The devastation of suffering eclipses the sense of meaning. As Cordelia says at the end of King Lear, “We are not the first who with best meaning have incurred the worst.” People who are sent on to the dark ground of suffering know how all the normal certainties collapse. Painstakingly, you have to begin again to reconstruct some minimal shelter for your burdened heart and your cleft soul. Pain breaks your innocence. It shatters your trust in the world you knew. Now you know how destructive and lonesome life can become. No one shouts for joy when she feels the ground of pain opening beneath her and exclaims, “God, I know exactly why this came now. Is it not wonderful that I am totally miserable? I will carry this for a few weeks. Afterwards, I will be happier than I have ever been.” If you can do that, then it is not suffering at all, or else you have actually broken through to sainthood!
Suffering seems to be a frightening totality. When it comes, it puts you in the place of unknowing. All the old knowing of the conscious mind becomes redundant. The leave-taking of your surface knowing often allows the deeper knowing within you to emerge. The experience of suffering can free a person to be in the world in a completely fresh and vital way. The intention of suffering may be to break the shell of ego with which each of us deftly surrounds ourselves. That we spin a cocoon around ourselves is completely understandable. We are so small and fragile. The universe is too big for us. Our inner worlds are too immense. The possibilities are endless and the dangers too frightening. Even if you had kind parents and a magic childhood, there are still places in your heart that have grown hard in the rough and tumble of experience. There are few people walking through the world without the shell of ego. Suffering makes an incision in that shell and breaks it open, so that a new hidden life within can actually emerge.
Farm life often shows how shells give way to reveal new life. We had hens at home. They would hatch every year. As a child, I always found it fascinating to see the eggs when the little chicks were ready to come out of the shell. At that time, you would hear the tiniest twitter of knocking against the wall of the shell from within. Then ever so slowly, the new little wet chick would force its way out and gradually break the shell that was its womb until then, so that it could come out into the new world which awaited it. Similarly, suffering helps us break the shell of ego from within, enabling us to release a new dimension of ourselves which is now too large and too bright for the small darkness in which it has been growing; it could no longer breathe and live. Real suffering breaks open the smallness within you and liberates you into larger and more hospitable places in life. It enlarges your belonging.