also knows everything (past present and future), this includes any and all forms of suffering from cancer, to divorce, to hurricanes, to mass shootings. All of these things, as horrible as they are, are used by God to bring about something greater.
Just like a master artist will use the darker shades to highlight and emphasize and bring meaning to the painting, so God uses the darker shades of my suffering to bring even more meaning to life.
In summary, faith is something we all do each day. When it comes to suffering, faith is not only important, it is automatic. In fact, how a person behaves in the face of suffering shows us what they are placing their faith in. What we place our faith in becomes very important, because it determines how we live.
