Misfortune, Unhappy, Curse
See also: Trials, Pain, Suffering, To Suffer.
The Lord has ensured that misfortune reaches us, for the Lord our God is just in all that He accomplishes, but we did not listen to His voice. (Dn 9:14)
In "The Gospel As It Was Revealed to Me"
Curse
- Woe to you who are rich, for you have already received your Consolation! (Luke 6:24-26)[2]
- Curse and blessing.[3]
- Woe to you, Capernaum, woe to you Bethsaida…[4]
- Woe to you hypocritical Pharisees … In Jerusalem in the house of Elchias, the hostile sanhedrist who invited Him to a Banquet to trap Him. (Mt 23:1-36 - Mk 12:37b-40 - Lk 11:37-52 - Jn 20:45-47)[5]
- When God is with men, men can overcome all misfortune whatever its name. When God, on the contrary, is not with men, they can do nothing against misfortune.[6]
Unhappy
- What charity would it be for someone who, being happy and seeing an unhappy person, would feel contempt and hatred toward them?[7]
In Other Sources
Simone Weil, French Philosopher (1909–1943), excerpts from "The Waiting for God" – La Colombe / Livre de poche editions – Paris 1963 - pp. 98 to 121
In the realm of suffering, misfortune is something distinct, specific, irreducible. It is quite different from mere suffering. It seizes the Soul and marks it to the core with a mark belonging only to itself, the mark of slavery. Slavery as practiced in ancient Rome is only the extreme form of misfortune. The ancients, who well understood the matter, said: "A man loses half his Soul the day he becomes a slave."
Misfortune is inseparable from physical suffering, and yet completely distinct. In suffering, all that is not linked to physical pain or something analogous is artificial, imaginary, and can be annulled by a proper disposition of thought. Even in the absence or death of a loved one, the irreducible part of grief is something like a physical pain, a difficulty in breathing, a vise around the Heart, or an unfulfilled need, a hunger, or the almost biological disorder caused by the sudden release of an energy previously directed by attachment and no longer guided. Grief not centered around such an irreducible core is simply romanticism, literature. Humiliation too is a violent state of the whole bodily being, wanting to leap out against outrage, but restrained by impotence or fear.
Conversely, purely physical pain is trivial and leaves no trace in the Soul. A toothache is an example. Some hours of severe pain caused by a rotten tooth, once past, are nothing.
It is different with very long or frequent physical suffering. But such suffering is often quite something else than suffering; it is often misfortune.
Misfortune is an uprooting of life, a more or less attenuated equivalent of death, made irresistibly present to the Soul by the immediate encounter or apprehension of physical pain. If physical pain is completely absent, there is no misfortune for the Soul, because the thought can turn to any other object. Thought flees misfortune as promptly, as irresistibly as an animal flees death. There is only physical pain and nothing else on earth that has the ability to chain thought; provided one assimilates to physical pain certain phenomena difficult to describe, but corporeal, which are strictly equivalent to it. The apprehension of physical pain, notably, is of this kind.
When thought is compelled by the impact of physical pain, however slight, to recognize the Presence of misfortune, a state as violent occurs as if a condemned man were forced to watch the guillotine that will cut his neck for hours. Human beings can live twenty, fifty years in this violent state. People pass by them without noticing. What man is capable of discerning them if Christ himself does not see through his eyes? One only notices that they sometimes behave strangely, and one blames this behavior.
There is truly misfortune only if the event that grasped a life and uprooted it affects directly or indirectly all its parts: social, psychological, physical. The social factor is essential. There is no genuine misfortune where there is no social decline or apprehension of such a decline in some form.
Between misfortune and all sorrows which, even if very violent, very deep, very lasting, are other than true misfortune, there is both continuity and a separation of a threshold, like the boiling point of water. There is a limit beyond which lies misfortune and not below it. This limit is not purely objective; all sorts of personal factors count. The same event may precipitate one human being into misfortune and not another.
