Suffering

It is only natural to do all we can to avoid things that cause us to suffer, or to mitigate it when suffering is unavoidable.  Yet when it is unavoidable it can (usually in retrospect) be viewed as a great turning point in a life that had been, by contrast, shallow or inconsequential.  Suffering can be transformational. 

 

In my faith the Prophet Joseph Smith, Jr., while incarcerated for months in a cold and cramped jail on trumped-up charges, received this revelation (quoted in part):

            “If thou art called to pass through tribulation; if thou art in perils among false brethren; if thou art in perils among robbers; if thou art in perils by land or by sea…if thou shouldst be cast into the pit, or into the hands of murderers … [or] into the deep (water) … know thou, my son, that all these things shall give thee experience, and shall be for thy good.  The Son of Man (Jesus the Christ) hath descended below them all.  Art thou greater than He?”  (Doctrine and Covenants 122: 5-8)

Bestselling author David Brooks in his 2015, The Road to Character, writes: 

            “Most people shoot for happiness but feel formed through suffering. / People we call deep have almost always endured a season of suffering, or several such seasons. / For most of us, there is nothing intrinsically noble about suffering … suffering is sometimes just destructive. / When it is not connected to some larger purpose beyond itself, suffering shrinks or annihilates people.  When it is not understood as a piece of a larger process, it leads to doubt, nihilism, and despair. / But some people can connect their suffering to some greater design. / It is not the suffering itself that makes all the difference, but the way it is experienced.” 

Mr. Brooks cited Abraham Lincoln as one who suffered through his psychological depression and the pain of conducting a civil war but “who emerged with the sense that Providence had taken control of his life, that he was a small instrument in a transcendent task.”  Many people, say Brooks, “don’t come out healed; they come out different. 

Orson Whitney has written,

            “No pain that we suffer, no trial that we experience is wasted.  It ministers to our education, to the development of such qualities as patience, faith, fortitude, and humility.  All that we suffer, all that we endure, especially when we endure it patiently, builds up our character, purifies our hearts, expands our souls, makes us more tender and charitable, … and it is through sorrow and suffering, toil and tribulation that we came here to acquire which will make us more like our Father…in Heaven.”

 

Every parent knows that suffering can be not only physical (as a birthing mother knows as she goes, sometimes, down into the valley of the shadow of death to bring forth new life) but also vicarious as they see their (physically) grown children make bad choice after bad choice that leads to their childrens’ sufferings.

But it can be for us, depending on how we view it and use it, as author Sheldon Vanauken (and C. S. Lewis) said, ‘A Severe Mercy’ because it enables growth of character that could come in no other way.