The Martyr Complex
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The Church suffers persecution, not only from without but also from within. One of the most insidious persecutions the Church has had to endure throughout the ages has been the scandal of the long face. The morbid preoccupation with suffering in which some souls indulge is particularly treacherous because of the sanctimonious air it wears. Some of the most "respectable" people are addicted to it. In this connection I am reminded of a woman, considered very "devout" by her neighbors, who never allowed her family to celebrate any joyful feasts—even those of the Church—because every feast was the anniversary of some tragic occurrence: the death by drowning of Granduncle Malheureux; the loss by theft of some cherished heirloom; the mysterious disappearance of Cousin Arbutus, twice removed; and so forth and so on.
Because of the false sense of moral security it gives, this practice is an almost invulnerable form of selfishness. Under its cloak the Devil can work with comparative margin, for it smothers any feeling of guilt that might put its victim on guard. The would-be "martyr" likens his dark and stubborn obsession to the gentle docility of the saints in the face of persecution, and enjoys himself immensely while practicing a form of spiritual masochism. He invokes the Cross, but only to pose as its unique victim, thus capitalizing on the drama of our redemption for the gratification of his own pride. The air of spurious holiness with which he invests all his activities attests to the fact that a transference of values has been made. Having placed his own image in the sanctuary, he attempts to embellish it with all the charismata of the Passion. Small wonder that honest souls are repelled from the Church he pretends to honor.
This perversion has come to be identified especially with "religious" people, because many of its addicts employ counterfeit coins stamped with religious symbols to buy sympathy for their lugubrious dolors, But actually it is a disorder of the self-centered, and thrives as rankly among the unchurched as among the churched. It is a form of escape from reality, from a humility that accepts in loving simplicity both joy and sorrow as gifts from an all-wise and merciful Providence.
The Gift of Pain
Pain is the common lot of fallen man, to be suffered well or ill. Mystics have welcomed it. Saint Teresa of Avila went so far as to declare, "I must suffer or die!" Far below the heights of that abnegate love the ordinary Christian, coming upon these words, finds their echo reverberating within the confines of his own spiritual susceptibilities. It was the realization of the reparation due to God's infinite goodness for humanity's base ingratitude, coupled with an earnest longing to mitigate, in some way, the sufferings of Our Saviour, that wrung this cry from her who was the most realistic and cheerful of saints. The Christian loves pain, not for itself, but as a means to an end—the incorporation of his suffering with that of the Redeemer Who consummated through the agony of His body and mind and soul all the retribution merited by our sins.
Those who do not know Christ may also find in grief a certain intangible sweetness, for, whether they know Him or not, He knows them, and His boundless compassion draws Him like a magnet to those who need Him.
Natural Compensations
There are also natural compensations to be found in pain. For one thing, it is nature's warning that certain elements, like fire, and certain acts, like gluttony, are dangerous to healthy human life. Then it has a wholesome disciplinary value. A child undergoing just punishment at the hands of his parents is comforted by the tacit assurance that this suffering is good for him. It reinstates him in an order of security from which he had estranged himself through disobedience.
If properly utilized, pain can also be the means of growth and becoming, of attaining a higher level of being. Through a painful regime a sick person gets well; through the pain of effort a student becomes a scholar, a soldier a hero, an artisan a master, a wife a mother.
The universal natural appeal of suffering, however, lies chiefly in the fact that it is an open sesame to the brotherhood of man. The first act of the newborn baby is a lusty cry. Pain is his first experience. Most primitive societies, and even modern fraternal organizations make use of pain in their initiation rites. Churchill turned to masterful account the psychology of pain, when in England's crisis during the last war he promised the British people nothing but "blood, sweat, and tears."
