The Meaning of Suffering: Part XI

Jul 05, 2007 02:40 PM

Pearl: I am indebted to Frimet Roth and David Evanier for describing so accurately the enormity and incomprehensibility of human suffering, and for pointing out the tendency of our culture to ignore its true magnitude.

To maintain our sanity in the face of such incomprehensibility, the human mind seeks to find "meaning" in suffering. But what do we mean by "meaning", and why is it that "finding meaning" makes suffering less painful? In a scientific sense, "finding meaning" means finding ways of embedding an event in a cognitive context capable of generating a rich set of expectations. Those expectations are comforting because they make the future appear less bewildering, hence more manageable. A God-governed universe is one such context, social Darwinism is another.

In adapting this secular view of meaning, I have almost committed the sin that Fr. Maurice called "downsizing God to what I can understand of him", but not exactly. Even when we succeed in finding a comfortable cognitive context, say a God-governed universe, in which to embed human suffering, there is still no guarantee that the context will be consistent with other contexts stored in our mind, hence, that we can fully "understand" God, nature, man, justice and other such concepts.

Our mind is a society of contexts which often contradict each others and constantly compete with each other for our attention. For example, the idea of an omnipotent and omniscient Almighty contradicts the idea of free will, yet most of the time we live happily with this contradiction and, like the particle-wave duality in quantum mechanics, we manage to use the right model at the right time for the right purpose. Likewise, the idea that God is everywhere contradicts my unshaken belief that God was not present in the Sbarro restaurant where Malki was murdered.

These contradictions prevent us from ever "downsizing God to what we can understand of him" but, on the other hand, they enable us to elevate God to a meaningful and contradiction-free level of a cognitive resource; perhaps an indispensable one, but still only a resource. The fact that I know that He is merely a cognitive instrument does not make Him a lesser God, or less holy, and it does not make our suffering less meaningful. My cognitive God still governs our lives with beauty, wisdom and compassion.

And now that we have delved into this mood of divine rationality (or is it secular spirituality?) I would like to tell Frimet that I have visited Malki’s website, and I have found God shining from her face with unbearable intensity. I have embraced her warmly and told her where she can find Danny up there. I am sure they will find comfort in each other company, and may we all be blessed by their shining goodness and humanity. Amen.