What Can it Mean?

[Emmaus Lessons - III]

Suffering is arbitrary. There is no Cosmic Figure after you or your family or your people. God is not angry.

People ask, “What does it mean?”

I’m not even sure I know what that question means anymore.

To suggest that there is a meaning for everything is dishonest. As if meaning is more foundational, more fundamental—imagined in the mind of the Reality behind the atrocity. No.

Suffering is meaningless.

“What can it mean?” is different. There is potential meaning made from everything. Meaning can become of almost anything. But that requires we sit with it, look it in the eye, not let it out of our sights, talk about it, analyze it, wrap language around it, write about it, wrestle with it, even curse it. In other words, meaning is made not by moving on and repeating platitudes but by moving close to the painful way things really are. We must reckon with it.

Okay then: “What can it mean?”

Well, get close enough for a while and tell me what you see.