What is the purpose of suffering? Of feeling
pain far in excess of what is needed to keep us from
injury? Many years ago I went on a
snorkeling trip to
Isla Espiritu Santo out of
La Paz, in
Baja California. I had too
close of an encounter with a patch of
fire coral!! The
pain was intense and I was stunned to the point that I feared I would
drown!! After dragging myself to the
surface, I got my
friends to pull me over the side of the wooden boat we'd rented. I flopped like a caught
fish, gasping from the
burning that pulsed through my
hands,
shoulders,
stomach and
chest.
I had by then long since settled on
pandeism as my guiding
spiritual principle, but as I lay there I wondered, why a thinking, designing
Creator -- especially one destined to share in our sensations -- would create a
Universe where such pain would be possible. The
secretions of the fire coral, though
dangerous in large
doses, were not so deadly that my
body should go so far to
warn me away from such contact. The burning persisted for days, gradually declining, but forever marking my
memory with that
moment.
As I healed I came to realize that some suffering lets us know the
blessing of the time when we are not suffering. The Creator that became the Universe did so in order to experience those things that it could not know -- not only pleasure for its own sake, but the pleasure of overcoming pain, even of escaping from suffering in the final
surrender that comes with
death. I was grateful that, over all those hours that I suffered from the fire coral burns, it touched only one
surface of my body. Laying on my back on cool
sheets helped ward off the pain.
Many look back on their painful experiences as psychic
scars, shuddering to relive them but forever forgetting to cast a relative eye on their current and future
circumstances. I revel in the fact that I was burned by fire coral precisely because this was a moment of
revelation, a
breakthrough. I revel because I healed; those parts of me that were in pain were ultimately at peace. And, I may be grateful to know that with such pain as I am capable of enduring, I am not now enduring it.
In a short time (
compared to the life of the Universe), those who are living in this moment will no longer be, and whatever suffering we know now, will be known no more. And in some time beyond that, we all may return to a oneness from which we came, sharing all of these memories and sensations. You, my friends, may know how I felt at the moment I was burned with fire coral in the Gulf of California; and the seeming bliss of cool sheets against my back as I healed; you will know my joy and my peace when the pain had finally passed, and indeed my relative pleasure in all but a few moments of my life. Most parts of most of us rarely suffer, but we do not bother to recognize absence of suffering as a significant
benefit. But in the end, the absence of suffering might resonate in our shared experience most resoundingly, for our suffering is fleeting even as
joy endures
eternal. Most particularly, we may share the joy of knowing how much better we spent most of lives feeling than could have been the case!!