The Spiritual Meaning of Suffering
By Vincent Tarantola
To understand the nature of suffering is perhaps the only way out of it. For we seem to cling to the idea that God wants us to suffer, that He enjoys seeing us in pain, or else that
the Creator is indifferent to our cries, to those of us who
are suffering from despair, from loneliness, or even from such physical illnesses as cancer and AIDS. Of course, there are
many other ways in which we suffer, not the least of which is the separation from God. Therefore, in order to understand such a human condition, we need to look at what suffering is and its relationship to God.
I believe the best way to understand this would be to read the parable of the Prodigal Son in the Bible. You may remember that the younger son decided to leave heaven and took with him half his inheritance. He then went out into the world and, instead of putting God's gift to good use, he squandered it
on harlots, as the Bible says. What does this mean to us personally? Well, it has to do with the fact that every human being comes to earth in order to fulfill a special task on behalf of God, of the Spiritual Universe. The trouble is that most of us forget all about such a task the moment we leave home and we become totally absorbed in our own self-gratification, in what today is called partying and having a good time. Although there is nothing inherently wrong with such a pursuit of happiness, the pleasure and satisfactions we receive are short-lived if they make us forget what we came for.
The reason a Divine Spirit becomes human is to bring the Divine into the material, to bring Heaven to earth. To put it another way, if you are working hard at realizing your potentials, then you are doing God's will of bringing light into the darkness and thus filling the void within you. But only too often we forget all about our divine task simply because we get caught up in the business of living, of earning a livelihood,
of raising a family, of having a career, and so forth. There is nothing wrong with such pursuits as long as we realize that they are means by which we learn how to survive in this reality. We have many lessons to learn and it takes many lifetimes to learn them. It's not easy being human, simply because we have left a good part of our innate treasure behind. In other words, only half of our Spirit is with us, so to speak, and we therefore
do not know who we really are, nor do we have available to
us divine qualities that we normally use when we are not incarnated. This means that we have to rely on the ego, on the human mind and will. And this is not sufficient. But we are so separate and so oblivious of our own divine nature that we actually come to believe that we are human and that we will therefore die and cease to exist when our body dies. Most of
us go on this way as long as we have good health and material possessions, or as long as we seem to be getting all we need by relying merely on our human faculties. So where does suffering come in?
Just like the prodigal son, suffering makes the person stop and reverse the direction in which he had been going until now. Whereas before we got sick we did not need God, and therefore did not even think of Him, when we are in pain or when we are afraid or when we are depressed, or feel terribly alone, or simply feel trapped and do not know what to do or whom to turn to, it is precisely then that we are most likely to turn to God and say: God help me. If we say these words silently and humbly into ourselves, in the understanding that God is not outside of us but rather within, then we have taken the first step back home. The return journey has begun. However, knowing human nature, such a path back to God, to the Divine within all of us, seldom if ever seems to begin unless we are suffering or in a crisis, and the more painful and hopeless the pain, or the more apparently insoluble the crisis, the more likely we are to turn inward for help and guidance.
Therefore, those of us who have a so-called terminal illness may or may not be turning inward and asking for help. If you have the humility to set your little ego aside and ask your own inner God to lead you back to health and wholeness, you will have to trust Him more than you do all the doctors and specialists who may assure you that you have no chance, that there is no hope for you, that you will surely die within the time frame they suggest to you.
You have the choice of blaming God for having the power and the authority to inflict suffering and having exercised this power for some unfathomable reason that no one seems to be able to understand or explain, or to use the suffering to learn how to overcome or transcend it once and for all, forever, so that no such suffering will ever again come to you, either in this life or in a future one.
In other words, you can use the suffering to understand yourself and what it is that caused this suffering, what Divine Law you may have broken, what destructive desire you harbor, what hatred lurks in your heart, perhaps unbeknown to your conscious mind.
Since you have been endowed with free will, you can continue to suffer by yourself and shake a fist at the heavens, or you can get on your knees, figurately speaking, and humbly ask God to forgive you for having been so selfish and foolish until now, and tell Him that you are ready to come home. Then you can ask Him to help you in this dangerous journey by sending you one of His angels to lead you and guide you so that you do not lose your way again. For your Father's door is always open, it was opened forever by the Son of the Universe when He came to earth as a man. You are His beloved son and you are never shut out. All you have to do is to say: Father, I want to come home. Please help me. I know that I cannot do it alone. Please send
me one of your helpers.
Then the suffering will begin to subside and you can heal yourself so that when you approach the gates of heaven you are just as whole and healthy as when you left, but now you have learned much and have many stories to tell your friends and
much to contribute to heaven, all the stuff you brought back from your brief excursion to earth.
Therefore, the reason suffering is necessary is because only pain and suffering brings people closer to God. For only then do we turn to Him as a last resort and only because we are in complete despair, just as the prodigal son did.