Julie L. Moore, the Featured Poet for Issue #1 of The Basilica Review, shares her thoughts on art and suffering in our very first guest blog entry.

Last summer, I entered an operating room for my seventh surgery and the removal of my fourth organ. On good days, I joke with my kids about how many more organs I could lose and still survive. On bad days, when I’m experiencing a new pain and the possibility of yet another surgery, something that’s been happening recently, in fact, I don’t find the scenario quite so funny. I’m only 44, after all.

Seventeen years ago, I stood at the coffin of my husband’s father, dead at 50. Diabetes had ravaged his body:  He’d had both legs amputated below the knees, his kidneys had failed and he’d become dialysis-dependent, and his heart had quietly gone bad. When he died, he’d seemed to be improving, adapting to his prosthetics, even looking better. Yet, he slipped away in his sleep four nights after Thanksgiving.

And two years ago, in the E.R., I stood at the bedside of my husband John, then just 43, as the doctor told us despite the good results of an E.K.G., no cardiologist in his right mind would send John home because of his family history and symptoms. A nuclear stress test the next morning proved that doctor’s judgment to be impeccable. After another day, my husband lay in the cath lab, watching on a television screen as his new cardiologist shot two stents into his right coronary artery.

Later that night, a hematoma—and its excruciating pain—surged as the nurse pulled the line from his leg. Then, over the next days, weeks, and months, what nightmares do come: The near flatline. Cardiac I.C.U. Blood clots. Uncontrollable blood pressure. That fall was a blur of E.R. arrivals and hospital admissions, long days and lonely nights. Leaving the hospital once at 4 a.m., I remember driving the forty-minute trip home in the still-dark morning, praying, “How much, Lord? How much will you ask us to bear?”

The only answer I ever received was the same one the apostle Paul recorded in 2 Corinthians 12.9: “My grace is sufficient. My power is made perfect in weakness.” Indeed, for the last six years, we feel as though suffering has become a way of life, a stubborn thorn in our flesh that simply won’t let go.

Ours is the human condition. As we look around us, we don’t have to search long to find others suffering far more than we have. In the wake of Haiti’s earthquake as well as the incomprehensible growth of slavery (the second largest illegal activity, behind only drug trafficking), it’s easy to find people oppressed, abused, ravaged. And for many, such suffering continues to fuel questions about the existence of God. Neo-atheist Richard Dawkins says that the existence of suffering conclusively proves there is no God. In a Scientific American article, Dawkins comments, “The total amount of suffering per year in the natural world is beyond all decent contemplation. . . . In a universe of electrons and selfish genes, blind physical forces and genetic replication, some people are going to get hurt, other people are going to get lucky, and you won't find any rhyme or reason in it, nor any justice. The universe that we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but pitiless indifference.”

Dawkins’ reasoning works perfectly well if two conditions are true: One, that suffering is all there is to this life and two, that all suffering has no value. Of course, the problem of evil is part of millennia-long philosophical and theological discourse, so I don’t want to diminish its complexity. It is hard to explain how a loving God allows suffering.

Yet, for all the talk about where evil comes from and who’s to blame, we often ignore another problem as equally troubling: the problem of goodness, the problem of beauty. If indeed, “there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but pitiless indifference,” then how does beauty blossom in the hand of a son bringing his mother a dandelion picked from the backyard? How does goodness emanate from the husband who gets down on his hands and knees and scrubs a bathtub? Or the daughter who bakes her class cupcakes for Valentine’s Day? Or the wife who sits with her husband day after day in a hospital, sometimes until the wee hours of the night, unclasping the fingers of fear from around his neck?

Where does love come from? Can it just evolve from mere “pitiless indifference”?

And how then do we explain art? How could it appear, even over millions of years, from a universe that has “no design” and “no purpose”?

And how can it be that the making of art has also saved many a life? Gregory Orr has said, “I believe in poetry as a way of surviving the emotional chaos, spiritual confusions and traumatic events that come with being alive.” Amen. Surviving my own chaos and confusions and traumas spurred me onto poetry. It is no coincidence that my first poems were published in 2004, when a mysterious and relentlessly painful illness inhabited my body for eight months.

Of course, I can’t say I’m willing to suffer just to get a poem out of the experience. Although I may have reached the point where I do see value in my suffering, where I can say I am, indeed, a better person—a wiser, more compassionate and patient person—because I suffered, I still wouldn’t say I want to suffer. And I certainly can’t say I’d wish suffering upon anyone, even if beautiful poetry gets written as a result. Who could make such a wish?

But at the same time, perhaps, we have a limited definition of suffering, a limitation connected inextricably to another word we define badly: happiness. So often, we characterize happiness as the lack of suffering, the lack of sacrifice. Yet, in the long run, sacrifice and suffering both work to make us wiser, deeper, more sympathetic and helpful people. Might that be why so much poetry comes from poets who have suffered? Though it may certainly be true that one doesn’t have to suffer in order to produce art, it likewise is true that because of suffering, some people are able to create something beautiful.

As Scott Cairns writes in his little gem of a book, The End of Suffering, “[O]ur taking pains to make anything well could be understood, in one sense, as a consolation for things around us that appear to be poorly fashioned. . . . For the artist of any art, therefore, it is not surprising that these labors can provide a deeply satisfying consolation, giving witness to one’s own subconscious hope, one’s own implicit—avowed or disavowed—faith. . . . One might say that, in attending to such art and in answering it with substantive response, we make our hope matter.”

And this reminds me of Madeline L’Engle who once wrote that her characters pulled her by the scruff of her neck back to her faith—not the other way around. So the value of art seems inextricably connected to the value of suffering. Consolation in a broken world, yes. A sense of satisfaction. And witness to hope—not a blind, or indifferent, hope, but one that has the potential to testify to “the Father of compassion and God of all comfort” (2 Cor. 1. 2-3).

Julie L. Moore is the author of Slipping Out of Bloom, forthcoming from WordTech Editions this spring, and the chapbook, Election Day (Finishing Line Press). Moore is a Pushcart Prize nominee and recipient of the Rosine Offen Memorial Award from the Free Lunch Arts Alliance in Illinois, the Janet B. McCabe Poetry Prize from Ruminate: Faith in Literature and Art, and the Judson Jerome Poetry Scholarship from the Antioch Writers' Workshop. Moore has contributed poetry to Alaska Quarterly Review, Atlanta Review, CALYX, Chautauqua Literary Review, Cimarron Review, The MacGuffin, The Southern Review, Sou’Wester, and Valparaiso Poetry Review. She lives in Ohio where she directs the writing center at Cedarville University. Her website is www.julielmoore.com.