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 he accomplishes, but we have not listened 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 hypocrite Pharisees … In Jerusalem at the house of Elchias the hostile sanhedrin member 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 face any misfortune no matter its name. When God, on the contrary, is not with men, they can do nothing against misfortune.[6]
Unhappy
- What kind of charity would it be from someone who, being happy and seeing an unhappy person, would feel contempt and hatred towards 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 domain of suffering, misfortune is a separate, specific, irreducible thing. It is quite different from mere suffering. It seizes the soul and marks it, to its depths, with a mark belonging only to it—the mark of slavery. Slavery as practiced in ancient Rome is only the extreme form of misfortune. The ancients, who knew the matter well, used to say: "A man loses half of his soul the day he becomes a slave."
Misfortune is inseparable from physical suffering, yet altogether distinct. In suffering, all that is not linked to physical pain or something similar is artificial, imaginary, and can be destroyed by a proper disposition of thought. Even in the absence or death of a loved one, the irreducible part of grief is something like physical pain, a difficulty breathing, a vice 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 controlled. Grief not centered around such an irreducible core is merely romanticism, literature. Humiliation too is a violent state of the entire bodily being, wanting to leap under outrage, but forced to restrain itself by impotence or fear.
On the other hand, pain that is purely physical is very minor and leaves no trace in the soul. Toothache is an example. A few hours of violent pain caused by a rotten tooth, once over, are nothing.
It is different with very long or very frequent physical suffering. But such suffering is often quite another thing than suffering; it is often misfortune.
Misfortune is an uprooting of life, a more or less attenuated equivalent of death, rendered irresistibly present to the soul by the presence or immediate apprehension of physical pain. If physical pain is entirely absent, there is no misfortune for the soul because thought turns to any other object. Thought flees misfortune as swiftly and irresistibly as an animal flees death. There is nothing on earth but physical pain and nothing else that has the property of chaining thought; provided that some phenomena difficult to describe but corporeal and strictly equivalent to physical pain are assimilated as physical pain. The apprehension of physical pain is notably of this kind.
When thought is compelled by the reach of physical pain, even if light, to recognize the presence of misfortune, a state occurs as violent as if a condemned man is forced to watch for hours the guillotine about to cut his neck. Some human beings can live twenty years, fifty years in this violent state. People pass them by without noticing. Who can discern them, if Christ himself does not look through their eyes? One notices only that they sometimes behave strangely, and this behavior is blamed.
There is truly misfortune only if the event that seized a life and uprooted it hits directly or indirectly in all its parts: social, psychological, physical. The social factor is essential. There is no true misfortune where there is no social degradation or apprehension of such degradation in some form.
Between misfortune and all griefs which, although very violent, deep, and lasting, are something other than misfortune itself, there is both continuity and a separation by a threshold, as for the boiling point of water. There is a limit beyond which is misfortune and not below. This limit is not purely objective; all sorts of personal factors come into account. The same event can precipitate one human being into misfortune and not another.
The great enigma of human life is not suffering but misfortune. It is not surprising that innocents are killed, tortured, driven from their countries, reduced to misery or slavery, locked in camps or dungeons since there are criminals to perform these acts. Nor is it surprising that illness imposes long sufferings that paralyze life and make it a likeness of death, since nature is subjected to a blind play of mechanical necessities. But it is surprising that God gave misfortune the power to seize the soul itself of innocents and take it as sovereign master. In the best case, the one marked by misfortune will retain only half of his soul.
Those who have experienced one of those blows after which a being struggles on the ground like a half-crushed worm have no words to express what is happening to them. Among the people they meet, those who, even having suffered much, have never had 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 to do so. Thus, compassion toward the unfortunate is impossible. When it really happens, it is a miracle more surprising than walking on water, healing the sick, and even raising a dead person.
Misfortune forced Christ to beg to be spared, to seek consolations from men, to believe Himself abandoned by His Father. It forced a just man to cry out against God, a just man as perfect as human nature alone permits, perhaps even more so if Job is less a historical character than a figure of Christ. "He mocks the misfortune of the innocent." This 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. Regarding 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 the 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 this darkness where there is nothing to love, the soul ceases to love, the absence of God becomes permanent. The soul must continue to love in the void, or at least want to love, even with an infinitesimal part of itself. Then one day God comes to show Himself to it and reveal the beauty 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 men into misfortune unprepared to receive it kill souls. On the other hand, in an age like ours, where misfortune hangs over all, help brought to souls is only effective if it goes as far as truly preparing them for misfortune. This is no small matter.
