Issue #1 Winter 2002
What Value in Suffering?
by Robert Fink
We are chosen. Who would choose to say, “Be careful,” to your only daughter as she cuts her phone call short; she must hang up; she’s got to run; they are boarding for the flight home to you, still waiting two hours later after every passenger and flight attendant and pilot has emerged from the mouth of the gaping, contractible tunnel to be welcomed by friends, sweethearts, and smiling parents? Who would take the hand of your pre-school child and enter the day-care center cheerful as primary colors and kiss his cheek and say, “Okay, give me one more hug,” not yet realizing these are words you will never forget after a colleague at work stops you in the hall to say there’s been a special bulletin..., an as-yet-unidentified man with a semi-automatic? Who would grow old and alone and trusting? Who would dare announce to the nurse at the reception desk you’ve come for your routine physical? Who is strong enough to inch the rubber band, tight as a tourniquet, off this morning’s newspaper?
We will all come to know, first-hand, suffering. God willing, we may learn its redemptive value. Viktor Frankl learned it in the Auschwitz and Dachau concentration camps:
If there is a meaning in life at all, then there must be a meaning in suffering. Suffering is an ineradicable part of life, even as fate and death. Without suffering and death human life cannot be complete.
The way in which a man accepts his fate and all the suffering it entails, the way in which he takes up his cross, gives him ample opportunity--even under the most difficult circumstances--to add a deeper meaning to his life. . . .Here lies the chance for a man either to make use of or to forgo the opportunities of attaining the moral values that a difficult situation may afford him. And this decides whether he is worthy of his sufferings or not. (Frankl 76)
Frankl explains in his book Man’s Search For Meaning that those who retained their dignity in the midst of such a bestial existence did so by making “a fundamental change” in their “attitude toward life” (85). They had to learn for themselves and had “to teach the despairing men” this lesson: “it did not really matter what we expected from life, but rather what life expected from us” (85). They had to stop asking about “the meaning of life” and, instead, think of themselves as “those who were being questioned by life--daily and hourly” (85). Their answer came “not in talk and meditation, but in right action and in right conduct” (85). “Life,” for Frankl, “ultimately meant taking the responsibility to find the right answer to its problems and to fulfill the tasks which it constantly sets for each individual” (85).
Frankl believed that for each of us, this “right answer” is not a collective one, but uniquely private. It is what we have heard in speeches all our lives and have mostly ignored until discovered for ourselves as indeed we come to travel that road no one else can walk for us, wearing those shoes no one else can wear. It is what we learn suiting up, one pants’ leg at a time, what we discover placing one foot in front of the other. We are all crossing the valley of the shadow.
Because the journey differs from person to person, and from moment to moment, Frankl said it is “impossible to define the meaning of life in a general way” (85): “No man and no destiny can be compared with any other man or any other destiny. No situation repeats itself, and each situation calls for a different response” (85). Frankl saw “only one right answer to the problem posed by the situation at hand” (86). Should the uniqueness of that situation be in its suffering, then suffering should “become a task” on which we do “not want to turn our backs” (86). We must realize “its hidden opportunities for achievement” (86): “When a man finds that it is his destiny to suffer, he will have to accept his suffering as his task; his single and unique task. He will have to acknowledge the fact that even in suffering he is unique and alone in the universe. No one can relieve him of his suffering or suffer in his place. His unique opportunity lies in the way in which he bears his burden” (86). Reading Frankl in my cushioned Boston rocker in my large, corner office with its north and east windows, its walnut desk and matching file cabinet, the ficus stretching to the twelve-foot ceiling, it is easy to nod Yes as if I, too, have survived Auschwitz, as if I have earned Frankl’s philosophy.
The Bible says I should not be afraid though “the earth be in turmoil,” its mountains tumbling “into the depths of the sea,” its waters roaring (Psalm 46, The New Jerusalem Bible). When I stumble and fall, I should “hope in Yahweh,” regaining my strength, sprouting “wings like eagles” (Isaiah 40: 30-32). I am assured that when I run, I “will not grow weary”; when I walk, I “will never tire” (Isaiah 40: 33-34). But these days when I run, when I walk, the bones in my knees grind like clinched teeth. God help me, I am no Isaiah, no Job; my shredded cartilage is no Auschwitz.
Who would be Frankl? Who would be God? Who could bear the supplications of children? When a blood vessel pops in the brain almost simultaneous with the child’s raising his hand to say he has a headache, will parents and the child’s teacher, the child’s classmates, embrace their opportunity for suffering? Why is it always a third-grader, the one who brings his lunch and is not ashamed of the cold tamales and sliced tomatoes, is happy with his mother and her boyfriend, can hardly wait each Sunday morning for the church bus to transport him to the children’s service of the Assemblies of God store-front worship center? What of the elementary school counselor comforting the parents, the children who did not die and previously only knew that pets went to heaven, the classroom teacher who cannot bear the empty desk? What does the counselor’s husband learn when his wife stands in the doorway to his cozy office in the early afternoon, her mascara smudged wet and dark beneath her eyes as if she’s been in a fight, her speech ponderous, her right hand extended toward the nearest piece of designer furniture? How could Frankl have known at Auschwitz, at Dachau, his was a valuable experience?
