Followup Questions on the Woody Allen Quote, Love to Suffer, Suffer to Love

[[Sister Laurel, even if the quote you were asked about was taken from a Woody Allen movie, couldn't it be used as an important motto by someone who believes God calls them to suffer and wants them to learn to love through the pain and in the middle of that suffering? I can see that the movie is a parody and that "Love to suffer and suffer to love" can be misunderstood to include or even to encourage masochism, but if someone were to find themselves in the midst of great pain and could do nothing about it, then couldn't this saying used as a motto remind them about the importance to love God, themselves, and others? They wouldn't be causing their own suffering then.]]

Thanks for the follow-up! I hear you putting the very best spin possible on this quote, and I appreciate your doing that. Personally, it seems to me that unless one has a strong grasp of a Christian theology of the Cross that allows one to go beyond the quote as Woody Allen gives it to us, I have to say what I said earlier about it, namely, of itself, it is not Christian and its "wisdom" is not only doubtful, but it is dangerous. For someone in the situation you describe and without a good interpretive key, to adopt this "motto" as their own and a source of inspiration, they would also be opening themselves to important distortions Christianity should never countenance, the greatest of which is the idea that suffering inevitably leads to love and is even necessarily a synonym for love. Granted, suffering can eventually lead to truly loving oneself and others, but not of itself, and not inevitably. I think other factors need to also be present in a consistent way to redeem such a situation --- especially faith, love, patience, humility, and hope --- if suffering is to help teach us to love in the midst of our pain. In other words, without these other factors, and without a larger, redeeming context allowing us to interpret the meaningfulness of these words and our suffering, suffering could teach us many things including self-pity, resentment, self-hatred, anger at God and ourselves, as well as at the world at large (or it could lead to an idolatrous piety based on a false God who sends and controls suffering), but it would be unlikely to teach us to love.

Once one begins to believe that one's suffering is necessarily synonymous with love, or that by itself it teaches us to love, it is a very short step to accepting that the God Jesus revealed to us wills our suffering (or that he willed Jesus' suffering) in order to love and so, to love us! And from here it is a short step to our own being incapable of relating honestly to God, or to proclaiming the Gospel of Jesus Christ with its call to abundant life! Suffering can be a blessing, yes, I know and believe that! However, that does not ordinarily mean that being in pain is necessarily a blessing.  Suffering is not necessarily a blessing at the very moment one is experiencing it!! Later, once we have processed the suffering, healed from it and the woundedness that causes it and the loss it has done to our lives, once we have adapted to the limits it has brought, and then come to look at it all again from the perspective of a new life with renewed hope and energy, then we can regard the suffering as a blessing because God does indeed bring new life into being all the time, even in the face of sin and death! If, however, we accept your (Woody Allen's) quote as though suffering necessarily teaches love or is similarly synonymous with loving, that whole process will be short-circuited.

What I am really saying is that personally, I just can't accept either part of the quote at face value. When used this way, particularly when separated from the movie itself and without a really adequate context that guides our understanding, I think both parts of the quotation are distortions of the intimate and nuanced relationship between suffering and love that Christianity reveals. The imperative, "Love to suffer," I addressed earlier. It either means "love in order to suffer", or "love the pain and suffering that does come into our lives." Either of these options has nothing automatically to do, so far as I can tell, with a healthy attitude toward either love or suffering. Both options militate against justice or any tendency we have to make the world or individual lives better as we work to ease suffering. In fact, they each could well suggest we should not do anything to ameliorate suffering for anyone or anything, since this is the way a person learns to love! That is un-Christian absurdity, I think.

"Suffer to love" can mean "accept suffering as part of truly loving others". Of course! If it means accepting the suffering that naturally comes with authentic love, then yes, I agree completely. That would be a truly wise statement, then. The problem is that, as written, the quote doesn't actually say that. Instead, it seems to raise suffering up as a litmus test for love. But that's where sadism and masochism come into play. Neither of these have anything to do with authentic love, whether of God, of self, or of others, yet I can definitely hear the masochist saying (to him/herself) either "Love to suffer!!" or "Suffer to love", and the sadist saying "Suffer to love!!" (to whomever they are presuming to "instruct" on the nature of love by making that person suffer). However,  as these stand, I cannot hear Jesus saying either one of these and especially not both of them together --- not to himself, not to me or other disciples, not to people I love, not to his Abba! "Accept the suffering love brings," yes, I can certainly hear Jesus saying this, especially as his disciples attempt to proclaim the Gospel to those in power, but again, this provides an interpretive context Woody Allen's quote badly needs.

If someone is in severe and ongoing pain, I want them to know God neither sent nor willed this suffering!! (That he "allowed" it or, more accurately, didn't prevent it, should never be interpreted as "God desired this"!) At the same time, I want them to know that God's love can transform their suffering from curse to blessing, but even here, I would need to take care with how I would say that. I would not want them thinking God will do that by taking away the pain or the source of suffering. Instead, I would want them to know that God's presence can bring new possibilities for meaningful and graced life even when the pain is not healed or the suffering mitigated or stopped.  I would want them to know that God knows their suffering, that Jesus knows it intimately, and that they both are with the person in and despite the suffering. I would want them to know that even though the suffering feels like it dehumanizes and denigrates them, or robs their lives of meaning and purpose, these are lies the Christ Event deals with and counters head-on. 

The quote from the Woody Allen movie of itself conveys none of this, and again, when taken out of context, seems to me to be a serious obstacle to hearing these things. If taken as theological truth without an adequate interpretative key, it reduces the problem of suffering and its relation to love to a form of bumper-sticker theology that distorts the truth. Fortunately, the movie is a parody of love and life, and also of suffering and death. Because of that, it has the power to make us laugh, and that includes the person who is really suffering. The clips I saw were powerfully funny because they told some of the truth! They also posed questions we could easily relate to (and may even be afraid to ask out loud). At the same time, the movie also provided a very human interpretation of that truth Christians might well want to reject. That's how parodies work. It was thus capable of drawing one out of a lot of daily suffering by inviting one to see the absurdity of some ways of viewing such significant topics and asking us to think more clearly about them ourselves. If they can bring us to laughter in the midst of all that, even better, for that can ease pain and take us out of ourselves in an entirely healthy way.