What doesn't kill you makes you suffer. And suffering?

What good does suffering do? I got in a Twittersation about that the other day, which was initiated by this quote:

"When injustice proliferates in the world it's not that God is absent; it's that God is inviting us to step up" @YUNews' Pres. Richard Joel

— Sarah Mulhern (@On1Foot_) February 22, 2012

But what about the person suffering, I responded. Do they want such an invitation?

To which there came a response:

@zacksholem @YUNews I think it's not the people suffering being told to step up, but other people, hopefully motivates them to do something.

— Sarah Mulhern (@On1Foot_) February 22, 2012

 

We all suffer in greater or lesser measure, because we all know illness and death – if not now, then soon. But my suffering is not yours. I cannot tell you what lesson you are supposed to learn from your suffering because I can never inhabit it fully. I can try and comfort you,  telling you what I have learned from my own experiences, but instructing you what you should learn from yours is presumptuous in the extreme.

When a community suffers, however, something different happens. Experiences are transmuted into group reflection, and the private obscurities of one's own suffering (was it something I did?) are subsumed in broader expression. Even if tradition's moral claims (to the extent that the tradition can speak with a single voice) can often not stand by themselves, the individual might learn something from the group's suffering.

This "something learned" is not a truth or moral message (we don't need suffering for that: I can see that there is imperfection, evil, illness, and death in the world without having to suffer it myself) but the wisdom of others, the knowledge that my experiences partake of a broader human experience. Shared pain is not a lesser pain but different, expressed in a group vocabulary – another genre to be added to the library of emotional strategies.