Misfortune hardens and despairs because it imprints to the depths of the soul, as with a red-hot iron, that contempt, that disgust and even repulsion of oneself, that sensation of guilt and filthiness which crime logically should produce and does not produce. Evil dwells in the soul of the criminal without being felt there. It is felt in the soul of the unhappy innocent. It is as if the state of the soul which essentially suits the criminal had been separated from the crime and attached to misfortune, and even in proportion to the innocence of the unfortunate.
If Job cries his innocence with such despairing accent, it is because he himself cannot believe it, it is because his own soul sides with his friends. He implores the testimony of God himself because he no longer hears the testimony of his conscience; it is no longer for him but an abstract, dead memory.
The carnal nature of man is common to animals. Chickens rush at a wounded chicken pecking it. This phenomenon is as mechanical as gravity. All the contempt, all the repulsion, all the hatred that our reason attaches to crime, our sensibility attaches to misfortune. Except those whose soul is entirely occupied by Christ, everyone despises the unfortunate more or less, although almost no one is aware of it.
This law of our sensibility also applies to ourselves. This contempt, this repulsion, this hatred in the unfortunate turn against himself, penetrate the center of the soul, and from there color with their poisoned hue the whole universe. Supernatural love, if it has survived, can prevent this second effect from occurring, but not the first. The first is the very essence of misfortune; there is no misfortune where it does not occur.
"He was made a curse for us." It is not only the body of Christ, suspended on the wood, that was made a curse; it is also His entire soul. Similarly, every innocent in misfortune feels cursed. Even those who have been in misfortune and were brought out of it by a change of fortune, if bitten deeply enough, still feel this way.
Another effect of misfortune is to gradually make the soul its accomplice by injecting a poison of inertia. In anyone who has been unfortunate long enough, there is complicity with their own misfortune. This complicity hinders all efforts they might make to improve their lot; it even prevents them from seeking means to be freed, sometimes even from wanting deliverance. They are then settled in misfortune, and people may believe they are satisfied. More, this complicity can against their will push them to avoid, to flee means of deliverance; it then hides under sometimes ridiculous pretexts. Even in one who has been freed from misfortune, if bitten forever to the core of the soul, something remains that pushes him to fall into it again, as if misfortune were lodged in him like a parasite and directed him for its own ends. Sometimes this impulse outweighs all the soul’s movements toward happiness. If misfortune ended by a benefaction, it may be accompanied by hatred of the benefactor; such is the cause of certain apparently inexplicable savage ingratitude acts. It is often easy to free an unfortunate from present misfortune, but difficult to free him from past misfortune. Only God can. Yet even God’s grace does not heal here below the irrevocably wounded nature. 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 did not create anything 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 one else could, to the maximum distance, infinite distance. This infinite distance between God and God, supreme tearing, pain unlike any other, marvel of love, is the crucifixion. Nothing can be farther from God than what has been made a curse.
This tearing over which supreme love puts the link of supreme union resounds perpetually through the universe, deep in silence, like two separate but fused notes, like a pure and shattering harmony. That is the Word of God. The whole creation is but its vibration. When human music in its purest form pierces our soul, it is that which we hear through it. When we have learned to hear silence, it is that which we grasp more distinctly through it.
Those who persevere in love hear this note at the very bottom of the degradation where misfortune has placed them. From that moment on, 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. Do not believe sin to be a greater distance. Sin is not a distance. It is a misorientation of the gaze.
There is, it is true, a mysterious link between this distance and an original disobedience. From the beginning, we are told, humanity turned its gaze away from God and walked in the wrong direction as far as it could go. It was then able to walk. We are nailed in place, free only in our gaze, subject to necessity. A blind mechanism, which takes no account of level of spiritual perfection, continuously tosses men and throws some right to the foot of the Cross. It depends only on them whether to keep their eyes turned to God through the shakes. It is not that God’s Providence is absent. It is by His Providence that God willed necessity as a blind mechanism.
If the mechanism were not blind, there would be no misfortune at all. Misfortune is above all anonymous; it deprives those it takes of their personality and makes things of them. It is indifferent, and it is the cold of this indifference, a metallic cold, which chills the very depths of the soul of all touched by it. They will never find warmth again. They will never believe again that they are someone.
Misfortune would not have this power without the element of chance it encloses. Those persecuted for their faith and who know it, no matter what suffering they endure, are not unfortunate. They fall into misfortune only if suffering or fear occupy the soul to the point of making it forget the cause of the persecution. Martyrs thrown to the beasts who entered the arena singing were not unfortunate. Christ was an unfortunate. 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 blind necessity can throw men to the point of extreme distance, right next to the Cross. Human crimes which cause most misfortunes are part of this blind necessity, for criminals do not know what they do.
