Why Grief is Different from Other Kinds of Suffering

Grief is the toughest pain we have to deal with. It is not the worst human experience, because it leads to resolution, but it is the most difficult for us to inter into voluntarily, which is the only way to get into it. The rest of our human experience just happens “to us.” Hurt, injury, anxiety, alienation, and failure all break through, and we suffer. Grief does not “break through.” It is something we enter into.

But its voluntary nature is not the only thing that sets grief apart from other kinds of suffering. The other difference is that grief is the one that heals all others. It is the most important pain there is. This is why we’re called to enter into it voluntarily. It heals. It restores. It changes things that have gone bad. Moreover, it is the only place where we get comforted when things have gone wrong.

Why is that? What is so special about grief? What is it the “pain that heals”? Because grief is the way of our getting finished with the bad stuff in life. It is the process by which we “get over it,” by which we “let it go.” And because of that, because it is the process by which we can be available for new things. The soul is greed from painful experience and released for new, good experience.

The soul is designed to finish things. It is designed to grieve. Just as a computer is programmed to run a particular path, so our soul is designed to go down the path of grief.

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