"We know that for those who love God all things work together for good, for those who are called according to his purpose." — Romans 8:28
The Question That Will Not Go Away
It is the oldest question in theology and the most personal. It has been asked in every language and in every century. It has been asked by people who had never heard of the Bible and by people who had read it all their lives. It has been asked in the moment of loss — the diagnosis, the accident, the death, the failure — when the mind that has always been able to function clearly is suddenly unable to process the gap between what is happening and what should, by any reasonable account of how a good God governs a world He made, be happening.
If God is good and God is all-powerful, why does He permit suffering?
The question has a technical name in philosophy: the problem of evil, or more precisely, the problem of suffering — since the philosophical problem is not primarily about moral evil, about the wickedness human beings do to one another, but about the suffering that comes without obvious human cause: the illness, the earthquake, the child born with pain, the good man who loses everything.
The Church has been thinking about this question for two thousand years. She has not resolved it in the sense of making it disappear — the suffering is real, and no theological answer makes it less real. But she has thought about it with greater seriousness and greater honesty than any other tradition the world has produced, and what she has thought is worth knowing — because Devasahayam came to the Faith through exactly this question, and because everyone who comes to this blog carrying their own version of it deserves the best the tradition has to offer.
What the Church Does Not Say
Before saying what the Church does say, it is worth being clear about what she does not say — because the false answers are common, and they cause harm, and they deserve to be named and refused.
The Church does not say: suffering is always punishment for sin.
This is the answer of Job's friends. It is the answer of the man who asked Jesus, "Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?" (John 9:2) and received the answer: "It was not that this man sinned, or his parents, but that the works of God might be displayed in him." (John 9:3) The connection between sin and suffering is real — there are sufferings that are the direct consequence of sin, and the Church does not pretend otherwise. But the connection is not universal or simple, and the inference from suffering to hidden guilt is one that the Gospel explicitly forbids. Job was declared righteous by God. The man born blind had not sinned. Suffering is not a reliable index of moral failing.
The Church does not say: suffering is an illusion.
Some spiritual traditions, faced with the reality of suffering, have concluded that the suffering is not ultimately real — that the appearance of pain is a feature of the unenlightened perception of a world that, at the deepest level, contains no genuine distinctions between good and evil, pleasure and pain, life and death. The Church refuses this. The suffering is real. Christ wept at Lazarus's tomb. He sweat blood in Gethsemane. He cried from the Cross: "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" These are not the actions of a man who believes the suffering is an illusion. They are the actions of God made man, entering the reality of human suffering fully and without reservation and without the consolation of pretending it is less than it is.
The Church does not say: God is indifferent to suffering.
The God of the Deists — the watchmaker God who wound up the universe and stepped back and lets it run without further involvement — is not the God of the Catholic Faith. The God of the Catholic Faith is the God who counts the hairs of every head, who notices the fall of every sparrow, who became flesh and lived among us and wept and bled and died. He is not watching the suffering from a safe distance. He is inside it. The doctrine of the Incarnation is, among other things, the Church's definitive answer to the charge of divine indifference: God did not watch from outside. He entered.
What the Church Does Say
The Church's answer to the problem of suffering is not a single proposition but a doctrine — a body of interconnected teachings that must be held together if any of them are to make sense.
1. God made a world with genuine freedom, and genuine freedom includes the possibility of genuine loss.
The Catechism of the Catholic Church addresses this directly in its treatment of Providence and the question of evil (§309–314). God could have made a world without the possibility of suffering — but such a world would be a world without genuine freedom, without genuine development, without the kind of creatures capable of genuine love. Love that cannot cost anything is not love. A world in which nothing can go wrong is a world in which nothing genuinely matters.
This does not explain every suffering. It explains why the category of suffering exists in a world made by a good God. The specific suffering of any specific person — the particular illness, the particular loss, the particular grief — is not explained by the general principle. The general principle only says: suffering is possible in this kind of world, and this kind of world — a world with freedom and development and the possibility of genuine love — is worth making.
2. God brings good out of suffering, without causing the suffering for the purpose of the good.
Romans 8:28 — for those who love God all things work together for good — is perhaps the most misused verse in the New Testament. It is not a promise that everything that happens is good. It is a promise that in everything that happens, for the person who loves God, God is working toward good. The distinction is critical.
God did not cause Devasahayam's cattle to die and his crops to fail in order to bring him to the Faith. He did not engineer the losses as a mechanism for producing the conversion. The losses were real losses — genuinely bad, genuinely painful, genuinely the kind of events that a good world would not include if it could avoid them. But God, whose knowledge and whose love operate in dimensions that exceed our understanding, brought from those losses something that the losses themselves could never have produced: the encounter with De Lannoy, the opening of Job, the nine months of instruction, the baptism, the apostolate, the martyrdom, the saint.
This is what Providence means in the Catholic tradition — not that everything that happens was directly willed by God in its specific detail, but that nothing that happens is beyond God's ability to turn toward good for those who love Him. The grain of wheat that falls and dies does not choose to fall. But the falling is not wasted.
3. Christ redeemed suffering from the inside.
This is the heart of the Church's answer, and it is the answer that no philosophy can give — only the Gospel.
The problem of suffering assumes a God who watches from outside. The Gospel declares a God who entered. Christ did not resolve the problem of suffering by explaining it. He resolved it by undergoing it — not as a demonstration that suffering is not really bad, but as the act by which the worst that suffering can do — death itself, the final negation — was transformed from inside into the beginning of the definitive good.