The great enigma of human life is not suffering, it is misfortune. It is not surprising that innocents be killed, tortured, driven from their countries, reduced to misery or slavery, locked in camps or dungeons, since criminals exist to commit these Acts. It is not surprising either that disease imposes long sufferings that paralyze life and make it a likeness of death, since nature is subject to a web of mechanical necessities. But it is surprising that God has given misfortune the power to grasp the very Soul of the innocents and seize it as sovereign master. In the best case, the one marked by misfortune will keep only half his Soul.
Those who have suffered such blows after which a being struggles on the ground like a half-crushed worm, those have no words to express what happens to them. Among the people they meet, those who, even having suffered greatly, have never been in contact with true misfortune have no idea what it is. It is something specific, irreducible to anything else, like sounds, of which nothing can give an idea to a deaf-mute. And those who have themselves been mutilated by misfortune are incapable of helping anyone and almost incapable even of desiring it. Thus compassion toward the misfortunate is an impossibility. When it really occurs, it is a miracle more surprising than walking on Water, healing the sick, and even the resurrection of a dead man.
Misfortune forced the Christ to beg to be spared, to seek Consolations from men, to believe Himself forsaken by His Father. It forced a just man to cry out against God, a just man as perfect as human nature allows, perhaps more so if Job is less a historic figure than a figure of Christ. "He mocks the misfortune of the innocents." It is not blasphemy, it is an authentic cry torn from pain. The Book of Job, from beginning to end, is a pure marvel of truth and authenticity. About misfortune, everything that deviates from this model is more or less tainted with falsehood.
Misfortune makes God absent for a time, more absent than a dead man, more absent than light in a completely dark dungeon. A kind of horror overwhelms the whole Soul. During this absence there is nothing to love. What is terrible is that if, in these Darkness where there is nothing to love, the Soul ceases to love, the absence of God becomes definitive. The Soul must continue to love in emptiness, or at least to want to love, even with an infinitesimal part of itself. Then one day God comes to show Himself and reveal the goodness of the world, as was the case for Job. But if the Soul ceases to love, it falls here below into something almost equivalent to hell.
That is why those who thrust unprepared men into misfortune kill Souls. On the other hand, in a time like ours, where misfortune hovers over all, the aid brought to Souls is effective only if it truly prepares them for misfortune. This is no small matter.
Misfortune hardens and despairs because it impresses to the depth of the Soul, as with a hot iron, that contempt, disgust and even self-repulsion, that feeling of guilt and shame which crime should logically produce but does not. Evil dwells in the criminal’s Soul without being felt there. It is felt in the Soul of the unhappy innocent. Everything happens as if the state of the Soul which essentially suits the criminal had been separated from crime and attached to misfortune; and even proportional to the innocence of the misfortunate.
If Job cries his innocence with such despairing accent, it is because he himself cannot believe it; because in himself his Soul sides with his friends. He implores the testimony of God himself, because he no longer hears the testimony of his own Conscience; it is no longer for him anything but an abstract, dead memory.
The carnal nature of man is common to the animal. Chickens peck a wounded hen. It is a mechanical phenomenon like gravity. All the contempt, all the repulsion, all the hatred our reason attaches to crime, our sensibility attaches to misfortune. Except those whose Christ occupies their whole Soul, everyone more or less despises the unhappy, although almost no one is aware of it.
This law of our sensibility also applies to ourselves. That contempt, that repulsion, that hatred, in the misfortunate turns against himself, penetrates to the center of the Soul, and from there colors with their poisonous hue the entire universe. Supernatural love, if it survives, can prevent the second effect from occurring, but not the first. The first is the very essence of misfortune; there is no misfortune where it does not happen.
"He was made a curse for us." It is not only the body of Christ, hung on the wood, that was made a curse, but His entire Soul. Likewise every innocent in misfortune feels cursed. Even those who have been in misfortune and have been withdrawn from it by a change of fortune, if they have been deeply bitten.
