In Her Memory: A Paschal Reflection on the Mystery of Suffering

By Dr. Bradley Nassif

My mother, Lydia, only had an 8th grade education and waited tables for a living.  She was poor and had 4 children to raise alone.  A tragic thing happen to her when she was 50 years old.  She became crippled for life after a surgeon made a horrifying mistake while operating on her feet.  The doctor confused her with the wrong patient or procedure.  Mom originally went into the hospital to correct a hammer toe that was bothering one of her feet.  Instead, the doctor ended up removing a massive area of her feet related to the metatarsus that attached her toes.  After the surgery she could no longer wiggle any of the toes or keep steady when standing because the connecting parts had all been removed.  Several bones were left jagged which poked her flesh from the inside of her feet.  Often at night she would wake up with throbbing pain.  Medicine helped take the edge off the pain but there was always a constant numbing or buzzing in her feet from the nerve endings that had been cut.  Mom had ten corrective surgeries after that to try to fix the initial mistake but without success.  She went from a shoe size 7 to a size 3 ½.
Mother was never able to go back to work after that so the pressure of her financial needs fell largely on us kids.  She went to a lawyer to seek justice.  The lawyer told mom that the doctor claimed he had lost the original x-ray that was taken "before" the surgery so her case could not be proven.  That x-ray would have showed two perfectly good feet that did not need the surgery which the doctor had wrongly performed on her.  So instead of receiving a just settlement, mother was awarded a meager $900.00.  Five years later, the lawyer died of cancer.  In a chance meeting, mother ran into his secretary on the street and was told that her lawyer accepted a bribe from the doctor's insurance company and that is why she lost the case.  We did all we could for her, but for the rest of her life Mom lived with severe chronic pain until her death in 2002 at the age of seventy-nine.
Some of us have to endure great trials for long periods of time.  For reasons that are sometimes known only to the Almighty, God allows great evil to come into our lives.  Like the story of Job in the Old Testament, our faith is severely tested.  We are called upon to live with a great mystery, the mystery of suffering.  That is why mother's story is worth telling during this season of our Lord's great Passion and Resurrection.  Hers was a life of faith.  She needed faith to believe that God was somehow working his purposes through her physically ruined life; she needed faith to forgive the doctor that had so brutally wronged her through his negligence; she needed faith to fight evil thoughts of revenge that bombarded her soul day after day; she needed faith to let herself be helped by others when she seemed unable to give back so little; she needed faith to overcome the worry of losing her home when the bills came due; she needed faith in God's final judgment where, on the Last Day, "the books will be opened" and justice will be given to all the unjust people that harmed her during the most vulnerable time of her life.
During this sacred season of divine suffering, the good news of the Gospel gives great hope to those of us who know the sorrow of unjust suffering.  We can not always know why God allows us to suffer, but our Orthodox faith tells us that He is accomplishing redemptive purposes through it.  Our Paschal liturgy proclaims "Through the cross, joy has come into all the world ... Christ is Risen!"  And because of that, I suffer, but do not despair whenever I recall the life of my dear mother.  Her grief ended seven years ago as she fell asleep in the arms of her Lord, who Himself suffered unjustly on her behalf.  And one day I, too, will join her when I die in faith and in hope of the Resurrection.  This is the "good news" of the Gospel that is so clear and central to the Orthodox faith.  I invite you to embrace it for yourself today.

Bradley Nassif, Ph.D.
Professor of Biblical and Theological Studies
North Park University