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We are entering, as a nation and as a world, a period in which suffering is going to become more and more visible and widespread. Of course, at any time in history, there are always some individuals who are experiencing acute suffering and private despair. As their ranks grow, there may be some relief on the part of those who were already suffering that they are no longer alone—that we are finally in this together—but as the suffering becomes overwhelming and our efforts to stem it come to seem insufficient and even insignificant, a deeper, more widespread kind of despair may set in.
When we suffer, our first response is to try to stop the suffering. And, if we can’t, our next response is to ask: “Why?”Why is this suffering occurring?
This would be a very strange question if our universe were a purely mechanistic one. In a mechanistic universe, the only possible explanation is a causal one. This event happened because of certain other events that happened first. And those happened because of other events before them.
By asking Why? about our suffering, we are not generally asking what caused our suffering. We are asking what purpose it serves, or could serve. We are asking for our suffering to be given a meaning. We are asking for it to be given some kind of significance.
The greater the suffering, the greater this significance must be. When suffering is overwhelmingly intense, and when it is ubiquitous, closing in on us from all sides, it is easy to conclude that there is no purpose in the world great enough or good enough to give it meaning. That there is no end in the world that could justify these means. That there is no way that God himself could justify this kind of devastation and grief.
And yet, if we look at those great cataclysmic evils that have affected human society in years past, we see that even some people who have experienced the worst kinds of suffering have been able, ultimately, to imagine the possibility of their redemption.
Viktor Frankl, the Austrian psychiatrist who survived the Nazi death camps of the Holocaust, describes the scrap of meaning that kept his soul alive during the years when he was torturously imprisoned. It was the memory of his wife. While in the death camps, he held onto hope and humanity by imagining the presence of his wife and carrying on imaginary conversations with her. It was then, he says, that he was able to grasp “the meaning of the greatest secret that human poetry and human thought and belief have to impart: The salvation of man is through love and in love.” “In a position of utter desolation,” he writes, “when man cannot express himself in positive action, when his only achievement may consist in enduring his sufferings in the right way—an honorable way—in such a position man can, through loving contemplation of the image he carries of his beloved, achieve fulfillment.”
On one particular morning during his imprisonment, when, as usual, Frankl was out laboring in the freezing air even before the sun was up, he had the following experience.
“I was again conversing silently with my wife, or perhaps I was struggling to find the reason for my sufferings, my slow dying. In a last violent protest against the hopelessness of imminent death, I sensed my spirit piercing through the enveloping gloom. I felt it transcend that hopeless, meaningless world, and from somewhere I heard a victorious Yes in answer to my question of the existence of an ultimate purpose.” Frankl says that, at that very moment, a light came on in a distant farmhouse. “Et lux in tenebris lucet” is the phrase that came to his mind: The light shines in the darkness.
He continued his grueling labor over the following hours. Despite insults from a guard, he continued to talk to his wife and to feel her presence more and more strongly and concretely. Just as Frankl felt he might actually be able to reach out and take her hand, a bird flew down in front of him. It landed on the pile of dirt he'd just dug out of a ditch and sat there, gazing at him.
In fact, Frankl’s wife died in a separate camp and he never saw her again—physically. But his experiences that day echo the experiences of many other people who not only feel that they have made contact with their lost loved ones across the veil of death but who appear to have touched something even more profound: the ultimate purpose of human existence, and of human suffering.
I have never lived through the devastation experienced by Frankl and other victims of Nazi brutality. All that I can say, from my own personal experience, is that, in the most devastating period of my own life, I had an experience akin to the one Frankl describes. Like Frankl’s experience, it involved light—in my case, sunlight—and it involved birds: a whole flock of seabirds flying over the waves along a shoreline. But, also like Frankl’s experience, it involved something much deeper as well: an inner connection and understanding. A moment of what felt almost like a revelation. It was as if the veil of suffering was momentarily pulled back to reveal another level of reality that, until then, had been hidden from me.
In that level of reality, there existed a glory so tremendous that, even with only that tiny fleeting glimpse of it, I could see the error of my previous conclusion that there was nothing in the world so good that it could outweigh the suffering I was experiencing. I saw that I had been the victim of a very limited imagination and that there was much more to this world than what I had thus far been able to perceive. I saw with extreme clarity that there existed something in this world so tremendously significant that achieving it would most assuredly be worth all the suffering I had thus far experienced. I was humbled. And indescribably encouraged.
As our world traverses a particularly dark and difficult time, pat answers—whether religious or humanist—will be of little comfort to those enduring the most searing losses. If we stay open, however, we may find that, from time to time, we are able to connect with something beyond ourselves and beyond the current mess in which we are embroiled, and that we catch glimpses of some transcendent reality in which redemption and meaning and awesome significance are indeed possible. If there is a meaning to all that the world is currently suffering and has suffered for ages past, it will be greater than anything we have ever yet imagined. We likely will not be able to understand it from our current limited perspective. But we may be able to catch a glimpse just luminous enough to carry us through.
References
Frankl, V. E. (1984). Man’s Search for Meaning. Revised and updated. New York: Washington Square Press. Pp. 56-61.
