Finding Comfort in the Truth of Suffering

Darlene was a beloved hospice patient whose heart stopped beating the day after her 101st birthday. As her chaplain, I visited her regularly during the eight months she was with us, and we became very fond of each other. Save for some short-term memory loss, her mind was still sharp. She was a devout Baptist, always had been. When tired of talking, she would ask me to read the Bible and pray with her. 

Darlene had a lot of stories to tell, and she told them well, with a fierce sense of humor and a knack for irony. A coal miner’s daughter, she had grown up during the Great Depression in the dirt-poor hollers of white Appalachian Virginia. A couple of years back, she had moved to an assisted living facility in our area to be closer to her only surviving child, nearly 80 herself. Darlene’s three other children had died, as had her six siblings and several grandchildren. Cirrhosis had killed her husband some forty years earlier. I could not begin to wrap my mind around the sheer enormity of her losses.

Trials like hers often put a believer’s faith to the test, but, it seemed, not Darlene’s. “God is good, all the time, every time,” she would say. “He answers all our prayers.” She would find comfort in talking about the hereafter and the promise of reuniting with the many loved ones who had preceded her in death. One day I asked her what she would do when she got to heaven and found herself in the presence of the Lord. “Ask him a question,” she answered without hesitation. “What question is that?” Darlene grasped my hands, sat up straight in her bed, and leaned toward me. “I’ll ask him why,” she declared with a surge of power and distress. Her eyes were pouring into mine, and her words seemed to rise from a wellspring of sorrow. “Why? Why? Why?” before falling back, exhausted, onto her cushions. She was crying.

The question with no answer. If God is good, why is there so much suffering? Why does God let it happen? Why does God make it happen, most noticeably in the Hebrew Bible (not to discount John the Baptist’s beheading or Jesus’s crucifixion, but there is an awful lot of wholesale slaughter in Act I)? I could only sit with Darlene in silence, holding hands, breathing and caring. Imagining her beloved Jesus streaming healing light into her worn-out, woeful heart until she slept. It was the only time she gave voice to her anguish in my presence. 

During my years as an interfaith chaplain, I have heard this question and its variants countless times. “I want to believe that God is perfect, but if God is perfect and we are his creation, why are we so cruel? I never have been able to make sense of it,” says Rose, 98, a friend whose trust in divine goodness has been shaky ever since her brother fell in WWII’s Bataan Death March. Rose has lived a charmed life, yet she is acutely aware of the trials of those less fortunate, and it distresses her deeply that God doesn’t seem to favor them.

Some people are struck by the abundance of loss and agony in their own lives, others are thinking of people they know or of the conflicts and disasters that overwhelm our aching, embattled world. And each and every time I hear a theological why, I am grateful to have the truth of suffering firmly embedded in my life. 

Why? Because of ignorance, clinging, karma. Why? Because of unquestioningly subscribing to the reality of what is experienced. Why? Because of causes and conditions. Why? Because of buying into duality, dividing the perceived world into friend and enemy, acting on the emotions that arise from this tacit categorization, and perpetuating the cycle. Why? Because of attachment to the ephemeral. Why? Because suffering is simply part of this grand illusion of birth, aging, sickness, and death.

It may seem counterintuitive, but I find it to be a colossal relief that this is simply how things are. That our allotment of joys, challenges, and misfortunes doesn’t depend on our ability to please a higher power. Instead of what did I/they do to offend him? (it’s almost always a “him”), I have an opportunity to explore how the four noble truths—suffering and its causes; liberation and its causes—can inform my life.

After college, decades ago, a high school friend and I met in a bar, and I told her over drinks that I thought I might become a Buddhist. “Oh, how depressing!” she said. “All they think about is suffering.” My dharma-related readings and conversations hadn’t prepared me for this—the authors I’d read and the acquaintances I’d spoken with who knew something about the subject weren’t gloomy or pessimistic. Gifted with an ever-unruly mind, I was more interested in the stability that meditation purportedly offered than in doctrine. I soon learned that the Pali word dukkha, the star of the first noble truth, refers to pretty much everything we don’t want, from the vaguely unsatisfactory to the excruciating. I didn’t buy it at first; I wasn’t ready to let go of the happy ending to my samsaric story.

