Abstract
Suffering gives testimony to the vulnerable condition of the human being. says of the human being: inconsistency, finitude, limitation, “infirmitas” and radical dependence on others, whom he needs as an area of personal and emotional growth. The human being is a fragile freedom, he cannot do everything. Failure and death are expression of this limited nature, which, in turn, are possibilities of finding profound meaning. Suffering is often experienced as an enclosed and extreme lack of protection, in the face of which the individual is impelled to flee from the suffering or confront it in an attempt to eliminate it, with no real possibility of escape. This gives it a mysterious character, which requires the person to “enter” in the thicket of the suffering experience, to live it from a courageous commitment to life. All this makes suffering an incommunicable and intimate experience, because in the end only those who suffer know what they suffer. It is possible to accompany and alleviate the suffering of others, but since it is a non-transferable mystery, one experience of pain can never be assimilated to another. We are facing a reality in which each one discovers and finds himself in a particularly unique way. This experience of radical incommunicability requires of the person the task of assimilating, accepting, living and learning in pain in order to transform it into a unique path of meaning and true humanization.
1. Introducction
The starting point of this work is the analysis of the vulnerable condition of the human being in some of its most evident manifestations: need, dependency, limitation and mortality. Next we delve into the question that gives the article its title: the incommunicability of the mystery of suffering, explaining first why we speak of mystery and then, in what sense or not it is an experience impossible to communicate. We conclude by affirming that this incommunicability of suffering can be a source of wisdom and growth insofar as it is lived with a desire for meaning.
