John Paul II held that suffering can carry meaning while remaining a mystery

Can suffering carry any meaning once it can no longer be avoided? John Paul II took up that question in Salvifici Doloris, where he acknowledges pain as a mystery but also examines the interior change that can take place in someone who discovers his suffering united to Christ.

The question of meaning is central to John Paul II's whole reflection. For John Paul II, a person does not simply undergo suffering but needs to understand it. When he suffers he asks about its cause, its purpose and, finally, its meaning. That search can make the experience even more painful when no satisfactory answer comes.

The need to find a meaning in suffering

John Paul II begins from a distinction he regards as deeply human. A person knows that he is suffering and asks "why?" He wants to know not only what caused his pain but what it is for and what significance it can have. "It is a question about the cause, the reason; a question about the purpose (what for); in short, about the meaning," he writes.

The absence of an answer can deepen the suffering itself. "Only man, when he suffers, knows that he is suffering and asks why; and he suffers in a humanly speaking still deeper way if he does not find a satisfactory answer," John Paul II writes. The search for meaning is not a reflection added from outside, then, but a question that arises within the experience of pain.

John Paul II does not set out to offer an explanation that resolves every case of suffering intellectually. He says plainly that "suffering [...] is always a mystery," and he acknowledges "the insufficiency and inadequacy of our explanations." The meaning Salvifici Doloris speaks about does not necessarily consist in discovering why each particular misfortune happened.

Can suffering change a person?

One possibility John Paul II already finds in the revelation of the Old Testament is that certain experiences of suffering can become a call to transformation. Writing about punishment and conversion, he says suffering can open the possibility of "rebuilding the good" in a person.

That approach moves beyond a purely punitive view. Punishment would have meaning not simply because one evil must be answered with another, but because it can create an occasion for recovering the good. John Paul II finds there a dimension that is not limited to justice but opens onto love.

Salvifici Doloris takes the possibility much further when it turns to the Christian experience of suffering. John Paul II asks what happens interiorly when a person discovers his pain within the mystery of Christ. He then describes a process that can lead to deep spiritual maturity.

Strength that can be born in weakness

John Paul II finds one of the deepest expressions of that change in the letters of St. Paul. Paul had suffered a great deal himself, and yet came to discover in his sufferings a strength that did not come simply from himself.

John Paul II recalls Paul's words: "My grace is sufficient for you, for power is made perfect in weakness." And Paul's answer: "I will all the more gladly boast of my weaknesses, that the power of Christ may rest upon me."

For John Paul II, those words describe a paradox. The weakness does not necessarily disappear, but within it a different strength can be discovered. A person can come to recognize that the strength of Christ is at work precisely where he meets his own limits.

John Paul II even speaks of a particular interior "strength" that draws a person closer to Christ and shows itself gradually in the midst of trials. Suffering does not automatically stop hurting; what can change is the person's relationship with what he is living through.

Discovering that suffering can have value

John Paul II describes this process as a discovery. Someone who shares in the sufferings of Christ can gradually come to understand that his own pain is not necessarily empty of meaning. He writes of people who, after an interior search, find "interior peace and even spiritual joy."

That joy does not come from suffering considered in itself. Salvifici Doloris does not present pain as desirable. John Paul II places it from the start within the human experience of evil. What changes is what a person can discover when his suffering is united to Christ.

Joy can arise precisely from the discovery of meaning, he says. The person goes on suffering, but he can stop experiencing his suffering as something entirely useless.

The change finds a particularly strong expression in St. Paul, who says: "Now I rejoice in my sufferings for your sake." John Paul II calls those words one of the great testimonies of the Christian understanding of suffering.

How can there be joy when a person is suffering?

Paul's statement raises an apparent contradiction. How can anyone rejoice in what makes him suffer? John Paul II says the source of that joy is not the pain but the discovery of its significance.

Suffering remains suffering. But Paul discovers that through it he can share in the sufferings of Christ, and that this sharing can take on a value for others. That is why he can speak of his sufferings "for your sake."

John Paul II says this experience can change the sufferer interiorly. A person discovers another dimension of his existence precisely where he seemed to meet nothing but his own weakness.

Spiritual joy appears, then, not because the pain has gone, but because the suffering is no longer experienced only as useless and absurd.

Suffering as a path to interior maturity

John Paul II uses one particular phrase for what can happen in this process: "spiritual maturity." Suffering can become a place where a person discovers his own limits and, at the same time, a new relationship with Christ.

That maturity, he says, is the fruit of a particular conversion and of cooperation with grace. The person does not necessarily receive an intellectual explanation of everything happening to him, but he can experience a change in the way he lives it.

Paul serves again as the point of reference. His trials do not disappear, but in them he discovers that the strength of Christ can show itself precisely in weakness. Hence his words: "When I am weak, then I am strong."

For John Paul II, this experience shows that suffering can conceal a particular call to virtue and perseverance. The person who suffers faces something that demands endurance and, at times, a deep interior rebuilding.

Does this mean suffering is good?

Salvifici Doloris does not identify suffering with the good. John Paul II starts from the link between suffering and evil: a person suffers when he experiences an evil. The change he describes does not turn that evil into something desirable in retrospect, and it does not require anyone to call pain good in itself.

The question is what can come out of it. In Christ, John Paul II finds the possibility that suffering, without ceasing to be painful, enters a new order. In the Passion, he writes, suffering "has been united to love," and that union is what makes it possible to understand how good can come from an experience marked by evil.

That is also how he views the suffering of the Christian. Its value comes not simply from enduring pain, but from the relationship that can be established between that suffering, Christ and love.

A meaning that is discovered, not an explanation that removes the mystery

John Paul II keeps one distinction to the end. Finding a meaning in suffering does not mean having an explanation for each particular pain. He continues to hold that suffering is a mystery and that human explanations fall short.

What Salvifici Doloris proposes is that a person can discover something new within that mystery. Suffering can become a place of transformation, of spiritual maturity and of encounter with a strength that, in Paul's words, shows itself precisely in weakness.

So for John Paul II the Christian answer does not consist in saying that suffering is good. It consists in discovering that even what a person experiences as evil need not be left without meaning when it is lived in union with Christ.

The pain remains, and so does part of the mystery. But a person can discover that his suffering does not have to be useless. In that interior change, John Paul II finds one of the deepest dimensions of the Christian meaning of suffering.