For Our Good

I’ve written before about one of my favorite books, The Chosen by Chaim Potok.  I am particularly moved by the story of Danny, the brilliant Jewish boy who lived in silence with his father while being raised.  His father would not speak to him while raising him except when studying the Torah.  From the perspective of Danny’s friend Reuven, who was the main character of the novel, it was impossible to understand why this father would make his son suffer so much by a self-imposed silence.  Why would he refuse to speak to his own son like a normal father for all those years?  How could he be so cruel to the person he was supposed to love the most?   

At the end of the book Reb Saunders, Danny’s father, finally revealed to Reuven why he had raised his son this way and allowed him to suffer in this silence.  He remarked on Reuven’s feelings: “You do not understand this, Reuven.  I see from your eyes that you do not understand this….  You think I was cruel?  Yes, I see from your eyes that you think I was cruel to my Daniel.”  He explained to Reuven that at four years old his young boy was brilliant, and he could read a story and repeat it back again perfectly because he had such a good memory.  When the young child did this with a story about intense suffering of someone but was unmoved by the story, his father lamented that he had a son with “a mind without a soul.”  His son had no compassion or feeling for the suffering of others.  He told Reuven, “I looked at my Daniel when he was four years old, and I said to myself, How will I teach this mind what it is to have a soul?  How will I teach this mind to understand pain?  How will I teach it to want to take on another person’s suffering?”  And so, in order to teach his son to have a soul filled with compassion and love and understanding for the suffering of others, he made him suffer.  “He was bewildered and hurt.  The nightmares he began to have….  But he learned to find answers for himself.  He suffered and learned to listen to the sufferings of others.  In the silence between us, he began to hear the world crying” (pg. 265-267).  In this disclosure of Reb Saunders, the suffering of his son finally made sense, and the reader finds that it all worked together for the good of Danny, for he did turn into someone with great compassion and concern for others (especially as the sequel, The Promise, showed).

I think we can often be like Reuven as we look at the suffering of others around us.  It can be very difficult to understand why some suffer so intensely in this life, and we may look to our Father in Heaven and see only cruelty in His actions (or inactions).  Though we understand in our minds that the Lord has told us “that all these things shall give thee experience, and shall be for thy good,” it is often hard to see in moment how seemingly senseless suffering can really be for the good of anyone (Doctrine and Covenants 122:7).  The disciples of Christ showed their limited understanding in comprehending the suffering of others when they passed by a “man which was blind from his birth.”  They asked Jesus, “Master, who did sin, this man, or his parents, that he was born blind?”  They thought they comprehended the reasons for suffering, and they could see only two possibilities for this particular individual.  But the Savior responded, “Neither hath this man sinned, nor his parents: but that the works of God should be made manifest in him” (John 9:2).  Perhaps we are not too unlike these disciples as we observe the world around us and try to understand our own and others’ suffering.  We think, “Either this or the reason, or that is the reason,” likely with some dissatisfaction with our own interpretations that still don’t seem totally just.  But, like for these disciples, the Lord’s reasons for allowing pain and sorrow may be altogether different.  As the Lord taught us through Isaiah, “For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts” (Isaiah 55:9).  For now we must learn to trust that fact and accept that we will not understanding everything here in mortality.  But there is a God in heaven who does and loves His children, even if He does not stop all of their suffering.  We trust in this future day: “The Lord shall come, he shall reveal all things—Things which have passed, and hidden things which no man knew, things of the earth, by which it was made, and the purpose and the end thereof” (Doctrine and Covenants 101:32-33).  Those purposes we may never fully appreciate in the midst of the trials of mortality here, but we can trust that they will indeed all be for our good.