What is the Purpose of Suffering?

My Personal Commentary on the Question

Life is fraught with suffering, so much so that it’s almost cliché to say. One need not search far to find horrendous examples of suffering on a grand scale. The so-called acts of God are too numerous to count. Some of the biggies in the past 10 years include the tsunami of 2004 (230,000 dead), the Katrina Hurricane of 2005 (1,800 dead), and the Sichuan earthquake in China of 2008 (350,000 dead). There are also man-made catastrophes, which include wars and genocide. Recently, the crisis in Darfur has killed nearly 1,500,000 people. The Holocaust also stands out as one of the most extreme examples in humanity’s history of the unconscionable magnitude of suffering people have inflicted and experienced.

The problem of suffering is one of the primary reasons religions exist as well as one of the biggest stumbling blocks for them. They offer various explanations of, justifications for, and advice to overcome suffering: We must suffer in order to grow. We must suffer so that we can transcend the ever-changing, pain-filled world. We must suffer so that we realize that suffering is but a mind construct that we must work to transform in order to overcome suffering.

All of these explanations seem hollow to me. I often wonder if the outward suffering we see an individual going through is the same as the inward suffering that the individual actually experiences. In other words, is our interpretation of another’s suffering accurate? Does the meaning of the suffering get misrepresented and mistranslated as we ponder it? Suffering is indeed an undeniable reality, but can we ever really know the full extent of another person’s suffering by merely assessing the symptoms of the suffering? I don’t think so. So I don’t know that statistics tell the true story—I don’t know that they can adequately encapsulate the fullness of the suffering question. I think we can only assess our own experience of suffering and draw conclusions from that. What has personal suffering taught you about its purpose?

I’ve included a riveting passage below from Elie Wiesel’s book Night in which he describes seeing the smoke from the crematoria ovens at a concentration camp during the Holocaust. Wiesel is a Holocaust survivor and one of the most eloquent writers on the subject. Another amazingly insightful author on the Holocaust was survivor Victor Frankl. His book Man’s Search for Meaning describes how we can find meaning in the most horrendous of circumstances, thus transforming and transcending suffering.