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    • Finding Meaning in Suffering

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    I’m an advocate of dropping the Why question. “Why?” you might be wondering (see what I did there). I find the question is generally not helpful. I have seldom seen it asked and answered to satisfaction, in any given circumstance. When a growing child asks her mother, “Why?” every five minutes on a car ride, it is cute and curious. When an adult, however, is plagued with tragedy, the haunting nature of the “Why?” is not so cute and is curious in a much darker, more painfully abstract manner.

    Rather than plague oneself with the unanswerable, I offer an alternative perspective and set of questions altogether. Rather than explain suffering (which we may well never be able to do), consider finding meaning in suffering. The questions that may be helpful on this journey, and which will provide answers – as well as new questions that arise as you continue the journey of thinking rather than knowing– look a bit different than “Why” and require more creative energy.

    Finding meaning in suffering might take on the shape and color of a million different experiences and thoughts. It might begin with the question, What is it to be human? To be human is to grieve, and to love and to laugh and to mourn and to think and to despair and to worry and to be angry and to know joy. It is all these things and more. How can this time of suffering, this deep pit of darkness, actually be making you more human? Is that possible? Who else in history, or contemporarily, has suffered a similar loss? How have they found meaning in it?

    The ones we might consider The Greats of this type of thinking – the mothers and fathers of existential quandary in the heart of pain – share a vast array of thoughts and opinions on the matter:

  • Victor Frankl said, “…man’s main concern is not to gain pleasure or to avoid pain but rather to see a meaning in his life. That is why man is even ready to suffer, on the condition, to be sure, that his suffering has a meaning.” Seemingly empty words, perhaps, until you consider their context. Frankl was an Austrian Holocaust survivor. He endured three years in concentration camps, which took the lives of his mother, brother, and wife. This was his story, and yet with it he wrote the words, “What is to give light must endure burning.”

  • Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was quoted, “As my sufferings mounted I soon realized that there were two ways in which I could respond to my situation – either to react with bitterness or to seek to transform the suffering into a creative force. I decided to follow the latter course.” I wonder if he shared this sentiment with Reverend George W. Lee, who was killed for his activism in attempting to bring justice to Black Americans seeking voter’s rights in a time when they were vehemently denied them, or William Lewis Moore, who was peacefully walking a one-man march against segregation when he was shot and killed, or any of the other countless martyrs of the Civil Rights movement, of whom we cannot quote on meaning in suffering because they were taken from the world before they had a chance to make a statement on the subject.

  • Loung Ung, a survivor of the Cambodian genocide that took place from 1975-1979, recalls her own thoughts while suffering the brutality of the Khmer Rouge in a prison work camp: “I think how the world is still somehow beautiful when I feel no joy at being alive within it.”

  • Horatio Spafford penned the renowned lyric: “When sorrows like sea billows roll; whatever my lot, Thou hast taught me to say, It is well, It is well with my soul.” He wrote these words following the tragic loss of his four daughters during a transatlantic voyage that was intended to precede a family holiday. Two years earlier, he had also lost his son to Scarlet fever.

  • C.S. Lewis contributed a raw collection of the thoughts, emotions, and experiences of his grief following the death of his wife, Joy Davidman, in 1960. In it he authentically wrestles with suffering, meaning, and utter despair. In his concluding thoughts on grief, he asks, “Can a mortal ask questions which God finds unanswerable? Quite easily, I should think. All nonsense questions are unanswerable. How many hours are there in a mile? Is yellow square or round? Probably half the questions we ask – half our great theological and metaphysical problems – are like that.” He concludes his book, “The best is perhaps what we understand least.”

    • These great grievers who have gone before us can each tell us something about what it means to be human. Their words echo the quest for meaning in the midst of suffering. They have each contributed chapters to the great story of finding purpose in pain. Like them, we each possess the ability to continue pondering the subject to greater depths individually.

    Each of us is writing a story. As a lover of stories and all mediums that contain them, whether they be books or bodies, I offer the solemn truth that no story is without value – yours included. What is the story you are writing at this very moment, in the heart of your sorrow? What themes are interwoven throughout that story, what hidden gems of beauty or truth lie within the seeming bits of chaos or uncertainty? What sense is there to be found in the nonsensical? How is your brokenness being rebuilt into something beautiful?

    I offer these questions as the beginning of a new kind of journey for you. Become a part of the greater narrative – of those who have gone before you and of those who walk alongside you in the path of meaningful pain – to seek meaning and find it as you are transformed on your own journey through whatever grief confronts you, and toward whatever new chapter awaits.