It is, of course, much easier to explain Frankl’s paradox that suffering is what we have in common and what makes us unique, than to live it. Physical, emotional, and spiritual despair reduce us to a number tattooed into our skin--just another pitiful person wailing at a world of vanities. Heads shaved, emaciated, naked, we all, except for physiological gender differences, look pretty much the same. It requires a perceptive eye to spot our uniqueness, and most of us are staring at our feet. Will you lift your head and look for me? Will I do the same for you, not to compare pain, but to share what bonds us through suffering, acknowledging what each of us needs to recognize about ourselves and our fellow humans by means of such human grace? Viktor Frankl believed that when the “impossibility of replacing a person is realized, it allows the responsibility which a man has for his existence and its continuance to appear in all its magnitude” (87). If we know the “why” for our existence, we will be able to “bear almost any ‘how’” (88). This sounds like something silk-screened on a tee shirt. I’m thankful Frankl included the word almost.
Who would be Job? Not just because of his loss of fields and family, not just because of the suppurating sores, the friends whole and judgmental, but because he knew God could do anything, and Job did not deserve it. How many of us can do more than whine, curse God, and die? And not knowing the exact agony of the apostle Paul’s mysterious “thorn in the flesh,” would we chance his daily endurance toward sainthood? Even the Son of God came to know what suffering means. The Bible says Jesus prayed to be spared the cross but accepted his fate, his calling. Was he fully human when he cried out, “My God, why have you forsaken me?”
Henry David Thoreau, in his book Walden, explains why he built a cabin in the woods surrounding Walden Pond and lived there two years and two months: “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived” (81). Like Frankl, Thoreau understood that learning from life meant meeting life and living it no matter how “mean” it is (292). In a talk he gave in the dark of the camp barracks, Frankl admonished both himself and his fellow sufferers not to lose hope but “keep their courage in the certainty that the hopelessness of our struggle did not detract from its dignity and its meaning” (90). Thoreau said he learned “this, at least, by [his] experiment: that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours” (288). Thoreau was turned down by the only woman he asked to marry him. He never fully recovered from the death of his brother. Frankl’s wife, his father and mother, and his brother died in the camps or “were sent to the gas ovens” (Frankl 7). Frankl knew what it meant to survive and then return home “to find that the person who should open the door was not there, and would never be there again” (Frankl 99).
We know that dreams and people can be lost. Who will come to our rescue? Are we better off alone and desperate? Like poet James Wright’s Saint Judas, when we come upon the traveler beaten by robbers and left for dead, and we interrupt our own suffering to hold the man “for nothing” in our arms (56), will we also be saved? Don’t each of us dream of Thoreau’s life of creative and spiritual fulfillment? What happens when Frankl’s suffering fills our days and nights, and we can’t seem to get beyond “the mental agony caused by the injustice, the unreasonableness of it all” (36)?
Consider my friend John the high-country backpacker seized by synapses, incoming messages overloading Saturday night, 9:17 p.m., between the canyon-steep aisles of K-Mart department store where John lies sparking on the cement floor as other shoppers gather to place a rolled up sport coat beneath his neck, dab the spit from the corners of his mouth, and say, “There, there,” trying to catch one fly-away hand to pat it while they wait. Consider Frances in her retirement-living apartment, her feet so far away she’s forgotten she used to take them for granted slipping one into a stirrup and following the other up and over the saddle to settle into such symmetry you’d think her the poster beauty of cowgirls. And the seventh grader in a distant state who has almost adjusted to the move, almost completed the first day of school when her mother comes to the principal’s office to wait for her daughter to ask, “Mom, what’s wrong?” before explaining how the middle-schooler’s father, separated in Texas, had called in sick, and the next day when he hadn’t shown up by 10:00, his cafeteria staff informed a university official who sent a campus policeman to the new Food Service Director’s rent house to knock on the door and, receiving no response, circle the house trying to see in the windows and then after calling for further instructions, force the lock. And all the white and blue collar workers, anonymous shirts, laid off to save billions for profit-sharing corporations. And the man sitting on the steps of the downtown post office. And the man selling Sunday newspapers at the intersection, faithful in all weather. And the woman who can’t read the legal notice explaining everything. And the father whose son is uncomfortable. And the wife who has taken to working out every day in the gym. And the pastor. The T.V. meteorologist. The unmarried Latin teacher. The veteran shortstop called off by the rookie left fielder. My friend John who two years ago was as hale and handsome as you.
When we learn what it means to be human, are we less likely to make easy pronouncements, sweeping generalities about the collective meaning of our lives? Can we, instead, appreciate the uniqueness, the power in each individual’s striving toward a definition of self-worth and love and responsibility in a world of beauty and suffering? Will we have the courage and faith, the stamina not to despair, not to succumb to our personal, inevitable suffering?
Works Cited
Frankl, Viktor. Man’s Search For Meaning: An Introduction To Logotherapy. 3rd ed. New York:
Simon & Schuster, 1984.
Thoreau, Henry David. Walden and Other Writings. New York: Modern, 1981.
Wright, James. “Saint Judas.” Saint Judas. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan UP, 1959. 56.
©2002 Robert Fink
Robert Fink directs the creative writing program at Hardin-Simmons University in Abilene, Texas. His literary nonfiction essays have appeared recently in River Teeth, The Texas Review, The Houston Chronicle’s Sunday supplement magazine “Texas” & The Cortland Review.