Suffering is an enigma for many people. Nietzsche is reported to have said, “if we have our own “why” of life, we can bear almost any “how.” The heart seeks an answer to “Why?” in order to endure the inevitable pathways of pain and trouble, but suffering that is apparently purposeless is maddening and vexatious.
I am amazed that pagans cling to the idea that their lives have real value despite their rejection of transcendent worth and beauty and goodness as revealed in the Jewish Scriptures. Their everyday assumptions are stolen from the Judeo-Christian tradition, yet their underlying logical and semantic foundation is quite simply an illusion…. I’d like to listen to them justify the reason for getting out of bed in the morning using just the language that is entailed by their metaphysical assumptions. If seriously questioned, especially in light of the traction of their own personal heartache and disappointments, it is doubtless that they, like Nietzsche, would find themselves going insane as they attempt to (re)define the most meaningful aspects of life.
This is not about “language games” or other head trips. I am talking about reality here. People love to pretend that they are sophisticated and have a meaningful way of dealing with suffering, but often they are merely trifling with life.
Some people flatter themselves that they can traffic in the realm ”beyond good and evil,” thinking these are but social conventions, etc., but they show their true colors once real suffering touches their lives. For example, put these pretenders face to face with someone who tried to rape and murder their child and you’ll hear them involuntarily making appeal to justice and a transcendent basis for morality.
Soren Kierkegaard seems to consider suffering as a “soul-building” enterprise, the means of which we can be unified and educated for eternity:
Only when a person suffers and wills to learn from what he suffers does he come to know something about himself and about his relationship to God. This is the sign that he is being educated for eternity.
Through suffering a person can come to know a great deal about the world – how deceitful and treacherous it is – but all this knowledge is not the schooling of suffering. No, just as we speak of a child being weaned from his mother’s breast, so also, in the most profound sense, a person must be weaned by suffering, weaned from the things of this world, from loving it and from being embittered by it, in order to learn for eternity.
For this reason, the school of suffering consists in a dying to – a dying to the world and to yourself. This is the key to finding rest in your suffering.
There is only one way in which rest is to be found: to let God rule in everything. Whatever else you might come to learn only pertains to how God has willed to rule. But as soon as unrest begins, the cause for it is due to your unwillingness to obey, your unwillingness to surrender yourself to God.
When there is suffering, but also obedience in suffering, then you are being educated for eternity. Then there will be no impatient hankering in your soul, no restlessness, neither of sin nor of sorrow.
If you will but let it, suffering is the guardian angel who keeps you from slipping out into the fragmentariness of the world; the fragmentariness that seeks to rip apart the soul. And for this reason, suffering keeps you in school – this dangerous schooling – so that you may be properly educated for eternity.
It is pathetic, is it not, to see people deny suffering, acting as if it were not part of the ”warp and woof” of life. Only God has the wisdom to use it for good ends. Our task is not to squelch the inner groaning but to give it voice in the confession of trust. May God help each of us surrender to Him.