There are two forms of friendship, meeting and separation. They are inseparable. Both enclose the same good, the unique good, friendship. For when two beings who are not friends are close, there is no meeting. When they are apart, 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 of 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 divine love relation, there is more than proximity, there is infinite proximity, identity. But through Creation, Incarnation, Passion, there is also infinite distance. The entirety of space, the entirety of time, interposing their thickness, put infinite distance between God and God.
Lovers, friends have two desires. One to love each other so much that they enter one another and make but one being. The other to love so much that having half the globe between them, 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 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 this bond of double virtue; this bond uniting two beings to the point that they are indistinguishable and truly one; this bond extending over the distance and triumphing over infinite separation. The unity of God where all plurality disappears, the abandonment where Christ believes himself to be without ceasing to love his Father perfectly, these are two forms of the divine virtue of the same Love, which is God itself.
God is so essentially love that unity, which in a sense is His very definition, is a mere effect of love. And to the infinite unifying power of this love corresponds the infinite separation it triumphs over, which is all creation, stretched through all space and time, made of mechanically brutal matter, interposed between Christ and his Father.
We humans, our misery gives us the infinitely precious privilege to share in this distance placed by divine Love between God and God. 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 our unique possibility of perfection on earth. 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 small part, is this distance placed by divine Love between God and God. We are a point in this distance. Space, time, and the mechanism governing matter are this distance. All we call evil is only this mechanism. God has ensured that His grace, when it penetrates the very center of a man and from there illuminates his whole being, allows him without violating natural laws 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 merely a thing, a falling stone. If one looks closely, with truly attentive gaze, at souls and human societies, one sees that wherever the virtue of supernatural light is absent, everything obeys mechanical laws as blind and as precise as the laws of falling bodies. This knowledge is beneficent and necessary. Those we call criminals are only roof tiles detached by the wind and falling at random. Their only fault is the initial choice that made them these tiles.
The mechanism of necessity transposes itself to all levels remaining alike in raw matter, plants, animals, peoples, souls. Viewed from where we are, according to our perspective, it is quite blind. But if we transport our heart outside ourselves, beyond the universe, beyond space and time, where our Father is, and if from there we look at this mechanism, it appears quite different. What seemed necessity becomes obedience. Matter is entire passivity, and therefore entire obedience to the will of God. It is for us a perfect model. There can be no other being than God and that which obeys God. By its perfect obedience matter deserves to be loved by those who love its Master, like a lover tenderly looks at the needle handled by a loved, deceased woman. We are warned of this share it merits from us by the beauty of the world. In the beauty of the world raw necessity becomes an object of love. Nothing is as beautiful as gravity in the fleeting folds of sea ripples or the almost eternal folds of mountains.
The sea is no less beautiful to our eyes because we know that sometimes boats sink. On the contrary, it is more beautiful. If it modified the movement of its waves to spare a boat, it would be a being endowed with discernment and choice, and not this fluid perfectly obeying all external pressures. This perfect obedience is its beauty.
All the horrors that occur in this world are like 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 leave the obedience to God. A creature cannot disobey. The only choice offered to man as an intelligent and free creature is to desire obedience or not 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 an additional necessity is added, a necessity constituted by the laws proper to supernatural things. Some actions become impossible for him, others occur through him sometimes almost despite him.
When one feels that on such an occasion one has disobeyed God, it simply means that for a time one ceased to desire obedience. Of course, all other things equal, a man does not perform the same actions depending on whether he consents to obedience; just as a plant, all other things equal, does not grow the same way in light or darkness. The plant exercises no control, no choice in its own growth. We are like plants whose only choice is 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 who do not work or spin. That is to say, they did not plan to take on this or that color, they did not set their will in motion nor arrange means for this end; they received all that natural necessity brought them. If they appear infinitely more beautiful than rich fabrics, it is not because they are richer, it is because of this docility. Fabric is also docile, 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 the sea, mountains, or flowers, it is because the light of God has filled the artist. To find beautiful things made by men not enlightened by God, one must have understood with all the soul that these men themselves are only matter obeying without knowing it. For one at that stage, absolutely everything here below is perfectly beautiful. In everything that exists, in everything that happens, he perceives the mechanism of necessity and savors in necessity the infinite sweetness of obedience. This obedience of things is for us, with respect to God, what glass transparency is to light. As soon as we perceive this obedience with our whole being, we see God.
When we hold a newspaper upside down, we see the strange shapes of the printed characters. When we put it right side up, we no longer see the characters but words. The passenger of a boat caught in a storm feels every jolt as a upheaval in his guts. The captain perceives only the complex combination of wind, current, swell with the boat’s arrangement, shape, sails, rudder.
