Can suffering teach us anything? Is there a knowledge that it would carry, as the Greeks envisaged it at the time of the tragedies, in particular the famous and daring ” tô pathei mathos (knowing through suffering) of theAgamemnon of Aeschylus? The modern West, in any case, seems to have resolutely turned its back on this possibility. Reason has imposed itself as the orderer of existence and the authorized path to happiness, driving out suffering from existence as an obstacle to human fulfilment.
And yet, sensitive life in its stubborn materiality never ceases to remind us, in our flesh and sensitive experience, that suffering is the companion of our thirst for life, our thirst for justice and freedom, inseparable from the fact of loving, of to feel, to grow in humanity. So many organized noises and siren songs new tech distract us from it, capturing our attention, numbing our senses, so that our comfortable, sanitized, life-protected way of life makes us believe — ah! the terrible illusion ofAmerican way of life — that suffering is foreign to life.
But what life are we talking about then? A life of consumption entirely turned towards things to be acquired, so many shells duly paid for against the blows of existence. Blessed are the haves because they will not suffer, proclaims the publicists of the holy gospel according to the rich. However, not to feel our vulnerability, not to touch our fault and crack, where tears ooze which sometimes gush out into lights, is to raise walls not only interior, but also collective, which make invisible the idle multitudes, lying in the side of the road, ejected from the pitiless train of progress.
One thus deprives oneself of experiencing the suffering of others as one’s own, while finding plenty of “good” reasons to postpone taking care of it. “I am not my brother’s keeper”, emphasize the Cains of a story written with the blood of Abel. And our technical era has mastered it by burying life under a screed of lead, lithium and coltan, extirpated by the ton, off-screen from suffering.
Experiencing suffering is a path of justice, of goodness, of beauty. Systematically blocking its passage towards the cry and healing takes the place of escape and suffocation: the spring of so much violence at work, or in latency. The excessiveness of a modernity which claims to possess and master nature and life is not unrelated to this, it which bogs us down in a tragic flight towards catastrophe, by crushing, attacking, dominating the Earth and the living, image of the masters, instead of letting them be and be born, and us with them, in the joyful solidarity of the tried. For the ordeal of suffering is also a place of birth, an ever gaping breach through which life makes its way towards the light.
It is this human truth that it has cost us so much to explore and share that resounds today in the feast of Easter, like a complaint in both senses of the term — both tears and judgment — on our world, like an “axe that splits the frozen sea within us”, as Kafka said of the literature he loved.
Thus, what does Easter tell us if not first that suffering and distress, anguish and the night of despair, are not intruders, accidents that should be avoided at all costs, as if we were not walking not always barefoot, whatever we do, on the rocky paths of existence. I am not talking about the paved and agreed paths of existences turning in circles following the itinerary of a broken life, but those which “open up while walking” (Antonio Machado).
But above all, Easter, in its subversive and irreverent way, reminds sated well-meaning people and beautiful souls withered and arrogant, indifferent to the suffering of others, that this too is a scandal that stirs the heart of God. And may the people who suffer, wounded and bruised by time or the masters of time, God hear their cry or their silence, heavy with evil and injustice, because he is very close, weeping and crying out. Some will shrug their shoulders: “What is the use of a god who cries with the tried, crucified with the crucified? These do not know the value of the gift. In any case, it is not used to flee the world. To those who know how to hear, it rather needles and spur the responsibility incumbent upon us to wipe away the tears and no longer erect a cross.
Easter, in the end, testifies that knowledge through suffering does not learn anything, but brings closer wounds, our own as well as others’. And in the night that bathes us, the anguish that grips us and the scandal that revolts us, he keeps us standing until dawn, which is slow to come, as witnesses of this indomitable hope of a fragile and bare life. , like this “flickering flame […] impossible to reach, impossible to extinguish with the breath of death” that Péguy sang.