No, your suffering isn't noble nor is it meaningful. Unless we make it so...

It’s a very narrow-minded idea that comes out of religion, that all suffering has a purpose. Suffering is just suffering. And after you’ve been through the suffering, perhaps your relationship to the world is changed, and perhaps it isn’t; but suffering shouldn’t be glorified. 

~Andrew Solomon, From The Pause, On Being with Krista Tippett

I've been thinking and writing lately about platitudes, about this idea that suffering has some sort of higher meaning. It's tempting to believe that our pain has a purpose. To accept that sometimes bad things happen just because is to accept chaos in the universe, which means that it can happen again.

I confess I used to believe that, because of childhood trauma, I had somehow met my pain quota. Surely only good things would happen to me because so much bad already had. I had a vague sense of some universal ledger that kept track: good things on one side, bad on the other, until everyone had achieved some sort of balance.

I blush now at my hubris. At my ridiculousness. I mean...the Holocaust! Car accidents that wipe out entire families! Childhood sex abuse! How does any good balance out those horrors? It's nonsensical. And yet, we still want to believe that our pain has a purpose, that our suffering contains something of value.

And perhaps it does. 

But only if we transform it.

The suffering itself is just...suffering. And no amount of good will erase it or balance it out. But though I wouldn't wish it on anyone, it can illuminate our lives. It can, if we let it, give our lives a meaning we might not have considered.

That's not to say we need suffering to make our lives meaningful. Not at all. It is to say, however, that those who've known suffering often find a way to use what they learned in that pain to help themselves and others. It is to say that suffering can become a light we shine forward.

I had a conversation with a friend this morning. Her son, a beautiful boy who'd been abused by his father and became addicted to drugs, continues to live on the streets, usually in a state of psychotic delusion. Nothing will erase my friend's suffering. She continues to ache for the boy she loves. What she has done, however, is extend compassion to other people on the streets. She gathers clothes and food. She supports organizations that offer outreach and medical care to drug addicts and those without homes. Her suffering didn't generate her empathy but it did direct it in a way that helps others and offers some soothing to her own broken heart. Does her suffering have meaning? I don't think so. How can watching a promising child abandon everything to a need for drugs offer meaning? But she has found a way to use her suffering to shine a light forward. She hopes others will do the same so that her son might one day benefit from their kindness.

There is no great meaning to why my husband cheated. He was in pain and he transmitted that pain, hurting so many. He made a stupid stupid choice.

But my own suffering, which I couldn't have imagined when I only heard of others going through infidelity became a light that I could use to shine the way forward for others. There seemed no point to my pain so I made a point of using it, of transforming it. I know so many of you have done the same, from creating local support groups, to reaching out to someone on Twitter who is hurting. It is comes from the same fountain of suffering transformed.

Suffering is just suffering. There are times when we can release it. And there are times when we can put it to work. But it should never be glorified.