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.

On the Woody Allen "Motto," Love to Suffer and Suffer to Love

[[Sister Laurel, what does the motto, "Love to suffer and suffer to love," mean? Is this a common Christian motto or wisdom statement?]]

Thanks for your question. I had to Google this saying and found it (or at least a close variation of it) is associated with a Woody Allen movie called Love and Death (1975)! This means the brief answer to your question is no, this is neither a Christian motto, nor, as it stands, is it common Christian wisdom. (That is, as you have cited it, it may be common, but it is not Christian, and I would argue that its wisdom is doubtful and, possibly, destructive!) Since I haven't seen the movie, I can't tell you what it means in context (and context is key). The film is, however, a parody of the complexities of loving and suffering, and (perhaps too of living and dying). In some ways, it seems to be about the messiness and even the apparent irrationality of human love. 

Some of this is summarized in a passage by a younger woman speaking to her cousin Sonja about someone who is in love with another person they both know, while that second person is in love with someone else who is having an affair with another person entirely, who loves physically but not spiritually, and whose love interest is also in love with. . . and on it goes in a long chain of frustrating instances of love producing suffering! (I'll add the clip of this below.) It is both hysterical and fraught! One comes away with the sense that human love is complex and intimately linked to suffering, but also, that whether we love or fail to love suffering ensues!! The blunt conclusion that one is to "love to suffer and suffer to love" is a simplistic way of cutting away the nuances and complexities of the relationship between these two realities, while shining a light on a situation that Allen found both funny and absurd. As the young woman says in the clip referred to above, [[Cousin Sonja, I never want to marry. I just want to get divorced!]].

That said, from a Christian perspective, the saying of itself is a distortion of the truth about loving and its relation to suffering. Yes, no question, suffering is intimately related to loving others. To open ourselves to genuine love is also to open ourselves to the pain of compassion, grief, loss, bereavement, having our love unreturned or betrayed, and ultimately, even having it abused and otherwise rejected. Love requires the gift of self, and that self-gift implies vulnerability that entails real sacrifice and pain.  In loving, we open ourselves to suffering and loss, but also to real joy and fulfillment when we choose to live our lives for the other's sake. The greatest image of this interrelatedness of love and suffering for the Christian is the Christ Event. God gives himself to and for us, and the Word is made incarnate in Jesus. Jesus says yes after yes after yes to allowing this incarnational event to be made real in space and time in and through his own life. He gives himself exhaustively for God's sake and the sake of all that is precious to God, right on up to Golgotha and beyond. But none of this equates to the Woody Allen conclusion, "Love to suffer and suffer to love!" (Remember, this movie is a parody, and parodies raise complex realities to a simplistic expression that is absurd! They do this to make us laugh and also to think more deeply and clearly.)

I don't think anything the Scriptures teach us gives the sense that Jesus "loved to suffer" in either the sense that he loved so that he might suffer, or in the sense that suffering was something he loved to do -- the only senses I can see "love to suffer" really bearing in this sentence. Quite the opposite!! Jesus was a highly social man who loved life and celebrated it and the grace of God in every way he knew. I suspect this is why he was labelled a glutton and drunkard (and perhaps something of a party animal) by some highly religious folk! Certainly, however, his love implied or occasioned suffering. It is the case that Jesus' suffering, both throughout his life and in his passion and death, was occasioned by the fact and faithfulness of his love for God and for the whole of God's creation. The idea that we suffer in order to love only makes sense in this way: viz., we accept suffering as an integral part of choosing to love. If, on the other hand, we are saying that suffering necessarily implies we love others, this is a mistake. There is such a thing as masochism, where suffering is a personal imperative, and it has nothing to do with loving oneself or others.

Each of us is to be realistic about love and life. Suffering (or at least a vulnerability to suffering) will be occasioned by both, and certainly by a faithful life of obedience (attentive responsiveness) to God. But so will abundant fruitfulness and joy! Additionally, suffering is the result of sin, not necessarily personal sin, but the state of sin -- the state of estrangement or alienation from God, who is the ground and source of being and meaning. As I have reiterated here over the years, God did not will Jesus' suffering; God willed an abundant and truly human life filled with the love of God and others, and lived for the sake of the Kingdom. God willed that Jesus live this life with integrity, generosity, and compassion, so that God might be Emmanuel (God with us), and so he did!! Jesus suffered (or embraced suffering) because he loved, and he loved despite his suffering, so perhaps this is a better paradigm (or motto) for Christians. It is quite different from the Woody Allen imperative! In any case, the excerpt from the movie clip is included here. I think you can hear the parody in just this small piece of the whole.