No Choice Except to Suffer
My state representative Betty McCollum sent me a letter today explaining why she voted for H. R. 3962 (or Affordable Health Care for America) and against the Stupak-Pitts Amendment. She included a statement from the state's "Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice" (I know, I know--scandalous.) I was particularly struck by her line: "Americans without access to health care too often have no choice except to suffer." We're talking about access to "reproductive health care" without which Americans have no choice but to suffer.It's hard to explain to a person who says "suffering is the worst thing there is" that something is worse. Moral degradation is worse. I had a student who once put it this way: "People often pity the victim, but the one to be pitied is the perpetrator of a crime. He is the one who lacks love. It doesn't matter what you suffer; as long as you have love, you will be fine. The one to be pitied is the one without love." Flannery O'Connor wrote of suffering: "It's the only thing worth a damn that we have to offer God." And the angel in Lewis' The Pilgrim's Regress puts it mysteriously in the quotation above.
Contra McCollum and the Religious Coalition, love challenges us to hope all things, endure all things. I turned from McCollum to this podcast of Alice Von Hildebrand talking about the sufferings and beauties of marriage.