4.1 Joys and Sorrows in Earthly Life
Relative Happiness and Unhappiness
Complete happiness does not belong to earthly life.
Life in the body is given as a time of trial or expiation. Because of that, no one should expect a state of perfect and lasting satisfaction here. What is possible is to soften suffering, reduce self-created misery, and attain as much peace as the conditions of earthly existence allow.
Relative happiness is therefore real, but limited. It depends partly on outward circumstances and even more on the way a person understands and lives those circumstances. Most people contribute greatly to their own unhappiness. By living in harmony with divine law, they would spare themselves many sorrows and enjoy a measure of happiness suited to life in a material world.
Those who understand their future destiny see bodily life for what it is: a brief journey. Its pains are then easier to bear, because they are seen as passing difficulties on the way to something better. Consolation comes from knowing that the future depends on the use one makes of the present.
Many of the sufferings called earthly misfortunes arise from violations of the laws that govern embodied life. Excess, imprudence, selfish choices, and early departures from the right path often lead, step by step, into distress. If one traces many human troubles back to their source, one finds not fate alone, but a chain of causes set in motion by human conduct.
The Common Measure of Happiness
Earthly happiness varies with each person’s situation. What seems enough for one may seem intolerable to another. Yet there is still a common measure.
For material life, happiness consists in possessing what is necessary. For moral life, it consists in a good conscience and faith in the future.
What people call necessity is often shaped less by true need than by prejudice, ambition, vanity, and social custom. A person accustomed to luxury may regard a reduction in wealth as ruin, even while others nearby lack food, shelter, and warmth. Such suffering is real to the one who feels it, but it often arises from artificial standards rather than actual deprivation.
Wisdom looks downward rather than upward when comparing conditions. Instead of envying those who appear more favored, it notices those who endure far more severe hardship. And when it lifts its gaze higher, it turns the soul toward what is beyond the world rather than toward social superiority within it.
Misfortunes That Do Not Depend on Us
Not every suffering is the direct result of personal fault. Some trials fall upon even the most upright. There is no way to avoid all such misfortunes, but there is a way to bear them.
Progress requires resignation, patience, and endurance without complaint. This is not passive despair, but moral strength. In the midst of unavoidable suffering, conscience remains a source of consolation. It preserves the hope of a better future for those who do what is needed to deserve it.
The apparent distribution of earthly goods should not be mistaken for a final judgment. Wealth often seems like a blessing, but it is also a dangerous trial, often more perilous than poverty. It exposes the soul to selfishness, attachment, pride, and forgetfulness of higher things. For that reason, prosperity is not always the advantage it appears to be.
Artificial Needs and the Burden of Civilization
Civilization creates many benefits, but it also multiplies desires. New wants are often mistaken for necessities, and these invented needs become a fertile source of disappointment.
Much of the unhappiness of the world comes from wanting more than one truly needs. Those who know how to limit their desires spare themselves many frustrations. In this sense, the richest are often those who need the least.
People commonly envy the pleasures of those who seem fortunate, yet outward prosperity may conceal inward torment. If wealth is used selfishly, it becomes a cause of moral downfall and future suffering. Such prosperity is not to be envied. It may end in bitter consequences.
By contrast, when the righteous suffer, their suffering can become a trial that benefits them if they bear it courageously. Pain accepted with dignity and trust is not meaningless.
Necessities, Deprivation, and Responsibility
Superfluity is not necessary to happiness, but the necessities of life are. Those who lack what is required for the preservation of life and health are truly unfortunate.
Sometimes such deprivation results from personal fault. In that case, responsibility rests with the sufferer. At other times, it results from the wrongdoing of others. Then responsibility belongs to those who caused or permitted the deprivation.
Human vocation also plays a part in happiness and suffering. Each person has natural aptitudes that point toward a proper sphere of activity in the world. Many disappointments arise from refusing that path. Pride, social ambition, and family pressure often push individuals into roles for which they are unsuited. Parents may be especially at fault when, through vanity or greed, they force their children away from their natural abilities and thus compromise their happiness.
To work outside one’s proper capacity is one of the most frequent causes of failure. Lack of aptitude in a chosen career can produce endless reversals. Pride then makes matters worse by preventing a more modest but suitable occupation. Some would rather sink into despair than accept what they consider a lower station. A sound moral education, freed from the prejudices of pride, would prevent many such tragedies.
