Passion is a form of suffering.
This truth does not fit well with the platitudes we typically hear relating to passion — phrases like “follow your passion” or “do what you love” or “never work a day in your life!” The appeal of these statements dulls quickly if we change them to “follow your suffering” or “do what makes you suffer” or “suffer every day of your life!”
If passion is a form of suffering, we need to understand all this better lest we drift off toward some genuinely strange claims. What we need to understand is that passion is a form of suffering — out of love.
Love always entails suffering on this side of our heavenly beatitude. When we love, we sacrifice our hearts, our affections, our desires for someone else’s good. Many times, we do this willingly and even gleefully, but even then it costs us something: what we might have preferred otherwise, what might have given us some private benefit, or what might have been more convenient or expedient. There is plenty of suffering without love, but there is no love without suffering.
Passion is a form of suffering out of love because we choose to endure hardship for the sake of something desired. If you have a “passion project,” you look for opportunities to work on it even at the expense of profit or eating or sleep. If you have a “passion for travel,” you will save and save and save in order to make travel possible, even at the expense of other indulgences along the way. If you are just a “passionate person,” that probably means you are ready to go “all in” on the task at hand, whatever the cost. Even the patience, or sometimes the intense longing, entailed in waiting to return to whatever you are passionate about is a form of suffering, just like waiting for a loved one to return from a long trip entails a suffering due to absence and anticipation.
Does God have passions?
It would be easier and more convenient if we did not have passions. Then we would not be bothered by the pain of longing, the intensity of focus that draws us away from other things, or the quickening of the heart that comes with doing something you love. Steady stoicism is more predictable and easier to schedule around. People without passions would rarely have trouble falling asleep at night because they were too excited or too worried about what tomorrow will bring.
So why do we have passions? Why do we even court passion in our lives? Why do we consider the passionate person to be more excellent than the one who doesn’t seem to have any passion?
Because our passion is part of our resemblance to God.
To say that God has passions or is subject to passion is actually problematic. When we have passions, we are, in some way, controlled or at least heavily influenced by them. To be a passionate person is not far from being a “possessed” person: one who is directed or impelled by something not entirely chosen. Are we saying, then, that God has passions like that if we say that our passion is part of our resemblance to God? No, and also yes.
God is absolutely free. We like to think of ourselves as absolutely free — at least ideally — but we are not, nor will we ever be. That doesn’t mean that we are bound to slavery for all time, but it does mean that we do not author ourselves, nor are we responsible for our own being and existence. Our freedom is never absolute. We only ever have dependent freedom, a freedom that depends on the one who is absolutely free: God alone.
Divine freedom is absolute because God is never subject to the control or even the unchosen influence of anything else. Everything else depends completely and everlastingly upon God; God does not depend on anything else. Anything that exists exists because God has freely chosen to create and sustain it. Anything that is true is true because it points to God. Anything beautiful reflects or reveals God’s beauty. Anything good is a sign of its creator, who alone is good. God moves everything; nothing can move God — unless God chooses to let it move him.
The passion of divine freedom
That is the crux of the mystery of divine passion. God is absolutely free and yet, in his freedom, God elects to make himself subject to what he has created. That seems illogical, but that’s because the logic we rely on is not divine logic. God is free even of our logic. God is free to be passionate because God is absolutely free and because God wills to love what he creates as if he depended on his creatures, even though he does not.
The Swiss theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar captures this paradox in one statement — a statement which also manages to echo the majority opinion of the early Church Fathers when it comes to the question of divine freedom and “divine suffering”: “There can be no pathos in God if by this we mean some involuntary influence from the outside. Or, to put it positively, God (and this applies to the Incarnate One also) can only be ‘passive’, subject to passio, if this accords with some prior, ‘active’, free decision” (Theo-Drama, Volume V).
Does Christ suffer? Yes. Is Christ God? Yes, he is the Son of God, the Word of God, the Second Person of the Most Blessed Trinity. Doesn’t that mean that God suffers? Yes, but only because out of the wondrous abyss of divine freedom God has elected to make himself subject to and vulnerable at the hands of his own creatures. Why? To reveal his love.
Divine love is love without suffering — though it is love in complete and total sacrifice — and yet, to reveal that love to us and for us, God enters into the suffering that we ourselves suffer. That is how God communicates his love to us. It is the most mysterious and most eloquent thing in the world. In short, God enters into passion.
The Passion of Christ takes place, in specific terms, during the week leading up to his crucifixion, and even more specifically from the conclusion of the Last Supper to his expiration on the cross. But seen more fully and broadly, everything about the Incarnation is the passion of the Son of God. He who “was in the form of God,” as St. Paul writes in Philippians, entered willingly into our condition, to share all things with us, even to depend on and become vulnerable to us. We are God’s “passion project.” God allows himself to become “passionate” for us. That divine love is expressed in the full range of human passions, a love that runs right through the beating of a human heart and the throbbing of human temples and the timbre of a human laugh and the saltiness of human tears.
Participating in the passion of God
Passion is no small thing. It is a divine matter. Our own passions — even the seemingly trivial ones — point back to and in some way imitate the divine passion, which is absolute passion, which is also the suffering that saves us. To contemplate our own passions rightly is to allow ourselves to meditate on the God who enters into passion. What we feel and suffer in and through our passions is revelatory in some small degree of the Passion of Christ — the passion that Christ himself is.
Our task, therefore, is two-fold. First, to regularly test our passions for compatibility with God’s will. God’s passion follows and springs from God’s freedom, which means that for our passions to be right and just, we must freely and responsibly test and choose them. If we lose our freedom and agency in a passion or if it takes freedom and agency from someone else, it is not of God. It must be either abandoned or chastened. But if we test our passions and find them of God, the second part of our duty comes into view: We must enflame and unleash our passions so the wildness of God’s life might burst forth through us.