Another effect of misfortune is gradually to make the Soul its accomplice by injecting a poison of inertia. In anyone who has been unhappy long enough, there is an complicity regarding his own misfortune. This complicity hinders all efforts he might make to improve his condition; it even sometimes prevents him from seeking ways to be delivered, sometimes even from desiring deliverance. He is then settled in misfortune, and people can believe he is satisfied. Moreover, this complicity can push him against his will to avoid, to flee the means of deliverance; it then hides under sometimes ridiculous pretexts. Even in one who has been brought out of misfortune, if he has been bitten forever to the depth of his Soul, there remains something which drives him to plunge into it again, as if misfortune were settled in him as a parasite and directed him for its own ends. Sometimes this impulse prevails over all movements of the Soul toward happiness. If misfortune ended by a good deed, it may be accompanied by hatred of the benefactor; such is the cause of some acts of wild ingratitude apparently inexplicable. It is sometimes easy to free an unhappy person from his present misfortune, but difficult to liberate him from his past misfortune. Only God can. Yet even the Grace of God itself does not heal the irreparably wounded nature here below. The glorious body of Christ bore the wounds.
One can accept the existence of misfortune only by seeing it as a distance.
God created out of love, for love. God created nothing other than love itself and the means of love. He created all forms of love. He created beings capable of love at all possible distances. He himself went, because no other could do it, to the maximum distance, the infinite distance. This infinite distance between God and God, the supreme rupture, pain unlike any other, wonder of love, is the crucifixion. Nothing can be farther from God than what has been made a curse.
This rupture, over which supreme love puts the bond of supreme union, resonates perpetually through the universe, at the depth of silence, like two notes separated and merged, like a pure and piercing harmony. This is the Word of God. The entire creation is but the vibration of it. When human music in its greatest purity pierces our Soul, this is what we hear through it. When we have learned to hear silence, this is what we grasp through it more distinctly.
Those who persevere in love hear this note deep at the bottom of the degradation where misfortune has placed them. From this moment they can no longer have any Doubt.
Men struck by misfortune are at the foot of the Cross, almost at the greatest possible distance from God. One must not believe that sin is a greater distance. Sin is not a distance. It is a wrong orientation of the gaze.
There is, it is true, a mysterious link between this distance and original disobedience. From the origin, we are told, humanity turned its gaze from God and walked in the wrong direction as far as it could go. It could walk then. We, we are nailed in place, free only of our gaze, subject to necessity. A mechanical mechanism, which takes no account of the degree of spiritual perfection, continuously tosses men and throws some at the very foot of the Cross. It depends only on them whether or not to keep their eyes turned toward God through the shocks. It is not that the Providence of God is absent. It is by His Providence that God willed necessity as a mechanical mechanism.
If the mechanism were not mechanical, there would be no misfortune at all. Misfortune is above all anonymous, it deprives those it takes of their personality and makes them things. It is indifferent, and it is the cold of this indifference, a metallic cold, that freezes to the very depth of the Soul all those it touches. They will never again find warmth. They will never again believe they are someone.
Misfortune would not have this power without the element of chance it contains. Those who are persecuted for their faith and know it, whatever they suffer, are not the unhappy. They fall into misfortune only if suffering or fear occupy the Soul to the point of making them forget the cause of persecution. Martyrs delivered to beasts entering the arena singing were not unhappy. Christ was unhappy. He did not die as a martyr. He died as a common criminal, mixed with thieves, only a little more ridiculous. For misfortune is ridiculous.
Only mechanical necessity can throw men to the point of extreme distance, right next to the Cross. Human crimes that cause most misfortunes are part of mechanical necessity, for criminals do not know what they do.
There are two forms of friendship, encounter and separation. They are inseparable. They both enclose the same Good, the unique Good, friendship. For when two beings who are not friends are close, there is no encounter. When they are afar, there is no separation. Enclosing the same Good, they are equally good.