Dead Issues
But once pain has accomplished its purpose, it should be discarded. It is the harking back to the searing fires that effected our liberation that turns us, like Lot's wife, into pillars of salt. The mother who can never forget the pains of childbirth; the man whose labored and grudging kindness has met with "nothing but ingratitude"; the nun who is constantly haunted by the "sacrifices" she made for her vocation; the wife who broods over the career she gave up for marriage; the nationalist who, generations after his country has been granted autonomy, persists in an attitude of bitter resentment against an erstwhile oppressor; all of these individuals are raking among dead stubble. The harvest has been reaped, the field lies barren. There is no fruit there for them. The sense of their own importance has eaten away any fruit that might have resulted from whatever measure of selflessness their sacrifice, or that of their forefathers, may have involved. Small wonder that they feel they have given too much for too little. Their sacrifices were laid, not on the altar of charity, but before the shrine of self-love. They have become pilgrims of the blind alley, martyrs of the fruitless cause.
Romanticism
It is this sense of self-importance that lies at the root of the perversion of the gift of pain. This weakness has undoubtedly been with man since the fall of Adam. The Middle Ages, for all their robust realism and active faith, must surely have had their share of doleful exhibitionism. Any undue emphasis on extravagant suffering for its own sake, however, was promptly declared heretical. It was the Renaissance, with its accent on humanism. that really put human suffering on a pedestal, enshrining it as an esthetic and emotional objective. Perhaps the revival of the Greek tragedies had something to do with it. Comparison of Christ's sufferings with those of legendary pagan heroes like Prometheus, victims of vindictive gods, may have blurred the terrible significance of Our Lord's sacrifice. Even where God was still given lip-service, it was man, the tragic animal, who by the magnificence of his dreams was doomed to endure, through the limitations of his own nature, his perpetual failure to realize those dreams, and who. by a daemonic twist of logic, had become God's victim, it was this creature who captured the imagination and admiration of the romantics. Since suffering was the common denominator of heroism it became a fetish. Everything was steeped in its brackish waters. In fiction and drama no love was true unless it was unrequited or came to a tragic end. Romantic music became heavily freighted with the burden of human pain. Poetry was riddled with the futile but oh-so-gallant gesture of rebellion.
It was the Renaissance that ushered in the custom of black vestments for Masses for the dead. Even certain Catholic hagiographers fell under the spell. And within the Faith self-pity was working its subtle ferment on individuals. They began to prefer their private disorders to the order of the Church. Finally, with great show of self-righteousness, they asserted the supremacy of their own "lights" over the true Light of the Gentiles and the Glory of Israel, and broke away.
The elite of the world went about wrapped in a cloud of "divine" melancholy. And then the humble people, who had hitherto accepted suffering as part and parcel of the ministry of giving that implements the commandment to love one's neighbor as oneself, suddenly became aware of it as an indignity inflicted upon them by human injustice.
It is true that injustice existed, for one of the strange things about the cult of suffering is that it goes hand-in-hand with self-indulgence and lack of compassion. But what had happened to Our Lord's beatitude: "Blessed are ye who hunger and thirst after Justice for My sake"? It was buried under envy of the oppressors, with their exquisite manners, their silken culture, their pious faces, and their flinty hearts. Social hatreds were fomented. Revolution became the watch-word of the new martyr-minded masses.
The vestiges of sickly romanticism remain today in our operas, in our history books, in much of our fiction, in those interminable soap operas whose heroines suffer and suffer and suffer. It is in our sentimentality and our sympathy for the under-dog. It colors much of our private thinking.
The New Slavery
But there is a new, less romantic incentive for the martyr complex. The martyr complex is a disorder of the slave-mentality, and man has become the victim of the machine. Under the relentless economic demand to keep his head above water, he finds himself inhibiting friendliness and compassion. His plight is truly deplorable, The farther he moves from God the more he is cut off from his fellowmen, the more he turns his vision inward. He has lost his sense of community.
