On Misfortune: When We Made Saints of the Suffering

There was once a surprisingly prestigious career available to people whose lives had gone terribly wrong. You could become a saint.

The qualifications were unusual. Poverty helped. Illness was excellent. Persecution was practically professional development. Being misunderstood by everyone around you was useful, and dying unpleasantly could considerably strengthen the application.

Christianity, in particular, built an enormous mythology around people who suffered and somehow remained human through it. Saints were starved, exiled, humiliated, imprisoned, abandoned, disfigured, bereaved and occasionally subjected to things that make a difficult commute seem manageable. Then we painted them in gold.

This was, admittedly, a strange system.

But perhaps it was doing something psychologically useful that we have failed to replace.

The saint told ordinary people something that modern culture is surprisingly bad at saying: a life can go badly without becoming a bad life.

You could be sick and significant. Poor and dignified. Lonely and worthy of admiration. You could lose almost everything and still occupy the centre of the painting.

Today, the person in the centre of the painting has excellent skin.

She wakes at 5:30.

She drinks water before coffee.

She journals.

She has boundaries.

She has somehow already exercised while you are lying in bed reading about how she exercises.

And, most importantly, she is healed.

Modern secular culture has not abolished sainthood. It has merely changed the admission criteria.

Our saints now have podcasts.

They stand before us with suspiciously white teeth and tell us about adversity, but adversity is usually permitted into the story only after it has been defeated. The depression becomes a wellness company. The divorce becomes a memoir. The bankruptcy becomes a TED Talk. Trauma is acceptable provided it eventually develops a personal brand.

Suffering must justify itself by producing something.

Preferably revenue.

This is an extraordinarily demanding way to be miserable.

The old saint could simply suffer.

There was no requirement that Saint Teresa turn her spiritual anguish into a six-week online course called Abundance Through Darkness. Nobody asked Job (النبي أيوب) whether losing his family had taught him five habits of highly resilient people.

The story itself granted suffering dignity.

That distinction matters because most suffering does not make people better.

Sometimes illness makes you tired.

Sometimes grief makes you boring.

Sometimes loneliness does not teach you independence, it makes Saturday evening feel approximately seventeen hours long.

Sometimes terrible experiences produce no wisdom whatsoever. They merely happen, and afterward you are the person to whom they happened.

Religious cultures had a vocabulary for this.

The modern world increasingly has a performance review.

Did you grow?

Did you heal?

Did you learn to love yourself?

Have you tried magnesium?

There is something almost cruel in our insistence that people transform pain into self-improvement. It converts suffering from misfortune into homework.

And if you remain unhappy for too long, you begin to suspect that you are doing unhappiness incorrectly.

This is where the disappearance of the saint becomes more than an interesting religious footnote.

Because societies reveal themselves not merely through whom they admire, but through what kinds of suffering they are capable of looking at.

Consider the survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

The people who survived the atomic bombings became known as hibakusha (literally, bomb-affected people). They had survived something almost beyond human imagination: cities transformed into furnaces, families disappearing within minutes, bodies permanently marked by burns and radiation.

One might imagine survival itself would have conferred a peculiar moral status.

Instead, many survivors encountered discrimination in postwar Japan.

Some faced difficulties finding work. Others encountered prejudice in marriage because prospective families feared radiation-related illness or hereditary effects. Their bodies became reminders of catastrophe, and reminders are inconvenient things.

There were, of course, complicated historical and social reasons for this treatment. Postwar Japan was rebuilding under extraordinary circumstances; knowledge of radiation was limited, fear was widespread, and survivors themselves were never treated uniformly.

But the contrast remains haunting.

Imagine a culture looking at someone who had walked out of Hiroshima alive and thinking not sacred but damaged.

Perhaps that is one of the functions sainthood once performed.

It reversed the ordinary hierarchy of human value.

The wounded body could become the holy body.

The rejected person could become the person whose statue eventually stood in the town square.

