Even materialistic philosophies like Stoicism and Epicureanism saw this as the fundamental state of the world, and the goal of their philosophies was combating the states of fear, pain, and disappointment, minimizing them, gaining some respite or control (ataraxia-freedom from worry, and aponia-freedom from pain). Most pagan religions pictured the world as a place of warring powers in which humans were minor players caught in a neverending transcendent conflict. Time was a wheel of cyclical repetition that slowly raised and then ground each generation into dust. You can see this general outlook considered and expressed in Ecclesiastes. This was the prevailing wisdom of the ancient world.

Generally, when times were really good and wealth and technology provided some space and semblance of freedom and control over our destinies, it relieved some of this burden. It let us forget this fundamental problem that all of humanity has struggled with. It gave us hope that maybe it wasn’t something fundamental to the world, but just a circumstance, something that could be fixed by something we could buy or aquire or make, some new possession or new technology or policy. That maybe there was some magic bullet of structural change that would fix everything and change the world into the utopia we all feel like it should be.

We started to feel that freedom from pain and fear was our true birthright, and being denied it was either the fault of foolishness (because there isn’t any good reason you shouldn’t have what you deserve), missing the right arrangement of things (because having the right setup should fix everything), or was the result of vindictiveness (someone deliberately denying us our birthright and stealing it from us, hoarding it for themselves).

We all have the same questions: what is the fundamental nature of the world, of ourselves, of life?And we all have our set of answers to those questions and problems. And everything we do, how we live our lives, what we expect to happen, what we think is possible, are all determined by these answers.

But any big challenge to our world and worldview, any really big difference between what the world gives us and what our beliefs tell us it should be giving us, creates a crisis. The structure of our life is built upon these pillars, these foundational beliefs about the world and ourselves and what can and should happen. But sometimes the world gives the whole thing a giant kick right at the foundations and our whole structure sways and shudders. Right now our world is living in a moment of a big kick.

No one likes being kicked, but here is something worth thinking about. If you look at pretty much every great religion or worldview or philosophy, one great pattern emerges. Enlightenment doesn’t come from comfort or ease or carelessness. Enlightenment comes from confronting suffering and fear and disappointment.

Moses didn’t get the Ten Commandments, a guide to navigating life, in the Promised Land. He got them in the desert, on the run and homeless. Buddha didn’t find his enlightenment in the palace, he found it in isolation and contemplation when he walked away from the palace. Marduk and Zeus became kings of the gods not by reclining on Olympus, but by standing up before Tiamat and Kronos, the world-ruling, world-defining embodiments of chaos. Literary figures like Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Victor Frankyl didn’t find their enlightenment within the halls of academia, but by facing the world’s most terrible evils and tragedies.

As much as we wish it were the case, humans don’t seem to find renewal and growth from the state of ease and freedom from conflict or pain. Pain and suffering hurt us, they can even cripple us, but they’re also the fundamental spark that lights the fire of our growth. They’re the challenge that makes us rise from our slumber to become stronger. They force us to burn off the dross of our delusions and errors and weaknesses, to purify ourselves so only the gold of truth and strength and wisdom remain to sustain us. They free us from the prison of our childishness and selfishness and self-delusion. That’s a terribly painful and destructive process sometimes. It can drown whole civilizations, not to mention people.

We all have a terrible distaste for unpleasant circumstances, anything that doesn’t represent the world as we wish it were. And we even extend that dislike to disagreeable people, people who don’t show us the world the way we wish it was, but might be trying to face the world as it is (or as they believe it is). But sometimes we need those disagreeable times, and sometimes we need those disagreeable people to deal with those times.

Sometimes what we would like isn’t what we need, sometimes it isn’t true to the world or to what we need to do to live in it.

In Christianity, the cross is the literal intersection of ultimate tragedy. It’s the most disagreeable thing imaginable. You’ve got someone who is entirely good, entirely undeserving of punishment and cruelty, who was only seeking to do right. And he was condemned and mistreated and tortured and killed by not only the secular legal and religious moral authorities, but by the crowds and common folk who were his friends. His own closest companions denied him and left him. And something of the highest, most perfect and elevated nature was brought low and made bloody, sweaty, weak, pathetic, swollen, hemorrhaging, broken. It was an object lesson in humiliation and contradiction of everything we hold dear and hope for and wish ourselves and the world to be.

And Christianity asks us to keep that symbol always before our eyes. Not to hide it, not to avoid it in all its crass horror and humiliation and blood. It’s bad PR, it’s not to our taste, it’s not what we want to see or hear or believe of the world. It’s not what we want to have to do or face, literally or psychologically. But this is the reality of the world, the cross. And we’re supposed to embrace it. Because if we can, there’s something to be found on the other side of that voluntary approach to that symbol of death and chaos and cruelty.

There isn’t any resurrection without the crucifixion. There isn’t any salvation if there is no Dukha, no fallen fate, to be rescued from. There is no enlightenment if there is no shadow of darkness and chaos to stand before. There is no purification without the flame. Is it merely coincidence that the presence of God, the result of embracing the cross of Christ, is envisioned as a flame coming to rest upon us?

Christianity isn’t a faith of denying suffering. It is a faith of embracing ultimate suffering, embracing ultimate tragedy, and finding meaning and purification and salvation beyond it and through it. That may not be the kind of comfort we want. It may not be the story of the world or our own destiny that we desire. But it may be what we need, what is true, and what will save us.