Work, Pride, and the Refusal of Honest Labor
No one should choose death rather than work.
Even in severe need, people can ordinarily find some means of supporting themselves if pride does not stand between necessity and labor. There are no dishonorable professions in themselves. What dishonors is not useful work, but the spirit in which one lives.
Many who suffer from want are held back less by the absence of all opportunity than by social prejudice. They fear humiliation more than hunger. Yet a simpler and humbler occupation may preserve both life and dignity.
There are, however, situations in which illness or circumstances beyond personal control make self-support impossible. In a society organized according to the law of Christ, no one would be left to die of hunger. A just and provident social order, founded on solidarity, would ensure that necessities were available to all except where personal fault intervened. Such a society depends not only on institutions, but on moral improvement in individuals themselves.
Why Suffering Seems More Common Than Happiness
The suffering classes appear more numerous than the fortunate ones, but no one is perfectly happy. Those regarded as favored often conceal deep and hidden afflictions. Suffering is everywhere.
Earth remains a place of expiation, and that is why pain is so widespread. When humanity is transformed, the world will also be transformed. As people become better and good spirits prevail, earthly life will no longer be marked by the same degree of misery. The world will become a dwelling fit for the good.
The apparent power of the wicked over the good also has a temporary explanation. The wicked are often bold, calculating, and aggressive, while the good are frequently hesitant and timid. Evil seems stronger when goodness lacks courage. When the good truly will it, they can prevail.
Mental Suffering and the Torments of the Soul
Human beings are even more the artisans of their mental sufferings than of their material ones.
Material pains may sometimes come from causes independent of the will. The sufferings of the soul, however, are often born directly from the passions: wounded pride, frustrated ambition, greed, envy, jealousy, and bitterness. These inward afflictions consume peace more thoroughly than many outward losses.
Envy and jealousy are especially corrosive. Where they exist, there can be no rest. The envious and jealous live in continual agitation, haunted by the success, gifts, or happiness of others. What they resent follows them like an obsession. Even sleep gives them little relief. Such passions create a kind of self-inflicted punishment, making the earth a hell for those who harbor them.
Language often captures this truth with striking accuracy. People speak of being swollen with pride, consumed by envy, or bursting with jealousy. Such expressions are not merely figurative. The passions do indeed torment the inner life in ways that resemble physical suffering.
Jealousy does not always arise from direct rivalry. Some people resent anyone who rises above mediocrity, even when they suffer no personal loss from it. They are disturbed simply by the sight of excellence or success beyond their own reach. In such cases, jealousy joins itself to pettiness and would gladly pull everything down to its own level.
Rising Above the Worldly View
Much unhappiness comes from attaching too much importance to the things of this world. Vanity, greed, and disappointed ambition enlarge every loss.
When thought remains confined to material life, every change in fortune appears immense. But when the soul rises toward the infinite, which is its true destiny, many earthly troubles shrink to their proper size. The setbacks of life then resemble the grief of a child over a lost toy once thought to be everything.
Those who seek happiness only in the gratification of pride or coarse appetites become miserable as soon as those cravings are frustrated. Those who are moderate and simple in their habits can be content with what others would call misfortune.
People in less developed conditions of society often have fewer needs and therefore fewer occasions for envy and anxiety. In more civilized settings, individuals reflect more, compare more, and analyze their own sorrows, and this often makes them suffer more acutely. Yet that same reflective power can also lead them toward consolation.
True consolation comes from moral and spiritual vision. In the Christian spirit, one finds hope for a better future. In the certainty of the soul’s destiny, one finds strength to endure the present. Relative happiness on earth becomes possible when desires are moderated, conscience is kept pure, work is accepted with humility, trials are borne with courage, and the future is seen in the light of eternity.
The Loss of Loved Ones
The loss of those we love is one of the deepest sorrows of earthly life.
It touches both rich and poor alike. No one is exempt from it. For some, it is a trial; for others, an expiation; for all, it is part of the common law of human existence. The pain is real because the separation seems irreversible and beyond human control.
Yet there is consolation in knowing that separation is not absolute. Those who have gone before are not lost. Communication with them remains possible through the means available to us while awaiting forms of reunion that will one day be more direct and more accessible.
Communication with Those Who Have Died
To remain in contact with loved ones beyond the grave is a deeply comforting possibility. It allows the living to converse with relatives and friends who have left earthly life earlier. When they are called with sincerity, they may draw near, remain beside us, hear us, and answer us. In that sense, the separation is no longer complete.
