Mere Orthodoxy | Christianity, Politics, and Culture

Why We Need to Attend to the Suffering

Written by Tessa Carman | Oct 20, 2025 11:00:00 AM

In his essay “How to Think Like a Poet,” Ryan Wilson notes that the ancient virtue of xenia, hospitality to the stranger, applies both to the stranger at our doorstep and to the soul’s reception of the world. “Those whom we love we do not enslave,” he writes. “Art must approach the stranger not with an eye toward enslaving it but with inquisitiveness and delight in it for what it is.” Rather, the true poet knows that we human beings are God’s workmanship—God’s poems.

I thought of these lines when contemplating British artist and human rights activist Hannah Rose Thomas’s paintings collected in her new book, Tears of Gold: Portraits of Yazidi, Rohingya, and Nigerian Women (Plough, 2024). Thomas’s portraits have been shown in the UK Houses of Parliament, Lambeth Palace, and Westminster Abbey, Washington, D.C., New York City, and more. Now Plough Publishing has brought these beautiful paintings to the ordinary household.

Since 2014, Thomas has organized art workshops for refugees and survivors of religious persecution, torture and sexual abuse, and forced displacement in Iraqi Kurdistan, Bangladeshi and Syrian refugee camps, Northern Nigeria, and more. In each place, making art became part of the process of healing. Thomas hoped that, through these gatherings, Yazidi women freed from ISIS captivity, Rohingya refugees from persecution in Myanmar, and Nigerian women who had experienced Boko Haram and Fulani violence could safely share their stories through spoken word and painted image: with each other and with the world. Thomas went on to portray other women survivors—Afghan, Ukrainian, Uyghur, and Palestinian.

Thomas sets the stage for the portraits with a Simone Weil-suffused essay on the art of attention to suffering, and each of Thomas’s portraits is accompanied by a name, a brief description of her sorrows, and her own self-portrait. Many of the women chose to paint themselves weeping tears of gold.

Leila, a Yazidi woman, first approached Thomas and asked for her to paint their portraits. Rather than being presented “through a lens of violence and victimhood,” these women wished to tell a different story.

“Can a portrait painting help us to behold the Infinite in the face of the other?” Thomas asks.

In some ways, perhaps, art itself is the deepest attention, for it requires deep and careful seeing, and it also requires communion: between art and subject, between art and the receiver. 

Thomas writes that she undertook her portraits of these women not only to advocate for them on the international stage, to reveal the personal stories behind the stories of genocide and persecution, but also as a practice of attention: to reveal these women as courageous persons with strength and dignity—“to show that they have not been defined by what they have suffered.”

And indeed, Thomas’s portraits are the work of a masterful artist. The Yazidi portraits are painted with the early-Renaissance egg tempera technique, a demanding process that exacts from the artist the kind of attention the paintings themselves demand. The portraits of Nigerian women are made with both tempera and Byzantine icon painting techniques. Every portrait is stunning and worthy of contemplation. The artist’s attention to the craft of painting and to her subjects themselves shine forth: These women indeed are God’s poems.

This is an immensely powerful book. But there is one weakness, and it lies not in the women’s stories nor in their magnificent portraits. Rather, it lies in too many assumptions that undergird the language used to describe these women’s suffering. For example: “These women have all survived the actions of men,” we read in the preface by Prince Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein, former UN High Commissioner for Human Rights. A strange statement, especially because these same women have beloved husbands and sons who have also suffered horrific persecution. Later on Thomas herself notes that in nearly every “conflict-affected” society, “men hold power while women are denied legal protection, rights, and freedoms.” “Violence against women,” then, can be battled by an increase in “gender equality.” She quotes Rebecca Solnit, who writes that “Violence against women is often against our voices and our stories,” and that “these voices, heard, upend power relations…” These things may be true, but the contested definitions of key terms (especially “gender equality” and “power relations”) as well as the question-begging regarding specific policies that would prevent similar atrocities, as worthy as such discussions would be, distract from the power of these portraits and of the women who gave them life.

To pay attention—this is what Weil urges us to do, and Thomas echoes this in her introduction. The book would have been stronger if Thomas’s portraits were allowed to stand in all their glory, alongside the stories from the women’s own voices, rather than those stories being interpreted through a political filter. Rather than appropriating their devastating stories to one or other political vision, the book would be stronger if the women themselves, and their portraits, were allowed to be attended to. Amidst political interruptions, we risk the situation Tom Wolfe described with regard to modern art, in which “the paintings…exist only to illustrate the text”—or politics. So too, we risk the very thing Thomas and these women want to avoid: their being defined by their suffering.

Better to welcome these portraits through contemplation, in the silence in which the soul of the art, and of the person—indeed, of the Infinite—manifests.