Now, after years of delving into the teachings and trying to apply them, I’ve come not only to accept the first noble truth but also to appreciate the space this gives me. It isn’t that I don’t rebel against suffering—physical, emotional, spiritual, planetary; mine, yours, theirs—and wish it would cease. Of course I do. When my body decides that its language is pain. When those I love stumble, are unwell, die. With every whine of a chainsaw and crack of a felled tree, with every patient who feels abandoned by God, with every image of war zone hell and every human-inflicted wound. Yet, at the same time, once I’ve embraced the relative, fundamental truth of suffering and its inevitability (at least until all clinging has ceased), I find it possible, sometimes, to stay grounded through the unexpected and the unwelcome. I can relax and breathe, mourn and breathe, connect and breathe. 

As Sharon Salzberg reminds us, 

“We don’t want to let our suffering, and the suffering intrinsic to being a human being, define and overtake us either. Therein lies our work. So how do we do it? . . . For a start, it helps to recognize that for many of us, a dominant cultural attitude toward pain is that it’s something to be avoided, denied, ‘treated.’ As a result, it can be particularly tough for people—including me—to acknowledge painful emotions. Simply recognizing and accepting suffering is a huge first step. Second, remember that this truth, that some things just hurt, is universal. That means that no matter what, we are not alone.”

In a deep way, living in an age where wholesale destruction has become de rigueur, it is this truth that keeps me in balance and inspires me to try to help. We’re in this together. I can work on changing myself and the world, if I choose to, without expecting miracles. I can, as prescribed in the Dhammapada, strive to eschew negative actions, practice genuine goodness, and tame and train my mind. 

While I can and do ruminate on my own whys—Why am I still anything but enlightened even though I’ve been at this dharma stuff for ages? Why are habits so tenacious despite the occasional deep and convincing glimpse into their lack of substance? Why do I find the familiarity of illusion more alluring than the freedom of truth? Why do I waste time when there’s no time to waste? to name a very few—the first noble truth, the truth of suffering, puts my questions in their rightful place. What matters most just now may not be why but how. Sometimes life hurts. How can I maintain an open heart? Beings I love are struggling. How can I help? Attachment’s final word is separation. How can I love, knowing that it will require letting go? The end of this particular journey is death. How do I prepare? 

As a hospice chaplain and a Buddhist, this last is an inescapable question. But when I asked a local Baptist pastor if members of his congregation might be interested in talking about “preparing for dying”—a conversation I’ve been offering and leading in different contexts within the greater community for years—his answer was a definitive no. “Chaplain White,” he replied, “Thank you for the offer, but I would be surprised if any of my parishioners would want to talk about that. After all, death is the enemy.”

Is it? In the last few weeks there have been deaths in his church community, in our neighborhoods, and among those near and very dear to me. It doesn’t take a cataclysm or a global tragedy to hammer home the truths of impermanence, death, and suffering, and to remind me to breathe and connect. When I approach death as an enemy and suffering as an anomaly, then I am always at loggerheads with reality. This rejection gives the unwelcome even greater emotional heft.

Right this moment, I am able to listen to, think about, and practice the teachings whenever I choose. Wow! I rejoice in this, all while knowing it won’t last.

On the other hand, if I don’t rely on things going well, I can appreciate it even more when they do. Thich Nhat Hanh reflected that only when a toothache has come and gone can we fully appreciate the immense well-being associated with not having a toothache. Right this moment, no one I love is actively dying. Wow! When my friend died recently, it was very painful. Right this moment, I don’t have a broken arm (or a toothache). Wow! I had one a few months ago, and it was very painful. Right this moment, I am able to listen to, think about, and practice the teachings whenever I choose. Wow! I rejoice in this, all while knowing it won’t last.

One day, not long ago, feeling glum and achy, Rose wanted to talk about the state of the world, and politics, and ignorance, and how she had grown up during the rise of fascism in Europe, and how heartbreaking it all was. I suggested that her keen awareness of suffering and compassionate heart would make a good Buddhist of her. Though she had traveled in Asia, the images she had of Buddhism were limited to temples and gardens and the Dalai Lama, she said. What did Buddhists believe, if not in God? So I began a sketch of the Buddha’s story and his first public teaching, the four noble truths. Rose listened attentively, then stopped me at the truth of suffering. “Oh, how depressing!” she said, and burst out laughing.