They continue to care for those they love. They offer counsel, give signs of affection, and find joy in being remembered. For those still on earth, there is great comfort in learning that they are happy, in hearing directly about their new condition, and in gaining a firmer certainty that reunion will come in its time.
Reverence and Propriety
Some regard communication with the departed as a sacrilege. It is not so when it is approached with reverence, respect, and seriousness.
There is nothing profane in a loving and dignified remembrance. Spirits who are attached to us are pleased to come near when called in a worthy spirit. They are glad to know that they are remembered and that exchange with us is still possible. What would be wrong is not the communication itself, but treating it lightly, frivolously, or without respect.
Excessive Grief and Its Effects
Spirits remain sensitive to the memory and sorrow of those they have loved. They are touched by affection and remembrance. But grief that becomes excessive, persistent, and without resignation causes them suffering.
Such sorrow shows a lack of trust in the future and in divine order. It reflects a refusal to accept that life continues and that separation is temporary. In this way, it can become an obstacle to progress and may even delay the peace of the relationship itself, because the spirit sees in it not pure love, but attachment that cannot release what has already been delivered from earthly suffering.
If a spirit is happier after leaving the body, then grieving as though it had been deprived of good is, in effect, grieving that it has found relief. Love should rejoice in the good of the beloved.
The Prisoner Set Free
Two friends are confined in the same prison. Both know that one day they will be released, but one leaves before the other. Would it be right for the one who remains to resent the other’s freedom? Would true affection wish the other to remain imprisoned simply to avoid being left behind?
Earthly life may be compared to such a captivity. When one of two loving persons departs first, that one is the first to be set free. The one who remains should not cling selfishly to the loss, but wait with patience for the hour of his or her own liberation.
The Friend Who Departs for a Better Country
Imagine a friend who must leave for a distant country because health or personal circumstances require it, and where life will be better in every way. That person will no longer be physically near, yet correspondence remains possible. The distance is real, but it is only physical.
Would love insist that such a person stay near if doing so meant continued hardship? Or would love accept the departure because it serves the person’s good?
The same principle applies to those who leave earthly life before us. Their absence is painful, but if they are in a better condition, affection should rise above possessiveness and find peace in their well-being.
Consolation in the Continuity of Affection
One of the greatest comforts available to human beings is the assurance that those they love are not annihilated, not absent in the absolute sense, and not cut off forever. The future life, the continued presence of loved spirits around us, the persistence of their affection and kindness, and the possibility of maintaining relationship with them remove the feeling of complete abandonment.
No one is truly alone. Even the most isolated person may be surrounded by friends in the unseen world and may, under proper conditions, remain in communion with them.
This understanding softens one of the most legitimate forms of sorrow. It does not forbid tears, but it transforms despair into hope.
Patient Endurance and Future Joy
The hardships of life often seem unbearable while they last. Human beings grow impatient under suffering and are tempted to believe they cannot endure it. Yet many trials can be borne with courage when complaint gives way to trust.
Earthly life is like a painful confinement or a difficult treatment that one day comes to an end. Just as a patient who has long suffered may later rejoice in being healed after enduring a difficult remedy, so the spirit, once released from bodily life, may rejoice in freedom after having borne earthly trials with patience.
For that reason, sorrow over those who depart should be joined to faith, courage, and hope. Love does not end with death, and separation is only temporary.
Disappointments, Ungratefulness, and Broken Affections
Disappointments caused by ingratitude and by the fragility of friendship can wound the human heart deeply. Yet such trials call not for bitterness, but for pity.
Ungrateful and disloyal friends harm themselves more than those they disappoint. Ingratitude springs from selfishness, and selfish people eventually meet hearts as hard as their own. This is part of the moral order of life: those who refuse gratitude and loyalty prepare suffering for themselves.
The good one has done should remain its own reward. It should not depend on praise, remembrance, or acknowledgment from those who have benefited. Even the purest acts may be met with scorn, contempt, or suspicion. Goodness does not lose its value because it is misunderstood. On the contrary, ingratitude becomes a test of perseverance in doing good. To continue acting well despite disappointment is itself a moral victory.
Those who respond to kindness with thoughtlessness will one day face the consequences of their conduct. The measure of their regret will correspond to the measure of their ingratitude. What is forgotten in one life is not lost forever. If the good done is not recognized now, it will be recognized later, and the one who was ungrateful will experience shame and remorse.
