Is Suffering Inevitable?

Death, taxes, and hippies espousing mindfulness...

Photo by Jimmy Conover on Unsplash

When I was pregnant with my first child, I signed up for what turned out to be a childbirth class run by hippies. In between talk of the “birth fairy” and assurances that women’s bodies instinctually knew how to give birth (in which case, why the class?), the instructor would pass around a bowl of ice. We were supposed to each take a handful and hold onto it as long as we possibly could. I’d watch my skin redden and track the sensations as they moved from cool, to cold, to Oh-shit-really-I-need-to-put-this-ice-down-right-now, all while the instructor told us about the difference between pain and suffering. See, pain in childbirth was inevitable, but suffering was optional. I guess this was based on some watered-down Buddhist philosophy, but the difference was lost on me: suffering vs. pain? They both sounded pretty bad!

What I wanted, what I’ve always wanted, was a way out of suffering. Maybe it’s a character flaw, (call it my “inner Karen”) but I’ve long believed that all suffering could be mitigated, we just needed to find the right solution. When faced with suffering, my first instinct is either to speak to the manager or to throw something in my Amazon cart which could surely prevent just this sort of thing from happening in the future—special ear plugs that will make loud noises less annoying, a special lid that will prevent my children from smearing toothpaste all over the bathroom.

I’m far from alone in this regard. In her excellent newsletter for The Cut, Kathryn Jezer-Morton wrote on the occasion of losing her parents:

“Capitalism infantilizes us by suggesting that we can evade suffering by making a series of ‘smart choices,’ and adult orphanhood as an identity marker rings childish in the same way: Did you think you could avoid it?…we live in a spiritual vacuum that precludes any real philosophical entanglement with mortality…”

That question haunts me: did you think you could avoid it? Did you think suffering was meant for someone else, not you? It feels silly to admit it, but yes, yes I did! Maybe it’s my white, middle-class privilege, maybe it’s the way our culture valorizes “problem solvers,” maybe it was the way modern Evangelicalism fails to deal with the problem of suffering.

When I was a kid, divine intervention was deemed not only necessary but likely, whether it was praying for a convenient parking spot or a successful term paper. If I ever doubted God’s power to deliver me from these small sufferings, I needed look no further than the Bible, or those sitting in the pews next to me, who could testify to God’s daily “miracles.”

But when my mother fell into a mysterious illness just before I left for college, no miracle came. I prayed like I’d never prayed before. I attended special worship times in our student ministry coordinator’s dorm room, where I sang and cried and begged God to heal her. It felt like if I could be faithful enough, or ask in the right way, then God must answer. I would’ve traded in all the good grades and parking spots for the rest of my life just for her to be well.

When it didn’t happen, none of the canned Christian answers about “God’s plan” made me feel any better. Either I had failed, or God had. And when I later learned the depths of my family’s substance use disorder, I felt even more betrayed by God. What had I done to deserve this? Hadn’t I sacrificed my own desires to be a good Christian? For all my troubles, I was repaid in canceled Thanksgivings and drunken voicemails.

I’m not alone in encountering The Problem of Evil as an obstacle to faith. Why do bad things happen to good people? And isn’t the suffering of innocent people incompatible with the idea of an all-powerful, all-good God? These issues around suffering are what I’d like to spend the month of May thinking about. (Yeah, maybe it’s sunny where you live, but in Seattle it’s 50 degrees and STILL RAINING, so WELCOME TO SUFFERING, FOLKS.)

To better understand suffering, I turned to Dr. Scott Samuelson’s Seven Ways of Looking at Pointless Suffering. In the book’s intro, Samuelson identifies three primary ways of dealing with suffering:

1. forget it (aka denial)

2. fix it

3. face it

Those of us who love addicts will be intimately acquainted with denial—I don’t have to make any scary changes if I just ignore it’s happening! But have we examined the implications of our modern, American, capitalist obsession with fixing suffering? Do our ever-expanding technologies delude us into thinking we can escape every moldy strawberry and cure all cancers? One day, you and everyone you love will die.

Did you think you could escape it?

As bleak as that sounds, there are upsides to facing suffering, from great art to universal compassion, which we’ll also talk about this month. I have some exciting interviews lined up, and if you’d like a deeper dive, feel free to read along with Seven Ways of Looking at Pointless Suffering and shoot me your thoughts/questions.

For the record, I did escape the pains of labor, thanks to a stubbornly positioned baby and the miracle of modern medicine that is a planned c-section with a spinal block. Though after the anesthesia wore off, I still felt like I’d been hit by a truck. Maybe pain is inevitable?

Journaling/Discussion Questions:

• Do you think there’s a difference between pain and suffering? How so/why not?

• Which of the three ways of dealing with suffering (forget it, fix it, face it) do you tend towards?

• What’s the dumbest thing you’ve ever bought in an attempt to fix/prevent suffering?