Finding Meaning In Suffering

Out of suffering compassion is born

There’s just no damn doubt about it comrades, in this life there will be a whole series of devastating losses. To use the cliché “shit happens,” and for many people it hits the fan big time, regularly.

Speaking to a very dear friend a while ago who lost her husband, my oldest pal, to cancer, I asked her how my old friend’s mother was doing in her grief? She observed that his mother, then in her 90s, was of the stoic generation and that she was coping well, all things considered.

Like most people of her great age, who have lived long enough to tell the tale. My friend’s mother is no stranger to tragedy. This was not her first brush with the loss of a child. Women and men of her generation have survived endless hardship, war, depression, illness, and yes, the death of children and loved ones

Those who haven’t been driven to permanent despair often develop an empathic wisdom that only such suffering can produce. They have the potential to become special carriers of compassion who ease the suffering of others, like no one else can. 

One of my favorite quotes from the oft quoted mystic Kahlil Gibran is: 

Out of suffering have emerged the strongest souls; the most massive characters are seared with scars. Kahlil Gibran

I’m convinced that if there is any meaning to be found in suffering, it is in this space, where it equips the sufferer to walk in solidarity with fellow sufferers.

In the hit Broadway play, The Last Days of Judas Iscariot, the American playwright Stephen Adly Guirgis trots out this cherished line, “No parent should have to bury a child. No mother should have to bury a son.”¹ This is the nightmare suffering scenario that lurks amongst the deepest fears of any parent. Obviously, most folks would rather face anything other than that. 

Mary-Beth Cichocki herself, a grieving mother writes: 

Mothers are not supposed to bury their children. It goes against nature. When a mother loses her young, the world slips off its axis and spins out of control. The universe mourns knowing it has gone against the circle of life…

If you read Cichocki’s article, from which this quote comes, two things are paramount. First, it is just drenched with empathy, the sort of compassion that simply cannot be mustered by anyone who has not walked in the same suffering shoes. Second, what becomes clear, is her own child’s death propelled her into a quest of assisting other mothers. Mothers who, like herself, suffer the terrible pain of watching powerlessly as their children succumb to addiction. If indeed the world slips off its axis every time such suffering occurs, then it’s had plenty of reasons for axis slipping. 

If indeed the world slips off its axis every time such suffering occurs, then it’s had plenty of reasons for axis slipping. 

Suffering, of course, has many hats, and most of us eventually reluctantly wear one or more of them. Given the random nature and apparent meaninglessness of such heartache, it’s hardly surprising that many people simply never recover from its ravaging. 

Maybe just maybe comrades? Suffering has a way, if properly conceived, of providing the bedrock for the rarest and most precious human gem, the jewel of compassion. The ability to suffer with the others for the others. If not that, then suffering is indeed most surely meaningless.  

It is a strange but beautiful axiom, comrades, that suffering begets compassion. And thus equipped, the most broken people become the most powerful healers of other broken people.

– Cormac Stagg, author of The Quest for a Humble Heart

1. Stephen. Adly Guirgis, The Last Days of Judas Iscariot (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux Publishers, 2006), 7. [↩]