There is, however, a danger in disappointment. Repeated hurts can tempt a person to harden the heart and become less sensitive. Such a change would be a misfortune. A loving nature remains happier in the good it has done than a selfish nature could ever be in protecting itself from pain. To prefer a happiness based on indifference would be to choose a poor and sorrowful form of peace.
When affection has been misplaced, wisdom lies not in ceasing to love, but in seeing clearly. If friends abandon someone or prove unworthy of trust, their loss need not be endlessly regretted. The mistake was in judging them too well, not in having loved sincerely. In time, better and more understanding companions may be found.
It is better to feel compassion than resentment toward those who treat others badly. Their conduct prepares for them a sad return. Rather than being cast down by their behavior, one may rise above it. Injury can become an opportunity for inner elevation.
Human beings are made with the need to love and to be loved. Among the greatest joys of earthly life is the meeting of hearts that are in harmony with one another. In such mutual affection there is already a foretaste of a higher happiness—the happiness of a more perfected state, where love and benevolence prevail without mixture. That joy is denied to selfishness, for selfishness closes itself to the very communion it longs to receive.
Antipathetic Unions
Spirits who are inwardly in harmony are naturally drawn toward one another. Yet among incarnate persons, affection is often uneven. One may love sincerely while the other responds with indifference or even repulsion. Strong attachment may also fade and, in some cases, turn into dislike or hatred.
Such experiences may serve as a temporary trial or expiation. They also arise because people frequently mistake physical attraction for deep affinity. A person may believe they love profoundly when they are only captivated by outward appearance or by qualities they imagine in the other. Once life is shared more closely, illusion gives way to clearer knowledge, and what seemed like love may prove to have been only passing passion.
The reverse also happens. Some relationships seem at first incompatible, yet with time and mutual understanding they grow into tender and lasting love. When affection is founded on mutual esteem rather than appearance, it acquires stability and depth.
What truly loves is the spirit, not the body. When physical illusion fades, the spirit sees more clearly.
The Two Kinds of Affection
There are two kinds of affection: that of the body and that of the soul. These are often confused.
Affection of the body is unstable and perishable. It depends on external impressions, desire, and the fascination of the senses. When its charm disappears, the feeling that seemed so intense may vanish with it.
Affection of the soul is pure, sympathetic, and lasting. It rests on real affinity between beings. Because it belongs to the deeper life of the spirit, it survives the changes that alter bodily attraction.
For this reason, those who imagine they love one another eternally may later come to detest each other when the illusion that joined them has passed away. What they took for enduring love was not love of the soul.
Suffering in Unions Without Sympathy
A lack of sympathy between persons destined to live together can become a profound source of suffering, especially when it poisons the whole course of life.
Much of this bitterness comes from human causes. Social laws and customs often bind people together in ways that do not respect true mutual affection. Pride, ambition, interest, and prejudice may be given more importance than inward harmony. When unions are formed for such reasons, the suffering that follows is often the natural consequence.
No one should suppose that God requires a person to remain bound by pure dislike as though such misery were a divine command. Human error has a large part in creating these painful situations.
The Innocent Victim
In these unhappy unions, there is often one who suffers without having caused the wrong. For that person, the trial may be a heavy expiation.
Even so, responsibility for the unhappiness rests with the one who caused it. No injustice is lost from view. Where truth has reached the soul of the one who suffers, faith in the future can bring consolation. The present pain is not the whole reality of existence.
As prejudices weaken and people become less governed by vanity, ambition, and external appearances, many of these private misfortunes will disappear. More sincere and more spiritual unions will then become possible.
The Fear of Death
Worry about death troubles many people, even though the future of the soul stretches beyond bodily life.
Much of this fear comes from false ideas impressed on the mind from an early age. When people are taught to imagine the future only in terms of heaven for a few and eternal punishment for most, death naturally becomes terrifying. If they are also told that nearly everything belonging to human nature is a grave offense, they grow up expecting condemnation rather than hope.
Later, when reason awakens, many can no longer accept such beliefs. Some then fall into disbelief altogether and conclude that nothing exists beyond the present life. Others continue to believe what they were taught in childhood, and they remain haunted by the fear of unending punishment. In both cases, death appears dark and threatening.
