As much as we all strive to avoid it, the simple truth is that humanity needs suffering. Throughout the ages, mystics have taught a consistent lesson: it is through hardship and reversals of fortune that we are roused from our complacency and the unconscious patterns we are prone to settle into. It is suffering that shakes us up and clears our vision.
When everything in our lives is going well, we can become so engrossed in trivial preoccupations that we lose touch with what is important. Success strengthens our identification with the self and keeps us from transcendence. We have no motivation to find something better. But if we are suddenly and unexpectedly confronted with our mortality and the transience of all we cherish, we are forced to recognize life’s preciousness and seek its meaning. As it is said, we are jolted awake by nightmares, not by pleasant dreams.
When someone close to us dies or we are given a terminal prognosis of our own, the priorities of our lives abruptly shift. The need to redecorate the house, so pressing yesterday, fades quickly into the background. Friction with friends over petty irritations is forgotten. Bank accounts and promotions at work lose their relevance in contrast to our new life-and-death challenges. The explanations we were given by our parents to make sense out of things, though they satisfied our previously superficial inquiries, often come up short in life’s most difficult times. We seek answers to what seems so wrong about life. Why is there suffering? How can a loving God allow this to happen, especially when the victims are innocent children or people who are kind, gentle, and good?
Three years ago I was diagnosed with colon cancer, hospitalized immediately for a colon resection, and subsequently scheduled for blood work or CAT scans at a nearby clinic to be sure it has not returned. I have come to think of my visits as a kind of snooze alarm. As with the alarm clocks so many of us use, we may push the snooze button for a little additional sleep, only to have it go off again in a few minutes. The clinic visits functioned in a very similar way. Every time I sat there waiting for my tests, surrounded by fellow cancer patients – some emaciated, some without hair – my priorities in life were refocused again on what was most important. Suffering is life’s wake up call, and often a blessing in disguise.