As we learn to read, as we learn a craft, so we learn to feel in all things, above all and almost exclusively, the obedience of the universe to God. It is truly a learning. Like any learning, it requires effort and time. For those who reach the end, there are no more differences between things, between events, than the difference felt by someone who knows how to read before the same phrase reproduced several times, written in red ink, blue ink, printed in such and such characters. One who cannot read sees only differences there. For one who knows how to read, all of this is equivalent since the phrase is the same. For one who completed learning, things and events everywhere and always are the vibration of the same infinitely sweet divine word. This does not mean he does not suffer. Pain is the coloring of some events. Before a phrase written in red ink, both one who knows how to read and one who does not see red; but the red coloring is not of the same importance for each.
When an apprentice hurts himself or complains of fatigue, workers and peasants have this beautiful phrase: "It’s the craft getting into the body." Each time we endure pain, we can truthfully say it is the universe, the order of the world, the beauty of the world, the obedience of creation to God entering our body. So how could we not bless with tenderest gratitude the Love who sends us this gift?
Joy and pain are equally precious gifts that must be savored both, each in its purity, without seeking to mix them. Through joy, the beauty of the world penetrates our soul. Through pain, it enters our body. With joy alone we could no more become friends with God than one becomes a captain only by studying navigation manuals. The body has part in all learning. At the level of physical sensitivity, only pain is a contact with this necessity that constitutes the order of the world; for pleasure does not carry the impression of necessity. It is a higher part of sensitivity capable of feeling necessity in joy, and that only through the feeling of beauty. For our being to become one day fully sensitive, throughout and through, to this obedience which is the substance of matter, for the new sense that allows hearing the universe as the vibration of the Word of God to form in us, the transformative virtue of pain and that of joy are equally essential. One must open to both, when either appears, the very center of the soul, as one opens one’s door to the messengers of the one one loves. What does it matter to a lover whether the messenger is polite or brutal if he offers a message?
But misfortune is not pain. Misfortune is quite another thing than a pedagogical process of God.
The infinity of space and time separates us from God. How could we seek Him? How could we go to Him? Even if we walked for centuries, we would only circle the Earth. Even by plane, we could do no other. We are unable to advance vertically. We cannot take a step toward the heavens. God crosses the universe and comes to us.
Over the infinity of space and time, the infinitely more infinite love of God comes to grasp us. He comes at His hour. We have the power to consent to receive or refuse. If we remain deaf, He comes again and again like a beggar, but like a beggar, one day He does not come anymore. If we consent, God puts a small seed in us and leaves. From then on, God and we have nothing more to do but 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 destroying what would hinder it, uprooting weeds, cutting 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. A day comes when the soul belongs to God, when not only it consents to love but truly, effectively, loves. Then it must in turn cross the universe to go to God. The soul does not love as a creature with created love. The 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 in our soul. That is self-denial. We were created only for this consent.
Divine love traveled the infinity of space and time to come from God to us. But how can it make the reverse journey when starting 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 that God made toward us, cross the infinite distance?
It seems impossible, but there is a way. We know it well. We know well what that tree growing inside us is like, that beautiful tree on which the birds of the sky perch. We know what is the most beautiful of all trees. "No forest bears one like it." Something even a little more dreadful than a gallows, that is the most beautiful of trees. It is this tree in which God planted the seed in us, without our knowing what that seed was. Had we known, we would not have said yes at the first moment. It is this tree that grew in us, which has become unuprootable. Only a betrayal can uproot it.
When one strikes a nail with a hammer, the shock received by the large head passes entirely to the point, without loss, even though it is just a point. If the hammer and the nail head were infinitely large, the same would still occur. The nail tip would transmit the infinite shock to the point where it is applied.
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 necessity scattered across the totality of space and time.
The man undergoing such an event has no part in this operation. He struggles like a butterfly pinned alive on an album. But he can, through horror, continue to want to love. There is no impossibility, no obstacle to this, almost no difficulty. For the greatest pain, so long as it is below fainting, does not touch that point of the soul who consents to a good orientation.
It must only be known that love is an orientation and not a state of mind. If one does not know this, despair falls at the first touch of misfortune.
He whose soul remains oriented toward God while pierced by a nail finds himself nailed at the true center of the universe. It is the true center, which is not in the middle, which is outside space and time, which is God. According to a dimension not belonging to space, not to time, which is an altogether other dimension, this nail pierced a hole through creation, through the thickness of the screen that separates the soul from God.
By this marvelous dimension, the soul can, without leaving the place and moment where the body it is linked to is, traverse all space and time and come before the very presence of God.
It finds itself at the intersection of creation and Creator. This intersection point is that of the crossing of the branches of the Cross.
Saint Paul may have thought of things like this when he said: "Be rooted in love, so as to be able to grasp what are the width, the length, the height, and the depth, and to know the love of Christ which surpasses knowledge."