For the righteous, death has a different character. Faith gives certainty about the future, and hope opens the view of a better life. Those who have lived according to charity carry within themselves a quiet assurance. They do not dread entering the spiritual world, because they know they have sought to do good and will not have to avert their eyes in shame before those they meet there.
Attachment to Material Life
Those who live chiefly for bodily life are bound more strongly to earthly existence than to spiritual reality. While on earth, they know mainly physical pleasures and physical pains. Their happiness lies in the brief satisfaction of desire, and because desire is unstable, their inner life remains unsettled.
The soul, constantly preoccupied with the changes, losses, frustrations, and uncertainties of worldly life, becomes anxious and troubled. Death frightens such persons not only because they doubt the future, but also because they believe they must leave behind everything to which they are attached: their habits, ambitions, affections, and hopes rooted in the world.
The Peace of the Moral Life
Those who live morally and rise above the artificial needs created by the passions already experience, even on earth, pleasures that materialistic minds do not know.
When desires are moderated, the spirit gains calm and serenity. A person who is content with doing good finds a steadier happiness than one who seeks endless gratification. Disappointments lose much of their power, and the troubles of life pass more lightly over the soul without leaving deep and lasting wounds.
This peace is not a mere theory. It is the natural result of an ordered inner life. Freedom from slavery to passion makes room for quiet strength, and that strength lessens the fear of death.
Why Simple Counsel Is Often Rejected
Advice about happiness is often dismissed as obvious, commonplace, or too simple. Many say, in effect, that the whole secret is merely to endure misfortune patiently.
Yet such objections often come from those who want the benefits of healing without accepting the remedy. They resemble patients who are given a diet necessary for recovery but wish to be cured while continuing whatever caused their sickness.
Inner peace does not come from wishing for it while remaining surrendered to disorder. It comes from accepting the discipline that restores health to the soul. The counsel may sound simple, but its simplicity does not make it shallow. Like all genuine remedies, it asks not only to be admired, but to be practiced.
Dissatisfaction with Life and Suicide
A weariness with life often arises where there is idleness, lack of faith, or the exhaustion that comes from satiety. When human faculties are employed usefully and in harmony with natural aptitudes, work does not feel barren, and life passes more steadily. In that condition, its trials are borne with greater patience and resignation, because hope is fixed on a more solid and lasting happiness.
No one has the right to take his or her own life. That right belongs to God alone. Intentional suicide is a transgression against divine law. When a person is insane and does not know what he or she is doing, moral responsibility is not the same, because the act lacks full awareness.
Those who kill themselves merely because they are dissatisfied with life reveal not wisdom but folly. Useful labor would often have made life seem less burdensome. Those who seek death in order to escape disappointments and hardships also fail to understand the meaning of earthly trials. Suffering is often a trial or an expiation. Blessed are those who endure it without rebellion, because endurance prepares a future reward. To flee through suicide is not courage but surrender.
When others have driven an unhappy person to such an act of despair, their guilt is grave. They answer for it as for a murder. Even so, a person who gives way to despair is not wholly absolved. If the person lacked firmness, perseverance, or the will to use intelligence to find a way through difficulty, there remains personal responsibility. The fault is even heavier when despair springs from pride.
There are people whose pride paralyzes their judgment. Ashamed to work with their hands or to descend from what they imagine to be their social rank, they would rather die than face material humiliation. Yet there is far more dignity in struggling against adversity than in sacrificing life to satisfy social vanity. A selfish society may flatter prosperity and abandon distress, but its opinion has no true value. To throw away one’s life for such judgments is both tragic and senseless.
Suicide committed to escape the shame of an evil act is also blameworthy. It does not erase the wrong; it adds another wrong to the first. Whoever had the courage to do evil should also have the courage to bear its consequences. God judges each case and may lessen punishment according to motive, but self-destruction never repairs the fault.
The same holds when a person kills himself or herself in order to spare children or family from dishonor. Such a person may sincerely believe that good is being done, and that intention is taken into account. In that sense, the act may become a self-imposed expiation, and the motive may lessen the guilt. Yet it remains a wrong. Much of this kind of tragedy is tied to social prejudice and false notions of honor.
Those who destroy themselves to avoid public shame show that they value human opinion more than divine judgment. They return to spirit life still burdened by their wrongdoing, while depriving themselves of the opportunity to repair it during earthly life. God is often more merciful than human beings. Sincere repentance and efforts at reparation are accepted, but suicide repairs nothing.
