Suffering Meaning

Abstract

If, unlike other forms of knowledge, the experience of God requires that we set aside our egos and all those faculties that feed them— reason, imagination, will, memory, perception—it will inevitably ring itself round with suffering. This is not to say that God demands that we suffer, only that, as we know It better, we inevitably experience a certain withdrawal from the contentments of being and that is painful. However, humans—as Geoffrey Hill once wrote—are dissatisfied unless we feel that there is something seriously at stake, something that hurts. In “Genesis,” Hill insists: “By blood we live, the hot, the cold, / To ravage and redeem the world: / There is no bloodless myth will hold.” We do seem to feel that suffering and meaning are conjoined, “Though Earth has rolled beneath her weight / The bones that cannot bear the light” (5).