God produces Himself, knows Himself perfectly as we miserably make and know objects outside ourselves. But above all God is love. Above all God loves Himself. This love, this friendship in God, is the Trinity. Between the terms united by this relation of divine love, there is more than proximity, there is infinite proximity, identity. But through Creation, Incarnation, and Passion, there is also an infinite distance. All space, all time, interposing their thickness, put an infinite distance between God and God.
Lovers, friends have two desires. One to love each other so much that they enter one into the other and make but one single being. The other to love each other so much that having between them half the globe of the earth, their union suffers no diminution. All that man vainly desires here below is perfect and real in God. All these impossible desires are in us as a mark of our destiny, and they are good for us as soon as we no longer hope to fulfill them.
The love between God and God, which is itself God, is that twofold virtue link; that link which unites two beings to the point that they are indistinguishable and are really one, that link which extends above distance and triumphs over infinite separation. The unity of God where all plurality disappears, the abandonment where Christ believes himself to be found without ceasing to love perfectly his Father, these are two forms of the divine virtue of the same Love, which is God himself.
God is so essentially love that the unity, which in a sense is its very definition, is a mere effect of love. And to the infinite unifying virtue of this love corresponds the infinite separation it triumphs over, which is all creation, stretched across all space and time, made of mechanically brutal matter, interposed between Christ and His Father.
We men, our misery gives us the infinitely precious privilege of sharing this distance set between the Son and the Father. But this distance is separation only for those who love. For those who love, separation, though painful, is a Good, because it is love. The very distress of the forsaken Christ is a Good. There can be no greater Good for us here below than to share in it. God here below cannot be perfectly present to us, because of the flesh. But He can be almost perfectly absent to us in extreme misfortune. This is for us on earth the only possibility of perfection. That is why the Cross is our only hope. "No forest bears such a tree, with this flower, this foliage and this bud."
This universe in which we live, of which we are a part, is that distance placed by divine Love between God and God. We are a point in that distance. Space, time, and the mechanism that governs matter are that distance. All that we call evil is only this mechanism. God has arranged that His Grace, when it penetrates to the very center of a man and thence enlightens his whole being, allows him, without violating the laws of nature, to walk on Water. But when a man turns away from God, he simply surrenders to gravity. He then believes he wants and chooses, but he is nothing but a thing, a falling stone. If one looks closely, with truly attentive eyes, at Souls and human societies, one sees that everywhere the virtue of supernatural light is absent, all obey mechanical laws as rigid and precise as the laws of falling bodies. This knowledge is beneficial and necessary. Those we call criminals are only tiles detached from a roof by the wind and falling at random. Their only fault is the initial choice that made them these tiles.
The mechanism of necessity extends to all levels while remaining the same: in raw matter, in plants, in animals, in peoples, in Souls. Viewed from where we are, according to our perspective, it is completely mechanical. But if we transport our Heart beyond ourselves, beyond the universe, beyond space and time, where is Our Father, and look at this mechanism from there, it appears quite different. What seemed necessity becomes obedience. Matter is entirely passivity, and therefore total obedience to the will of God. It is for us a perfect model. There can be no other being than God and what obeys God. By its perfect obedience, matter deserves to be loved by those who love its Master, like a lover fondly looks at the needle that has been handled by a beloved Woman who has died. We are warned of this part it deserves of our love by the goodness of the world. In the goodness of the world, brute necessity becomes an object of love. Nothing is as beautiful as gravity in the fleeting folds of the ripples of the sea or the almost eternal folds of mountains.
The sea is not less beautiful to our eyes because we know sometimes ships sink. On the contrary, it is more beautiful because of this. If it modified the movement of its waves to save a ship, it would be a being endowed with Discernment and choice, and not that fluid perfectly obedient to all external pressures. It is this perfect obedience that is its beauty.
All the horrors that occur in this world are like the folds printed on the waves by gravity. That is why they enclose a beauty. Sometimes a poem such as the Iliad makes this beauty perceptible.