The Cross is not the proof that suffering is acceptable. It is the proof that suffering has been entered and transformed and that the last word is not the suffering but the Resurrection. This is why the Church can say, with Paul in Romans 8:18, "I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us" — not because the sufferings are trivial, but because what is coming is so much more than the suffering that the comparison cannot be made.
Devasahayam understood this. Not abstractly — as a theological proposition to be held at arm's length and admired — but from the inside, in his own flesh, across three years of chains and thirty-two wounds. He had been told about the Cross. He had received it at the font. And then he lived inside it, in the particular way that God had prepared for him — not as a copy of Christ's Passion but as a participation in it, a configuration to it, a life shaped by the same pattern that the grain-of-wheat verse describes.
He did not endure the suffering by finding a way to think about it that made it hurt less. He endured it by knowing whose it was — knowing that the God who permitted it had himself been through it, had been through worse, and had come out the other side not destroyed but glorified and glorifying.
4. Suffering, received in faith, is redemptive.
"I rejoice in my sufferings for your sake, and in my flesh I am filling up what is lacking in the afflictions of Christ for the sake of his body, that is, the Church." (Colossians 1:24)
This is one of the most challenging verses in Paul's entire corpus, and it has been carefully and precisely interpreted by the tradition of the Church. Paul is not saying that Christ's suffering was insufficient — the sacrifice of the Cross is complete and definitive and admits of no supplement. He is saying something more subtle and more wonderful: that Christ has chosen to associate the sufferings of His members with His own, to make the suffering of those united to Him by faith a participation in the redemptive work He accomplished on the Cross.
This means that suffering, when received in faith — when offered, when united to Christ's suffering rather than merely endured in isolation from it — is not merely passive. It is active. It participates in the redemptive work of the Cross. It does something in the world and in the Church that could not be done without it.
John Paul II's apostolic letter Salvifici Doloris (1984) — the most extended and careful treatment of the theology of suffering in the modern magisterium — develops this precisely. The suffering person united to Christ is not merely a passive recipient of something imposed on them by a universe that has gone wrong. They are a participant in the redemptive work of Christ, contributing — through their union with the suffering Lord — to the good of the Body that is the Church and of the world that Christ came to save.
Devasahayam's three years of suffering in chains were not wasted suffering. They were not the meaningless cruelty of a universe indifferent to human pain. They were the suffering of a man united to Christ, offered to the God who had entered suffering from the inside, participating — in the way that Colossians 1:24 describes — in the redemptive work that Christ accomplished and that His members continue, in their own bodies, to carry forward in every age.
The Answer That Is a Person
The philosophical problem of suffering asks for an explanation. The Gospel gives a Person.
The explanation, if it comes, comes within the relationship — within the encounter with the God who entered the suffering and transformed it from inside. It comes the way God's answer came to Job: not as a logical resolution of the problem, but as the overwhelming presence of the One who made everything and sustains everything and is present in everything, including the suffering, and whose presence is itself the answer — not because it explains the pain but because it places the pain inside a reality larger than the pain, inside the life of the God who has been through worse and has come out the other side.
De Lannoy did not explain Neelakandan's losses to him. He introduced him to the God who had been through Job's losses with Job and had spoken from the whirlwind and had wept at Lazarus's tomb and had sweat blood in Gethsemane and had cried from the Cross and had walked out of the tomb on the third day. He gave him not an explanation but a Person. And Neelakandan — Devasahayam — received the Person and found that the Person was sufficient: sufficient for the losses, sufficient for the prison, sufficient for the thirty-two wounds, sufficient for the mountain.
Jesus, save me.
He said it at the end because it was the truth he had been living for seven years. And the Person who had been sufficient for everything else was sufficient for the final thing as well.
This is the answer the Church gives to the problem of suffering. Not a proposition. A Person. The Person who said I am the resurrection and the life and meant it — and proved it, in the empty tomb and in the incorrupt tongue and in the bell that has not stopped ringing on the mountain since 14 January 1752.
For Those Who Are Carrying the Question
If you have come to this page carrying the question — if you are in the middle of the suffering, in the place where the formula does not fit and the rituals give nothing and the silence of heaven seems total — then this is for you.
The Church does not offer you a comfortable answer. She offers you the truth: that the suffering is real, and God is present in it, and the presence is not always felt but is never absent, and the last word is not the suffering but the Resurrection.
She offers you the company of the saints — the men and women across twenty centuries who have been in the place you are in and have come through it, not without scars, but without being ultimately destroyed. Devasahayam is one of them. He was in the place you are in. The losses, the silence, the question that the rituals could not answer. And from that place, through the encounter with the living God, he was brought to a life so full, so complete, so fruitful, that it is still bearing fruit nearly three centuries after the death on the mountain.
He intercedes for you. From within the life of the God who answered his question — not with an explanation, but with a presence that was sufficient for everything.
Bring him the question. He has been there.
Saint Devasahayam, you came to God through the darkness of suffering and found Him sufficient for everything. Intercede for those who are carrying the question today — who cannot reconcile the God they believe in with the pain they are living through. Give them the grace to bring the question honestly, as Job brought it. Give them the encounter with the living God, who answers not with explanation but with presence. And give them, in that presence, the peace that the world cannot give and cannot take away.
Saint Devasahayam, pray for us.
← Return to THE PROVIDENCE OF SUFFERING — His Encounter with De Lannoy
→ Continue to THE BOOK OF JOB AND THE SOUL OF DEVASAHAYAM
