When Life Hurts... / Responding Well to Suffering in a Life Worth Living

The world is full of suffering. But it’s hard to talk about.

Whatever we might say about what it would be for life to go well or feel as it should, we know that quite often it doesn’t. What we hope for, doesn’t come to pass. However we might hope to feel, other experiences fill our lives: Loss; Pain; Betrayal; Injustice; Violence.

We suffer at the hands of others. We suffer simply because we’re fragile creatures in a big and sometimes dangerous world.

Whatever its cause, suffering raises at least two really important questions: First, how should we respond to suffering we can relieve or eliminate? Second, how should live with the suffering that inevitably remains? We’ll start with that first question here.

Lecturer at Yale College and Life Worth Living Director, Matt Croasmun asks what sort of response to each other’s suffering would be worthy of our shared humanity? in this this chapter-by-chapter video curriculum series based on his bestselling book (with Ryan McAnnally-Linz and Miroslav Volf), Life Worth Living: A Guide to What Matters Most.

Transcript

‍It’s hard to want to talk about suffering. But the world is full of it.

Whatever we might say about what it would be for life to go well or feel as it should, we know that quite often it doesn’t. What we hope for, doesn’t come to pass. However we might hope to feel, other experiences fill our lives: Loss; Pain; Betrayal; Injustice; Violence.

We suffer at the hands of others. We suffer simply because we’re fragile creatures in a big and sometimes dangerous world.

Whatever its cause, suffering raises at least two really important questions: First, how should we respond to suffering we can relieve or eliminate? Second, how should live with the suffering that inevitably remains? We’ll start with that first question here.

And, well, a simple—but at the same time radical—response to the question of how to respond to suffering is that we should do something about it. If someone is hungry, feed them. If someone is sick, give them medicine. If someone is poor, give them money. Some say it’s that simple.

The radical part of that simple answer is this: the world is full of this sort of suffering. And if we commit ourselves to helping we will quickly realize that we could fill many, many lifetimes and barely make a dent. That in itself isn’t necessarily a reason not to help. It just means it’s hard.

Or maybe we should, as the saying goes, stop just rescuing drowning children and instead prevent them from falling in the water in the first place. Maybe taking suffering seriously requires social, political, or economic change. Maybe it requires changing our governments.

Or maybe it most of all requires changing the hearts of those who govern.

Or perhaps our universally shared experience of suffering requires all this but also more: a spiritual awakening not just of leaders, but of all of us, awakening to the fact that we belong to one another in our shared suffering.

It’s hard to want to think about suffering. But here we are. What do you think? What sort of response to each other’s suffering would be worthy of our shared humanity?