Man can never escape obedience to God. A creature cannot not obey. The only choice offered to man as an intelligent and free creature is to desire obedience or not to desire it. If he does not desire it, he nevertheless obeys perpetually as a thing subject to mechanical necessity. If he desires it, he remains subject to mechanical necessity but a new necessity is added to it, a necessity constituted by the laws proper to supernatural things. Some Actions become impossible for him, others are accomplished through him, sometimes almost despite him.
When one has the feeling that on some occasion one disobeyed God, it simply means that for a time one ceased to desire obedience. Of course, all else being equal, a man does not perform the same Actions according as he consents or not to obedience; just as a plant, all else being equal, does not grow the same way according to whether it is in light or in Darkness. The plant exerts no control, no choice in the matter of its own growth. We are like plants that have only the choice to expose themselves or not to the light.
Christ proposed to us as a model the docility of matter by advising us to look at the lilies of the field which neither toil nor spin. That is to say, they have not proposed themselves to wear such or such a color, they have not moved their will nor disposed means to this end, they have received all that natural necessity brought to them. If they seem infinitely more beautiful than rich fabrics, it is not because they are richer, it is because of this docility. Fabric is docile too, but docile to man, not to God. Matter is not beautiful when it obeys man, only when it obeys God. If sometimes, in a work of art, it appears almost as beautiful as in the sea, mountains or flowers, it is because the light of God filled the artist. To find beautiful things made by men not enlightened by God, one must have understood with the whole Soul that these men themselves are only matter that obeys without knowing. For one at that stage, absolutely everything here below is perfectly beautiful. In all that exists, in all that occurs, he discerns the mechanism of necessity, and he savors in necessity the infinite sweetness of obedience. This obedience of things is for us, regarding God, what the transparency of a glass is to light. As soon as we feel this obedience with all our being, we see God.
When we hold a newspaper upside down, we see the strange forms of the printed characters. When we turn it right side up, we no longer see characters, we see words. The passenger of a ship caught in a storm feels every shock as a turmoil inside. The captain only perceives the complex combination of wind, current, swell, with the disposition of the ship, its shape, its sails, its rudder.
As one learns to read, as one learns a trade, so one learns to feel in everything, above all and almost only the obedience of the universe to God. It is truly a learning. Like all learning, it requires effort and time. For one who has reached the end, there are no more differences between things, between events, than the difference felt by someone who can read before the same phrase reproduced several times, written in red ink, blue ink, printed in this or that font. One who cannot read sees only differences. For one who can read, all that is equivalent, since the phrase is the same. For one who has completed the learning, things and events, everywhere, always, are the vibration of the same infinitely sweet divine word. This does not mean he does not suffer. Pain is the coloring of certain events. Before a phrase written in red ink, one who can read and one who cannot see red alike; but the red coloring does not have the same importance for one and the other.
When an apprentice gets hurt or complains of fatigue, the Workers, the peasants, have this beautiful saying: "It is the trade getting into the body." Each time we suffer a pain, we can truthfully tell ourselves that it is the universe, the order of the world, the goodness of the world, the obedience of creation to God entering our body. Hence how could we not bless with the tenderest gratitude the Love that sends us this gift?
Joy and pain are equally precious gifts, which must each be savored in their purity, without trying to mix them. Through joy, the goodness of the world penetrates our Soul. Through pain, it enters the body. With joy alone we could no more become friends of God than one becomes a captain just by studying navigation manuals. The body has a part in all learning. At the level of physical sensibility, pain alone is contact with this necessity which constitutes the order of the world; for pleasure does not enclose the impression of a necessity. It is a higher part of sensibility that can feel necessity in joy, and this only through the feeling of goodness. For our being to become one day entirely sensitive, through and through, to this obedience which is the substance of matter, for a new sense to form in us that allows hearing the universe as the vibration of the word of God, both the transforming virtue of pain and that of joy are equally indispensable. We must open to each, when either appears, the very center of the Soul, as one opens one's door to the messengers of one who is loved. What does it matter to a lover if the messenger is polite or brutal, if he brings a message?
