On suffering, certainty, and the things I no longer need to explain

There is an enormous amount of spirituality organized around the following clichés:

Everything happens for a reason. Trust the universe. What’s meant for you won’t miss you. Your thoughts create your reality. There are no accidents. You chose this before you arrived.

Those ideas can be comforting, particularly when life is going reasonably well. The trouble begins when they stop being comforting and quietly become expectations for how we’re supposed to understand everything that happens to us.

When Spirituality Becomes Another Way to Avoid Reality

When something happens that you cannot make morally, emotionally, or intellectually meaningful, spiritual bypass is often the off-ramp.

Spirituality can become less a way of interpreting reality and more of an acceptable way to avoid it. We can use it to bypass grief, anger and confusion, and sometimes even to abandon accountability.

Spiritual bypassing is the tendency to reach for transcendence when what is actually required is acknowledgment:

Forgive before you’ve acknowledged what happened. Find gratitude before you’ve allowed disappointment. Look for the lesson before you’ve admitted the loss. “Release“ someone rather than acknowledge that you are furious. Call something divine right timing rather than admit that it was devastating.

Over the years, I’ve become less interested in a spirituality that explains suffering and more interested in one that can withstand suffering without explaining it away as a means of control.

Spirituality Versus Control

High performers can turn spirituality into another achievement system: manifest correctly, think correctly, heal correctly, maintain the right vibration, find the lesson.

If something terrible happens, there is almost an implied performance review, with our response becoming evidence of how spiritually evolved we are:

What did I attract? What haven’t I healed? What am I supposed to learn?

Even our suffering can become something we believe we are supposed to do well.

And because many of us learned years ago to reject “victim mentality,” we can end up constructing an entirely different way of making ourselves responsible for everything that hurts.

I’ve done this a thousand times.

If my thoughts create my reality, what does suffering say about my thoughts? If I attracted this, what does that say about me? If everything is a lesson, what am I failing to learn?

We haven’t necessarily surrendered control. We’ve spiritualized it.

Some of our oldest patterns can even acquire spiritual language. People-pleasing becomes compassion. Hypervigilance becomes intuition. Martyrdom becomes selflessness. Rescuing becomes service. Overfunctioning becomes devotion.

A spiritual belief can become a pattern protector just as easily as a psychological belief can.

I Have Become Less Certain About God and More Certain About the Sacred

Certainty has a way of diluting mystery. It requires an answer where perhaps there isn’t one. I don’t think all the terrible things that happen to us are assignments, lessons or exercises in meaning. Sometimes terrible things happen to us and around us.

When I am willing to make space for not knowing, something changes. What seemed like a foregone conclusion becomes less certain. Possibilities I couldn’t see while I was busy trying to explain what happened begin to appear. Not knowing doesn’t guarantee that what comes next will be better. It simply leaves room for what I cannot yet see.

That feels spiritual to me.

These are some of the places I recognize the sacred now:

Grieving someone or something without requiring the loss to have a purpose.
Telling the truth when telling it costs you something significant.
Staying beside someone when there is absolutely nothing you can do to fix what hurts.
Refusing to abandon yourself even when someone else does.
Love that remains real even though the relationship could not continue
A body telling the truth a person is not yet ready to hear.
Someone having the courage to say, “I don’t know.”
Laughter appearing somewhere you would have sworn laughter no longer belonged.

There are things that have happened in my own life that I no longer feel compelled to make spiritually meaningful. I don’t need to believe they happened for a reason. I don’t need to call them gifts. I don’t need to find the lesson hidden inside them. Some things I am willing to call devastating and leave the sentence there.

And yet I don’t experience life as meaningless.

What If There Is No Lesson?

Maybe this is the distinction I’ve been trying to understand. Meaning doesn’t have to be hidden inside what happened. It can be something we build afterward.

We often expect profound suffering to produce profound wisdom, as though pain owes us something in exchange for what it took. But maybe some experiences don’t arrive carrying lessons. Maybe terrible things aren’t assignments. Maybe we aren’t required to turn every loss into personal development in order for our lives to remain meaningful.

Perhaps the spiritual act isn’t discovering why something happened.

Perhaps it is deciding: Given that it happened, who will I be now?

I am less certain about many things than I once was. About God. About purpose. About why some things happen and others don’t. About whether there is a plan behind any of it.

But I have become increasingly comfortable saying three words I once experienced as an unanswered question: I don’t know.

I no longer experience those words as an absence of spirituality.

I think they may be where spirituality begins.