Some imagine that by ending life they will reach a better world more quickly. This, too, is an illusion. Entrance into a happier state is not hastened by wrongdoing. Instead, suicide delays that progress. The person often must return to complete the life that was interrupted. No wrong opens the way to a higher state.
A very different act is the sacrifice of one’s life to save others or to be genuinely useful to one’s neighbor. When the intention is pure, such an act is not suicide but sublime self-giving. God does not approve meaningless sacrifice, especially when it is stained by pride. Its value depends on selflessness. Every sacrifice made at the cost of personal happiness for the good of another is deeply meritorious, because it fulfills the law of charity. Since life is the earthly possession most highly valued, giving it up for another’s good is not a crime but a sacrifice. Even so, one should consider whether one’s continued life might be more useful than one’s death.
There is also a moral form of suicide in the abuse of destructive passions. Some know perfectly well that their habits are hastening death, yet continue because habit has become a physical need. In such cases there is a double fault: lack of courage and surrender to animal impulse, joined to forgetfulness of God. In general, this guilt is greater than that of someone who kills himself or herself in a moment of despair, because there was time for reflection. Punishments are always proportioned to awareness of the wrong.
Even when a terrible death seems inevitable, it is still wrong intentionally to shorten one’s suffering by a few moments. Human beings cannot know with certainty whether help might arrive unexpectedly at the last instant. More deeply, such an act shows a lack of resignation and submission to the Creator’s will. The consequence is expiation proportioned to the seriousness of the fault and the circumstances.
Not every act that endangers life is culpable. When there is no positive intention to do wrong and no awareness of causing harm, moral guilt is absent. Responsibility depends not only on the outcome but on intention and consciousness.
Customs in which widows have burned themselves on the body of a dead husband are also not judged in the same way as deliberate suicide committed in full freedom. In such cases, people often act under coercion or social pressure, believing they are fulfilling a duty. Ignorance and lack of moral development lessen responsibility. Barbarous customs recede as civilization advances.
Those who kill themselves because they cannot bear the loss of loved ones, hoping to rejoin them, do not attain what they seek. Rather than being reunited more quickly, they delay reunion. God does not reward an act of cowardice that expresses distrust of divine providence. The moment of despair is followed by deeper afflictions, and the hoped-for consolation is denied.
General Consequences of Suicide
The consequences of suicide vary widely. There is no single fixed penalty applied in every case. Consequences are always related to the motives and conditions that produced the act. One result, however, is universal: disappointment. Those who imagined escape, relief, or immediate happiness discover that they have gained none of these things.
The state of the spirit after suicide is not the same in all cases. Some expiate their fault at once. Others do so in a new life, often more difficult than the one they interrupted. Observation shows that while the outcomes differ, some common effects often accompany violent and premature death.
One of the most striking is the persistence of the bond between spirit and body. In natural death, this link gradually weakens and is often already loosened before life fully ends. In suicide, the rupture is sudden, and the bond frequently remains strong. This prolongs spiritual confusion and may produce the illusion, for a shorter or longer time, that one is still among the living.
In some cases, the continued affinity between spirit and body produces a dreadful repercussion of bodily conditions upon the spirit. The spirit may be forced to witness the body’s decomposition and to experience anguish and horror connected with it. This may last as long as the earthly life would normally have continued. This consequence is not universal, but it illustrates how far suicide is from being an escape.
In no case does the person avoid the consequences of the act. Sooner or later, the wrong must be expiated. Some spirits who were deeply unhappy in one earthly life have later declared that they had committed suicide in a previous existence and had willingly accepted new trials in order to learn to endure with greater resignation. For some, the consequence is a painful attachment to matter, from which they long to free themselves while access to happier worlds remains closed. For many, the prevailing condition is regret—regret for a needless act that brought not relief but frustration.
Religion, morality, and philosophy all condemn suicide as contrary to the law of nature. The deeper reason is not merely that it violates a rule, but that no one is free to cut short life at will in order to flee suffering. Such a choice brings no true benefit. What appears to be release becomes a new burden. The hoped-for end of pain is replaced by confusion, delay, disappointment, and expiation.
The law governing life is therefore not arbitrary. Earthly trials have meaning, and courage in bearing them advances the spirit. Despair interrupts that work but does not abolish it. What was refused must still be faced, often under harder conditions. The wiser path is not flight, but endurance, repentance where needed, useful effort, trust in God, and fidelity to the duties of life.