What Silence says that “God has a Plan” does Not…
There is a particular kind of Catholic vocabulary word that sounds lovely in a homily and considerably less lovely in a hospital waiting room with bad coffee and worse magazines. Gratia—i.e., Grace. “Grace”, formally, is the unearned, unmerited, freely-given favor of God, poured out to sanctify and strengthen us. I have spent a great deal of my adult life studying grace the way a man reads about a country he intends to visit someday. Comfortable. Theoretical. Footnoted. I have listened to Podcasters and So-Called “OrthoBros” and Protestants debate the concept of Grace endlessly for clicks and likes. Then my wife was diagnosed with stage IV cancer, and grace stopped being an intellectualized conceptual country I was planning to visit and became the only country I was allowed to live in, whether I had packed for it or not.
The motivation for this missive really came from having a discussion with a family member about what it was like on the inside. I couldn’t quite formulate the explanation as to why there was nothing for him to do or to say or any real way to help.
I should say plainly that I do not think this hardship entitles me to complain, and I am aware of the irony of writing that sentence in the middle of an article that is, by any honest accounting, one seemingly long complaint. I mean something more specific. I was raised to believe that a man carries what is his to carry, quietly and without narrating the weight of it to every passerby. He doesn’t seek affirmation and accolades on TikTok or Instagram. He doesn’t chronicle his “journey” on Facebook. And, he doesn’t go work through his struggles in therapy or “journal his feelings.” No, this is not stoicism for its own sake but, rather, the ordinary shape of duty rightly understood. A husband's vows did not come with a clause excusing him from service when the service becomes extremely difficult; if anything men exist for precisely that contingency.
Also, a man’s virtue is not deserving of greater honor because he meets his duty. This is why I am particularly saddened each time someone praises what a “great husband I am.” Each time I hear such praise, it lands as an reinforcement of the ignorance of what marriage and its duty constitute. Did I predict, at the altar, what the “or worse” part of the vow was going to mean in my situation some twenty-five years ago? No. But, what precisely is it that is deserving of praise? A man keeping his vow? It isn’t praiseworthy at all. It is the expectation. It is the duty and honor of my vocation. The fact that it seems to many to be exceptional is one thing that brings me great sadness in this whole sordid affair. I am not exceptional. I am a simple man honoring an age-old vow. I do so out of duty, honor, commitment and, most of all, out of a suffering, guilt ridden love because I lack the power to switch places and endure the physical suffering in place of my wife.
But, I want to be honest about something: this is hard. And not a silly "offer it up and it builds character" hard. Not "God never gives you more than you can handle" hard, a phrase which, incidentally, I would like formally struck from the Catholic lexicon, ideally by conciliar decree but an ex cathedra anathematizing will do fine too. I mean this is the kind of hard where, after a 10 hour work day, you are folding laundry at eleven at night, alone, because your wife is too exhausted and ill from a treatment that is trying to kill the thing that is trying to kill her, and you find yourself nearly weeping from fear, frustration, anxiety and your own exhaustion over a fitted sheet. Why? First because you are a man. ←click. Second, because the fitted sheet has no opinions, asks nothing of you, and that turns out to be exactly the kind of company this type of grief requires.
People always offer and I couldn’t be more grateful. “Do you need anything?” “What can we do?” “How can I help?” The truth is: there’s nothing to be done. So when I decline the casserole, or wave off the offer to sit with her so I can "take a break," or simply do not answer the question of how I am holding up with anything more than "we're hanging in there," this is not wounded pride playing at self-sufficiency. It is the opposite: it is the plain fulfillment of an obligation I made freely and intend to keep without a running commentary on how much it costs me or how I am able to do it. The complaining in this piece, such as it is, is not a request for anyone to lighten the load. Nor is it an invitation to consider the virtue of the load carrier. It is a simple, ordinary man thinking out loud, on paper, in one venue where thinking out loud does not require anyone to actually come do anything about it. It is designed, solely, to try and give you, dear reader, a glimpse into what things look like from the inside.