But misfortune is not pain. Misfortune is something else than a pedagogical procedure of God.
The infinity of space and time separates us from God. How would we seek Him? How would we go toward Him? Even if we walked all through the centuries, we would do nothing more than circle the earth. Even by plane, we could do nothing else. We are incapable of moving vertically. We cannot take a step toward the heavens. God crosses the universe and comes to us.
Above the infinity of space and time, the love infinitely more infinite of God comes to grasp us. He comes at His hour. We have the power to consent to the Homecoming or to refuse. If we remain deaf, He comes again and again like a beggar, but also, like a beggar, one day He does not come back. If we consent, God plants a little seed in us and leaves. From this moment, God has nothing more to do nor we either, but to wait. We must only not regret the consent we gave, the nuptial Yes [1]. It is not as easy as it seems, for the growth of the seed in us is painful. Moreover, because we accept this growth, we cannot help but destroy what would hinder it, to uproot weeds, to cut out couch grass; and unfortunately this couch grass is part of our very flesh, so these gardening cares are a violent operation. Nevertheless the seed, all in all, grows by itself. One day comes when the Soul belongs to God, where not only does it consent to love, but truly, effectively, it loves. It must then in turn cross the universe to reach God. The Soul does not love as a created creature by created love. This love in it is divine, uncreated, for it is the love of God for God passing through it. Only God can love God. We can only consent to lose our own feelings to let this love pass into our Soul. That is to deny oneself. We were created only for this consent.
Divine love crossed the infinity of space and time to go from God to us. But how can it make the return journey when it starts from a finite creature? When the seed of divine love deposited in us has grown, become a tree, how can we, who bear it, bring it back to its origin, make the journey back God made to us, cross the infinite distance?
It seems impossible, but there is a way. We know it well. We know what this tree grown in us resembles, this beautiful tree where the Birds of the sky perch. We know what is the most beautiful of all trees. "No forest bears such a tree." Something even a bit more dreadful than a gallows, that is the most beautiful of trees. It is this tree of which God put the seed in us, without our knowing what that seed was. If we had known, we would not have said Yes at the first moment. It is this tree that grew in us, that became unuprootable. Only betrayal can uproot it.
When one strikes a nail with a hammer, the shock received by the wide head of the nail passes entirely to the point, without any loss, though it is only a point. If the hammer and the nail head were infinitely large, all would happen the same. The nail’s point would transmit to the spot where it is applied this infinite shock.
Extreme misfortune, which is at once physical pain, distress of the Soul, and social degradation, constitutes this nail. The point is applied to the very center of the Soul. The nail head is all the scattered necessity throughout all space and time.
The man to whom such a thing happens has no part in this operation. He struggles like a butterfly being pinned alive in an album. But he can through horror continue to want to love. There is no impossibility, no obstacle, almost no difficulty. For the greatest pain, as long as it is short of fainting, does not touch the part of the Soul that consents to good orientation.
One must only know that love is an orientation and not a state of Soul. If one ignores this, one falls into despair at the first encounter with misfortune.
He whose Soul remains oriented toward God while it is pierced by a nail finds himself nailed to the very center of the universe. This is the true center, which is not in the middle, which is outside space and time, which is God. According to a dimension that does not belong to space, that is not time, that is a whole other dimension, this nail pierced a hole through creation, through the thickness of the screen that separates the Soul from God.
Through this wonderful dimension, the Soul can, without leaving the place and the moment where the body to which it is linked is, cross the entire space and time and reach before the very Presence of God.
It finds itself at the intersection of creation and the Creator. This point of intersection is that of the crossing of the branches of the Cross.
Saint Paul may have thought of such things when he said: "Be rooted in love, that you may be able to comprehend with all the saints what is the width and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ which surpasses knowledge."