There is a classic scene in Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life where George Bailey tells his guardian angel, Clarence, “I wish I’d never been born.” That is a statement which some others have likely uttered at some point in 2020. George is at the end of his rope; he has watched friends outpace him in education and business; despite boyhood ambitions of travel and adventure, he has spent his life in his hometown of Bedford Falls, working for the family business; and his uncle has lost thousands of dollars in what appears to be a financial scandal for which George will be held accountable. After appealing to God for help George receives what he takes to be “a bust in the jaw in answer to a prayer.” George is struggling with the apparent contradiction between the existence of suffering and the existence of God. If God is all-powerful and all-loving, why does he allow people to suffer? Like the impenitent thief said: “If thou be Christ, save thyself and us.”
As Peter Kreeft notes in Making Sense Out of Suffering, our society has not done what the title of his book proposes to. We are offered countless ways to mitigate physical and emotional pain; we enjoy longer and more prosperous lives than most people in human history; but many of us are unable to cope with spiritual pain and, like George Bailey, come to resent God because of that.
Kreeft identifies a fundamental misunderstanding of modern society, that suffering is something which can be avoided. Kreeft cites the Four Noble Truths of Buddhism, the first of which is dukkha – life is suffering. But rather than a cause for hopelessness, or evidence vindicating atheism, suffering is actually proof that God exists. Like C.S. Lewis said, evil must exist, have intelligence and free will, but existence, intelligence and free-will are good things. Good is necessary for evil, but evil is not necessary for good. Suffering, while evil, is requisite for a good existence, because without suffering we would have no way of knowing pleasure. Borrowing from Tolkien, Kreeft says that the greatest stories need monsters and mysteries, which is why the greatest storytellers are people who have encountered both. We are all creators because we decide the story of our lives, and without suffering, those stories would be unreadable.