The theology of redemptive suffering is not wrong. I want to say that clearly, because I am not writing an apostasy column here, however therapeutic that might be for word count. Saint Paul really did carry a thorn in the flesh he begged God to remove and really was told that grace was sufficient, that power is perfected in weakness. Christ really did say that anyone who would come after Him must take up a cross. What I have learned is that the cross is not a decorative one, not a metaphorical one, but an actual instrument of slow public dying. This is what it means to follow Him. Pope John Paul II, writing Salvifici Doloris from inside a body that had already survived an assassin's bullet, argued that suffering, united to Christ's, becomes participatory rather than merely destructive, that it can be transfigured into something with meaning rather than remaining pure waste. I do believe this. I believed it intellectually longer than I believed almost anything else about the Faith.
Now-- I simply want to report, from the field, that believing a thing and living the truth of it at three in the morning while your wife is uncontrollably sick are two very different exercises requiring two very different sets of spiritual muscles, and mine, frankly, are sore.
Here is what nobody tells you about redemptive suffering: it does not arrive pre-redeemed. You do not get handed the instruction manual of meaning along with the diagnosis. The meaning is something you are apparently supposed to construct, in real time, out of scan results and side effects and insurance phone calls, with the theological equivalent of a rusty multitool, while also remembering to eat something that is not entirely composed of items from cellophane bags. Joy, under these conditions, is not a mood. Of course, Christian joy was never supposed to be a mood despite what the silly felt banners and Lisa from the Parish Council might say. The saints were quite clear that it is a fruit of the Spirit and a fixed disposition of the will toward the good that is God regardless of circumstance. It is not a pleasant feeling that floats through you like spring weather. That is a fine thing to know intellectually. It is a considerably harder thing to produce on command in a chemotherapy suite with the potpourri smell of hand sanitizer and quiet desperation set to a soundtrack of home renovation programs at volumes calibrated for the deaf from a tv bolted to the ceiling.
And now, having established that I am not abandoning the Faith, I would like to spend a paragraph or two complaining, because I am told this is charitable so long as it is done with love, and I have decided to test that proposition rigorously.
First, I must provide a list:
"You just need to have faith."
“She Looks Great!”
“She’s a Warrior.”
"God has a plan."
“Offer it up.”
"She's a fighter."
“God never gives you more than you can handle.”
“Just give it to God.”
“You need to trust God more.”
“God works in mysterious ways.”
“Maybe God is trying to teach you something.”
“Just keep praying.”
“This is all part of God’s timing.”
“When God closes a door, He opens a window.”
“There’s a blessing hidden in this somewhere.”
“You’ll understand why someday.”
“God is using this to make you stronger.”
“You just have to surrender it to Him.”
“Everything happens for a reason."
“I’ll pray for you.”
“This too shall pass.”
I am going to need whoever assembled this particular starter kit of phrases to be identified and sentenced to a few consecutive Wednesday-afternoon infusion appointments and their after-effects. We have faith — enough, per the Gospel, to relocate a mountain range, though we are often too tired to relocate the dishes to the dishwasher. We know God has a plan; we have long ago staked our entire lives on that doctrine and do not need it delivered to us again in a grocery store checkout line. We have generally suspected, on our better theological days, that the plan does not come with a synopsis, and that Job — a man who received an extraordinarily lengthy divine speech about hippopotamuses and ostriches and precisely zero explanation for his suffering — remains our patron saint of “Not Getting the Memo.”
None of the lines above are false. That is exactly the problem. They are conversation enders dressed as conversation starters, small theological doors closed gently in your face while smiling, offered by people picturing a tidy, dignified sorrow that bears no resemblance to three a.m. spent Googling symptoms of the latest new side effects and how to handle them or whether to go to the E.R. Anxiety does not respond to syllogism. A five-word platitude, however orthodox, cannot deliver practical protocol for navigating whether this particular symptom is a life-ending event or simply one more in a long line of twists and turns on this road with a singular destination.
The deeper failure is not malice but a complete failure of imagination. The people who reach for these phrases have never inhabited the specific geometry of this particular grief. They stand outside it, peering in through a fogged window, and offer the verbal equivalent of a polite wave. They cannot see that “God has a plan” lands not as comfort but as a reminder that the plan, whatever it is, currently involves watching the person you love most be slowly dismantled by her own body and by the chemicals meant to try and save it. They cannot grasp that “offer it up” assumes a surplus of spiritual energy that has already been spent on simply getting through the past hours and days. Their words reveal a lack of understanding so profound it borders on the comical: they seemingly view suffering as a temporary inconvenience that can be papered over with piety, rather than as a permanent alteration of the self. The phrases are not just inadequate; they are evidence that the speaker has never been forced to live inside the soundproofed room where individualized suffering actually occurs.