The city crowds in which he huddles are a pathetic conglomeration of stony-faced units, bound together by nothing but the physical exigency of the moment, each hugging to himself a dogged detachment from "these awful people," each determined not to lose his grip on the defenses he has raised against them: the unseeing stare, the vacuous preoccupation, the brusque impatience, the air of desperate hurry, the pitiless indifference.
Each individual is swamped with his own troubles. He has no time for anyone else's. Time, which was once considered another of God's bounties, whose passing was proclaimed by church bells for everyone's benefit, is now considered a private possession. Everybody carries his own on his wrist. He resents every moment spent outside of his own insatiable demands for self-gratification. Because he feels little beyond his personal sense of injury and his urgency to grab what satisfaction he can, he has become amenable to any propaganda that would pit nation against nation, race against race, class against class, and man against man.
Reaction
There is a strong reaction today against the outward manifestation of morbid self-pity. For the hope in man's power to extricate himself from his dilemma still persists. This is but another facet of the same malady, for humanism is still paramount, and if it does not wear a long face outwardly, it is only because it has gone out of style. Every social uplifter has his own panacea for the ills that afflict humanity. The only common bond lies in the injunction to "keep smiling." "Persecution complex" is the withering diagnosis pronounced glibly upon the bewailer of his woes.
The trouble with this reaction is that much of it is founded upon a new idolatry—material well-being. Since the nature of this well-being depends upon our being free from any discomfort, the gift of pain, insofar as is humanly possible, has been rejected. It has become imperative to assume a blind, determined optimism which is frequently a mask for despair. We dare not suffer. We shut out the suffering of those about us with lies. The dying are told that they will get well, the poor that they will get rich, the rich that they are happy.
Edwin Arlington Robinson has given us a prototype of this ghastly geniality in his poem "Richard Cory"—a man who was admired, respected, and benignly envied by the community he charmingly patronized, for he was "rich, yes richer than a king-and admirably schooled in every grace."
And Richard Cory, one calm summer night,
Went home and put a bullet through his head.
The Face of Reality
Modern society is lost in the confusion of conflicting values, sore with the mounting indignities of inhuman living, torn between breaking down, once for all, and acknowledging it can't be borne any more, or keeping up the farcical laughter of despair. In the face of this, is it the Christian formula to "keep smiling"?
Leon Bloy has set the crazy juxtaposition of courses straight in one sentence: "The only tragedy is not to be a saint." And to be a saint is not to search frantically for happiness, nor to make great gestures of renunciation, nor to exhibit one's wounds to the world. The Christian is vitally concerned with the plight of his contemporaries. And his concern, because it is prompted by love and compassion, is painful. But he cannot shut himself off from this pain by retiring to a never-never land of ineffectual grief or callous cheeriness. We shall all go to Heaven together or we shall all go to Hell together. The Christian must face reality, and it is the honest, open face of reality that he will wear. He acknowledges the fact of human suffering, but he clears the air of the victim psychology by also acknowledging the fact that each one of us, insofar as he is voluntarily bound up with the flight from reality, is in a large measure responsible for it. Above all, he acknowledges God's infinite mercy through the supernatural virtues of faith and hope and love. To put into practice what he believes will entail going against everything our contemporary civilization stands for. It may mean martyrdom, but it will be real martyrdom, clean and searing and fruitful, and not its pampered, whining, sterile counterfeit.
The Light Burden
Saints are formed by God out of those who love Him and seek His Kingdom by the acceptance and right use of every gift he sends. And if the gift be pain, the enormity of the distinction conferred in being given a gift which He has hallowed by His participation in it must be met with the most profound humility and simplicity. It is a visitation, an invitation to a mystical communion, and the response can only be: "Lord, I am not worthy but only say the word and my soul shall be healed."
But not embittered, not soured. The soul of a saint is a limpid well of joy, and suffering only deepens the well. He knows joy because he has found it in the acceptance of the Cross of One Who said: "Follow Me, for My burden is light and My yoke is sweet."
Excerpted from Integrity, Vol 6, No. 6, March 1952
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