The person everyone avoided could, through the strange moral mathematics of sainthood, become the person everyone prayed to.

This did not eliminate cruelty. Religious societies were perfectly capable of treating suffering people appallingly. Sometimes they caused the suffering themselves and then built an impressive cathedral nearby.

But the mythology contained an important counterargument.

It said: Do not confuse fortune with virtue.

The healthy person is not necessarily better than the sick person.

The prosperous person is not necessarily wiser than the poor person.

The person whose marriage survived is not necessarily more lovable than the person whose marriage collapsed.

And the person who survived catastrophe carrying visible evidence of it is not contaminated by catastrophe.

She may, in fact, deserve to be placed at the centre of the story.

We badly need some secular version of this idea because contemporary culture has developed an almost theological devotion to wellness.

We track sleep.

We optimize hormones.

We close rings.

We count protein.

We meditate so that we can become more productive at the job that necessitated the meditation.

The body has become a small corporation whose quarterly performance must constantly improve.

There is nothing wrong with wanting to be well. Antibiotics are preferable to relics. Therapy is generally more useful than exorcism. I would personally choose modern dentistry over medieval spiritual purification without requiring time to consider the alternatives.

But somewhere in our enthusiasm for improving life, we have begun treating improvement as evidence of virtue.

And this creates an awkward category of people: those who do everything correctly and remain unwell.

The chronically ill.

The grieving.

The lonely.

The traumatized.

The person whose career never recovered.

The woman who never found the great love she was promised.

The man whose depression did not reveal his purpose.

The person who went through something terrible and emerged not enlightened but exhausted.

What do we offer them?

Usually advice.

The saint offered something different.

Recognition.

There is an enormous difference between saying, “Here is how you can fix your life,” and saying, “Even if this cannot be fixed, your life still belongs among the lives we consider meaningful.”

We have underestimated how radical the second sentence is.

Perhaps this explains part of the peculiar loneliness of modern suffering.

We are surrounded by people publicly discussing hardship more than ever before, yet much of that discussion takes the form of retrospective victory.

Everyone tells you about the worst year of their life from a studio with excellent lighting.

The narrative reassures us because we already know the ending.

She made it.

She healed.

She found herself.

She launched the newsletter.

But the person watching from bed may still be in the middle of the story.

And the middle is where saints were useful.

Saints were not interesting because suffering inevitably improved them. They were interesting because suffering failed to disqualify them from significance.

That is a profoundly different proposition.

Maybe we do not need saints again in the theological sense. Canonization committees are unlikely to solve the mental-health crisis, and nobody needs another bureaucracy deciding who has suffered impressively enough.

But perhaps we need the cultural instinct behind them.

We need ways of honouring endurance that do not require triumph.

We need to stop demanding that every wound become wisdom.

We need stories in which the person who has been damaged is not merely waiting for the final chapter in which she becomes undamaged.

And perhaps, had such an instinct been stronger, societies confronted with survivors of unimaginable catastrophe might have responded differently, not by romanticizing their suffering, which would be another form of cruelty, but by recognizing that surviving horror does not diminish a person’s place among us.

It may enlarge our obligation to them.

There is something deeply humane in the old, strange impulse to put a halo around the person everybody else had overlooked.

Not because pain is good.

Pain is frequently pointless, unfair and spectacularly inconvenient.

But because human worth must be able to survive it.

Otherwise our compassion applies only to people temporarily experiencing difficulties on their way back to being impressive.

We do not need more influencers explaining how adversity made them unstoppable.

We have quite enough unstoppable people.

Perhaps we need figures who remind us that stopping is sometimes unavoidable. That weakness is not a moral failure. That suffering need not become content. That there are lives which remain unfinished, unresolved and nevertheless worthy of reverence.

The old saint looked down from the church wall and offered the miserable person in the pew a peculiar consolation.

Not: You will overcome this.

Not even: Everything happens for a reason.

Something quieter.

Something considerably more believable.

I suffered. My life remained imperfect. And I remained a person worth loving.

S.N