What to Make of Suffering
How the power of love transforms our pain.
Nobody told me—or maybe I failed to hear—that one of the hardest things about being a parent would be watching my children suffer. It hurts when our sons or our daughter endure pain or sorrow.
Their scrapes and bruises—both physical and emotional—break my heart. They always will. But thankfully my children’s injuries and disappointments no longer have the power to make me believe that I’m a failure as a parent.
Somewhere along the way I admitted to myself that suffering happens. To everybody. Even to the people I love. That we will suffer is a brute fact of human existence. One of our crucial spiritual challenges is how we will live with suffering.
This insight made me realize that my chief parental task is to help my sons and daughter navigate suffering. And there are many wise and knowledgeable voices on this subject.
The psychologist Angela Duckworth stressed the importance of teaching the virtue of grit. That’s her phrase for passionate persistence. Nietzsche famously encouraged resilience by saying that what doesn’t kill us makes us stronger.
These approaches are not wrongheaded. But they don’t tell the whole story. Current research on trauma reminds us that what doesn’t kill us can actually debilitate us. Consider what Bessel van der Kolk says in his bestseller The Body Keeps the Score:
“Traumatized people chronically feel unsafe inside their bodies: The past is alive in the form of gnawing interior discomfort. Their bodies are constantly bombarded by visceral warning signs, and, in an attempt to control these processes, they often become expert at ignoring their gut feelings and in numbing awareness of what is played out inside. They learn to hide from their selves.”
The path to health and well-being involves getting our heart and head around the trauma stored in our bodies. We have to learn to tell a new narrative about past traumatizing events and our present selves.
The Stoic philosopher Epictetus (d. 135 AD) anticipated this contemporary approach in phrases like this: “It's not what happens to you, but how you react to it that matters.”
Another Stoic, Seneca (d. 65AD), struggled with asthma from an early age. Eventually he contracted what many believe to have been tuberculosis. His condition had become unbearable, so he began contemplating suicide.
He explained to a friend what ultimately led him to persevere. Seneca thought about the pain that his father would endure if he should take his own life. And so he chose to live for the love he felt for his father.
In his classic book Man’s Search for Meaning, the concentration camp survivor and psychoanalyst Viktor Frankl described the horrific conditions of camp life. He noted that those prisoners who thrived psychologically under those circumstances were precisely the ones who sought to make life better for their fellow inmates.
What I gather from these and many other voices is that we can become the victim of suffering. Our lives can be distorted and diminished by what happens to us. Or, our circumstances—perhaps even the most trying and painful and even chronic ones—can become the occasion for choosing to become our true selves.
No one has taught me this with greater clarity than Jesus.
He once asked his disciples, “Who do people say that I am?” After they told him, he got more personal. “Who do you say that I am?” (Mark 8:27-38)
Peter answered, “You are the Messiah.” In other words, “You are the one who will set things right.” As it turns out, Peter was correct. But he wasn’t at all prepared for how Jesus would set things right and what that would mean about following him.
Jesus explained that he would suffer and die and be raised. That is precisely how Jesus sets things right.
You see, Jesus had spent his entire ministry teaching and preaching about love. Love God. Love neighbor. Love is the “why” of Jesus’ life. And to follow him, we make that the “why” of our lives.
Jesus put it this way: “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.”
The startling thing about taking love as our “why” is that it draws us into a life that can never be destroyed or distorted. When we love, our lives are braided into the divine life. We begin to experience eternal life.
We will all suffer. We have no choice about that.
We can all love. Or not. The choice is ours.
Summer’s End
Upcoming Podcasts
Each Wednesday The Woodlands Podcast lands in your inbox. Paid subscribers have access to the full audio. I’m still gathering your questions for Ask Me Almost Anything episodes. Got questions? Send them my way:
Here are some episodes coming this fall:
Rev. Christine Vaughn Davies (spiritual director and CPE supervisor) will talk about grief, hope, and calling.
Bishop Mariann Budde and I will discuss learning how to be brave
Rev. Pamela Dolan will share thoughts about spirituality, creation, and gardening
Bishop Rob Hirschfeld will share his thoughts about mental health and the spiritual life.
"But thankfully my children’s injuries and disappointments no longer have the power to make me believe that I’m a failure as a parent." Thank you for this reminder, which I seem to need constantly; my daughter has had some hard and terrible times in her life, for which she constantly blames herself, and for which I find I also blame myself, when the truth is there were circumstances we could not, at the time, have known or prevented. I do think the suffering of those we love is much harder to bear than our own--maybe Jesus's suffering is proof that God suffers for and with us, as we do for and with our own children.
Bishop!!!! Thank you so much for this blog. It resonates in more ways than I can express. How liberating it has been for me.