The Art Of Suffering

Hollywood Connect
Thursday E-mail - January 21, 2010
The Art of Suffering

At an event I spoke at several months ago, a middle-aged gentleman – let’s call him Al – pulled me aside to get some advice. He had been a professional musician for many years, especially as a guitarist, and it was his true joy and passion. However, much to his dismay, his doctor recently had told him that he was in the advanced stages of a progressive eye disorder, and that as a result, he soon was going to be completely blind.

“I don’t know what I’m going to do,” he said quietly. “Music is all I’ve done, all I’ve ever dreamed of doing, and now God is taking away my eyesight. Everything is going dark.”

We stood there next to each other, looking at the floor. It would have been so easy for me to spit out some spiritual platitude – much too easy, I realize to my chagrin. The only thing most spiritual platitudes end up doing, whether they be in art or in relationship, is make the speaker feel smart and the recipient feel small. And usually, neither emotion is telling the truth.

We believe in a God who can heal and remove suffering in this life, but who doesn’t always choose to do so. It is because God is a God of ability that a world that contains suffering is so difficult to accept. If He was not able to do anything about our suffering, if He was unable to intervene between evil and the good people who are beset by it, we could, at the very least, just shrug and get on with our lives. But the very idea of a benevolent God who is able seems, at first glance, to be mutually exclusive with the existence of suffering. We are left with few options. Either God does not care about all the world’s suffering, or He is not there while the world suffers, or maybe, just maybe, He has allowed that suffering to occur with some better, more valuable plan in mind.

At one point, I thought that when I became a Christian that the suffering would be over, as if by divine fiat. What I’ve found, however, is that the suffering isn’t over; it just has taken on new meaning. Ultimately, a person who is an artist has one of the only vocations in which, when he suffers, he becomes better at what he does. (Incidentally, the only other such occupation is that of the pastor or minister.) It’s not that we go looking for suffering or willfully wallow in it, as some misguided artists have done. It is, however, the recognition and acceptance of the fact that when we as artists suffer or feel pain – physically, emotionally, financially, or otherwise – we have the opportunity to become deeper and richer and less willing to rely on cheap answers.

It is no coincidence that cultures that have experienced the deepest suffering and persecution have also produced some of the most compelling art. It is the same for us as individuals; the pain prompts us to struggle, to sweat, to drag out the unwilling answers for the difficult and otherwise overlooked questions that accumulate in our souls through the season of suffering. And our art can reflect all of that – if we will allow it to do so.

It is then that we become truly passionate artists, realizing that the very word passion is derived from the Latin passio, which means “suffering”.

All I found myself able to do with Al that evening was to stand with him as a fellow artist. I reminded him of certain artists – Beethoven, Van Gogh, Ray Charles, and Stevie Wonder – whose work became something greater not in spite of, but because of their suffering. I reminded him of the role that pain and suffering has in the life of the artist who is willing to accept and embrace it. I put my hand on his shoulder and prayed to the God who longs to heal and who doesn’t always do so.

All my best,

Shun Lee
Director
Hollywood Connect

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