The End of Suffering

Finding Purpose in Pain

Book Details

Discerning Reader Editorial Review

Reviewed 07/08/2010 by Chad Vandervalk.

Not Recommended. An interesting book that succeeds or fails depending on who reads it and at what point in their lives they do so.

There comes a time in every Christian's life when the question, "Why?" is the most important question they ask God. A time when life does not go the way that it had been planned. Times when pain, suffering, and anguish seem to seep into the core of our being. It is in response to this kind of situation that Scott Cairns wrote The End of Suffering: Finding Purpose in Pain.

Through eight chapters book-ended by a prologue and an epilogue, Cairns outlines our lives in a larger story of love and redemption, and claims that times of pain are necessary in this larger story.

Saint Isaac counsels, "Blessed is the person who knows his own weakness, because awareness of this becomes from him the foundation and the beginning of all that is good and beautiful." Affliction appears to be our only reliable access to this kind of knowledge, this necessary confrontation with our own weaknesses, and this advantageous mitigation of our pride.

For Cairns, the purpose of pain is to reveal ourselves to ourselves so that we can be more aware of who we are and how we can grow.

If he wrote this for those who are in the throes of pain, he failed. This book is far too intellectual and meandering to be any help to someone who really suffers from real pain.

If he wrote this book to help prepare people to face times of hardship by giving a general framework to place the problem of pain, he did a decent job. The best thing about this book is that it draws heavily on the ancient Christian tradition to face the problem of pain, something desperately lacking in today's 'self-help' Christianity which is little more than repackaged psychology.

I had some pretty big hopes for this little book, as the Eastern Orthodox tradition, from which Scott hails, has some rich resources to approach the issue of pain and suffering. I have to say that I was rather disappointed. The book turned out to be more of a personal explorative essay on the theology of suffering.

While there are many good things in this book, it is written is such a way as to hide rather than reveal them. Not one I would recommend.