Suffering, Meaning and Acceptance
By Judy Wood In InsightWhat are we to do when things go badly, when setbacks occur or tragedy strikes? How do we handle it? What happens then? Human survival is based on the meaning we make of our own lives, on the purpose we bring to our own existence. That’s a powerful and essential tool, but recently I think it has been turned from a challenge to a meme. What is out past “choosing” your purpose and “defining” your own narrative?
I discovered Viktor Frankl on the eve of my daughter’s Bat Mitzvah. “Man’s Search for Meaning” was published following Professor Frankl’s internment in several Nazi concentration camps, including Theresienstadt and Auschwitz. A dog-eared copy was in the bookshelf of the cabin we were staying at out on Peak’s Island, out in the middle of Portland’s Harbor. I found myself engrossed. “It’s so very like you to be reading about the Holocaust right now,” was all my wife could say. I saw her point; I can be gloomy on the brightest of days. I tried to explain that I was reading about what Frankl discovered in himself and the others who lived, about the unquenchable power of purpose. “It’s totally appropriate for this moment, what fills the world with purpose more than love?” My wife looked at me, and then up at the heavens. “That’s my Dad,” was all my daughter said, kissing the top of my head.
‘Who are you when you have nothing except your own existence?’ is the question Frankl asked me as I sat reading on a sunny porch, my daughter trying on dresses in the next room. When everything that defines you from the outside has been lost, how do you find the strength to live through the worst of times? I sipped my coffee. His answer is deeply challenging: You still have the freedom to choose to make your life matter. Professor Frankl noticed that survivors always knew that their lives had meaning and purpose, and that truth alone was more powerful than the forces cleaving their lives into pieces. Inspiring, particularly when sitting in an easy chair.
Man’s Search for Meaning inspired me for years. I thought about it during the toughest of times, and it really helped. Horrible as it sounds to say out loud, I am not totally satisfied by this idea the way I used to be. This has nothing to do with Frankl, who remains a hero of mine to this day. Finding the courage to live through the Holocaust absolves him of the need to do anything further in my eyes. My dissatisfaction with Frankl’s tenet is in response to how the idea of purpose has been reduced to a meme. Choose to make your life mean something, and all will be well. If you’re suffering, it’s because you’re not thinking about your life the right way, you made the wrong choices, do the work, buttercup.
Another question began to trouble me: Do we have to suffer in order to create meaning in our lives? Suffering certainly seems unavoidable. If so, how much is enough? The Old Testament answer to suffering was to accept it completely. When Job lost everything, he threw himself on the ground and worshipped. His faith unshakeable, his flocks were restored, and he raised a new family, more beautiful than his first. Job’s grief and anguish were extinguished in the light of a new beginning. Would it were that easy.
The years went by. I’ve been through open heart surgery, the pain of watching my daughter struggle with adolescence, the gradual disappearance that comes from aging and many other difficulties, personal, familial, financial. I’m going through a tough time right now, not comparable to Victor Frankl’s or Job’s of course, but not easy. I do my best to create a narrative that this difficult time has a purpose, that I am learning from this time, that things will work out (even if they don’t, if you get my meaning), that there is a reason beyond my own physical fragility and intellectual limitations, that purpose and faith will get me through. However, that no longer feels like enough to me, negativity and purposeless suffering being out of fashion in America right now. If it seems like you are required to make create meaning, that you have to find a purpose in everything, are you still making a choice?
Fortunately, chance placed another writer in my path. Chris Wiman writes, “One grows so tired, in American public life, of the certitudes and platitudes, the megaphone mouths and stadium praise, influencers and effluencers and the whole tsunami of slop that comes pouring into our lives like toxic sludge.” In one sentence, Prof. Wiman skewers the meme-ified positivity that has permeated American pop culture, and he doesn’t stop there.
In an age where we seem required to make everything mean something, and something wonderful to boot, here’s someone who gives us the strength to simply accept that suffering exists, we’re going to get a chunk of it, and we are not always going to be able to place an inspirational soundtrack behind it. A divinity scholar and minister, Prof. Wiman was diagnosed with a rare form of cancer in his early 30’s. Wiman’s description of his pain is utterly shocking, intimate, and at the same time, gently powerful. His pain is so profound that it completely obliterates all other thoughts or ideas or narratives, it wipes his consciousness of everything except the pain itself. The pain exists whether he accepts it or not, whether he creates a sense of purpose around it or not. For Wiman, acceptance precedes purpose, but what you are accepting is the utter impossibility, the impenetrability of what it means to be alive.
I find this idea completely liberating. I am alive whether I accept that or not, whether I understand that or not whether I find a purpose or a meaning. Freed from the requirement to create meaning, I can just accept my life. Paradoxically, that is what allows me to give my life purpose. Things don’t have to be lessons or metaphors, or part of an over-arching plot line of meaning and purpose and unflagging positivity. Life alone is enough.