Suffering

What is suffering? Prolonged, aching pain? Pain of the mind, pain of the heart, pain of the body, or of the soul?

How is it that suffering can also be beautiful? I remember being around the age of 14 and my mother wiping my tears and telling me I was beautiful after my grandmother’s death. I had locked myself in a bathroom at my uncle’s house. How could she say that? How wrong was the universe that it could, in fact, be true? Was I more beautiful when suffering? Or was suffering a thing of beauty?

I haven’t always seen the beauty in suffering. Like most people, my years—almost 40 now–have contained plenty of suffering. Yet, the sufferings that stand out the most to me are the ones that have been intertwined in my memory with beauty. I can still see the image of a dark, narrow curved bridge embedded in a neighborhood of quaint houses and established trees as I mulled over a heartbreak at 23. The image struck me as beautiful and I recall thinking in that moment that this heartbreak was beautiful, too; and that perhaps I could only see the beauty of the bridge because of it.

Grandparents’ deaths, heartbreaks–these are common sufferings. Yet, each person’s suffering is their own, and mine mentioned above are not of a fixed or limited list. We also each have our different sufferings: acute and dull, long-lived and short-lived. Recently, I was listening to Life Worth Living by Volf, Croasmun, and McAnnally-Linz on audiobook. In their discussion of suffering, they discuss the Book of Job in which God, speaking of Job’s suffering to Job’s friends, teaches that people can never really know or judge another’s suffering. This theological teaching, actually came to me first from a friend who having had tough start to her young life not only modeled but spoke of this concept–stating that each person’s trauma was their own, and it shouldn’t be judged against another’s.

Another theological figure, Buddha is known for teaching that life is suffering. He also teaches that pain is inevitable, suffering optional. This, in my amateur opinion, essentially boils down to the fact that suffering is linked to our thoughts, our minds, our hearts, our emotions, our worldly attachments–which is all within our means, at least to some extent, to control. Buddha’s thoughts, though extreme to me, help me to remember that, although many aspects of suffering are out of our control–there are choice and accountability in suffering as well. I find this especially helpful when I find myself dwelling in my suffering for too long. Yet, to avoid attachment, to me, would be to avoid also love, caring and, in effect, life.

So what have my recent reflections on suffering taught me? As a child suffering and trauma were things to be vanquished, bad things to be washed from the world. As I have grown, I still feel compelled to answer the suffering call, but usually it is to be there as a witness to another’s suffering. I have also learned some acceptance of suffering: That it can be a beautiful part of life that reminds us that we are living and that helps us to see the world from a different, and sometimes enlightening, lens. Yet I have not found beauty in all my suffering. I know that much of my suffering has also been at my own hand and at times went on longer than it needed to due to various forms of denial on my part. So while I work to accept the concept of suffering, I still believe that to welcome pain and suffering would be, also, not to be fully alive: Part of an inescapable impulse of life is the impulse to avoid pain and suffering. After all, joy is so much more palatable and, well, joyous. Still, most joys, such as the joy of motherhood, come also with inevitable sufferings attached.

We all have to make sense of suffering for ourselves. Taking time to reflect on its meaning in your own life may prove a fruitful adventure, should you have the gift of time to do so.