And then there is “This too shall pass.” Of all the entries on the list, this one deserves its own special place in the museum of well-meaning cruelty. There is no hope of it passing—not in the sense the speaker intends. “This” will not pass into recovery, into a return to the life we had, into the ordinary future we once assumed was ours by right. For “this” to pass means: that the present stage of suffering will end when I have buried my wife, and a whole new stage of suffering will begin. The phrase pretends that time itself is a solvent that dissolves pain. It is not. Time is merely the medium in which one form of agony is exchanged for another. When people say “This too shall pass,” they imagine a horizon of relief. What they cannot see—or they lack understanding to see—is that the only current horizon available is one that contains a casket. The words are meant to soothe. Instead they announce, with cheerful ignorance, that the only way out is through death, and that even then suffering will simply change its address.
And it is in the culmination of the foregoing where profound loneliness is constructed. And, that loneliness grows with each well-meaning platitude that simply reinforces you are truly alone despite the hordes of well-meaning people who truly want to help. The problem is, there is no mechanism for it. It is not merely that others cannot reach you. It is that the suffering itself becomes a private island with no maps, no shared language, and no citizens except the two of you—and at some point, only one. You cannot make anyone understand that the loneliness is not the absence of company but the presence of a grief so particular that even the most loving friend or family is, by definition, a tourist in it. Such individualized suffering does not merely isolate; it seals you inside a room whose walls are made of the exact details of this diagnosis, this body, this marriage and this history. No one else has the key and no one else ever will.
I do not say any of this to indict or castigate the people who say these things, because here is the uncomfortable, charitable truth beneath the complaining: they mean well, are deeply compassionate, and they are right, and this loneliness is not their fault. I love and deeply appreciate each and every one of the people who has ever said anything on the list. But, this is a structural loneliness, built into the very nature of suffering itself. Nobody who has not sat exactly where you are sitting can fully reach you there, not because they lack love but because they lack the coordinates. C.S. Lewis, in A Grief Observed, wrote about discovering that grief felt less like sorrow and more like fear, a comparison that startled him precisely because nobody had told him, because nobody could have told him, because it is the kind of thing you only learn by being lowered into the pit yourself. Suffering is, among other things, remarkably well soundproofed. You can hear people outside it, faintly, offering encouragement through the walls, and they can hear you, faintly, and everyone is doing their genuine best with an acoustic problem that has no solution this side of shared experience.
This, I think, is where gratia actually shows up, not as a feeling but as the peculiar and largely invisible fact that we are still standing at all. Grace is not the removal from the pit. Grace is apparently the oxygen that turns out to be down there with you, which nobody warns you about because nobody can prove it to you in advance; you only discover it is breathable once you are already gasping. It looks, in practice, unglamorous. It looks like a five-minute laugh, genuinely uproarious, over something stupid on television, in the middle of an otherwise unbearable week, and the faint scandalized guilt that follows, as though joy were contraband. It looks like still being able, on the worst days, to receive the Eucharist and mean it, even through gritted teeth, even while privately informing God that this all had better be going somewhere good.
I do not have a tidy ending for this, because we are not at the end, and pretending otherwise would be a lie dressed up as piety, which is its own kind of sin. What I have instead is a man, a fitted sheet, a wife who is still, against considerable odds and considerable chemistry, cracking jokes from the next room, and a God who has not yet seen fit to explain Himself and is, on the evidence of the Book of Job, unlikely to start now. I no longer expect an explanation and I have stopped waiting by the phone for it. What I get instead, on the better days, is something smaller and stranger than an explanation — a kind of ballast, low and steady, that keeps the boat upright without ever calming the water. That, I have come to suspect, is what gratia actually is when you finally meet it outside of a footnote: not a rescue, not a reason, just enough weight in the right place to keep you from capsizing on schedule.
So if you are reading this from outside the room — and statistically, blessedly, most of you are — I am not asking you to stop showing up, and I am certainly not asking you to stop praying, because we need every one of those prayers more than I have the pride left to admit. I am only asking you to notice that your job, most days, is not to say the right or true thing. The doctrine was never in question. Your job is to let the loneliness be a little less soundproofed for exactly as long as you're standing near it with us. That is not a small thing. It is, in fact, nearly the whole of charity. It is just never the thing that fits on a felt banner and it comes with the hope that, actually, “this” will NOT pass—at least not anytime soon...
