This essay has been adapted from a talk given by Dan Barry on March 12, 2026, as part of the “Roots: Dialogues for the Common Good” series of public conversations cosponsored by Commonweal and Columbia University’s Burke Library at Union Theological Seminary.
The question has been put to me: Why do we suffer?
Ultimately, I think we suffer because we have no other choice in the matter. The only choice we do have is: What do we do with our suffering?
We need to find meaning in our suffering. We need to give it purpose. As the Franciscan priest Richard Rohr has said: “Pain that is not transformed is transmitted.”
By quoting Richard Rohr, I may give the impression that I am some kind of scholar, or an amateur theologian. I am not. I am a newspaper reporter: a hack. This means that my musings are entirely rooted in what is popularly known as the “lived experience.” My lived experience represents the research I have done on this subject. That adds up to sixty-eight years of research—on suffering.
I am also what my friend Joe Sexton once called a collapsed Catholic. Not lapsed Catholic, but collapsed. I suppose this means that I’m so exhausted by all of it—the mysteries, the scandals, the residual guilt—that I surrender.
To say that I am not a Catholic would be like saying I’m not Irish American, even though my mother was born in County Galway. I had not eight, not twelve, but sixteen years of Catholic schooling. My wife is named Mary Trinity. Her parents’ names were Mary and Joseph. We got married in a church called Our Lady of Sorrows. You get the picture.
All of this means that I have a rudimentary understanding of the Catholic idea that by suffering, we more fully know the Passion of Christ. And by twinning our suffering with how Christ suffered for our sins, we play a role in our salvation and in the salvation of others. We become that much closer to God.
This means, then, that I am also familiar with the eleventh commandment known to Catholics of a certain age: Offer it up. Offer it up for the poor souls in purgatory. When I was growing up, this is how it went: You have a toothache? Offer it up. You’re stuck in traffic? Offer it up. The Mets lost again? Offer it up.
I know that the purgatorial fires that animated the Catholic imagination from the Middle Ages until well into my adolescence have been doused a bit. The idea now is that purgatory is more of a psychological washing of the spirit. An expiation. A cleanse.
But, again, this is my lived experience. And I was taught long ago that purgatory wasn’t like some waiting room at Newark Airport, where people who missed their connection sat in sad anticipation for the next flight out. As I remember it, unless my classmates and I were the saints of our parochial school in Deer Park, Long Island, we were all bound for purgatory. We were all going to be in that waiting room, and we were definitely not going to be enjoying a Cinnabon while we waited.
In fact, we’d get to suffer some more! We’d go through a purification by fire, and there was nothing we could do to lessen our suffering. Pretty much the only way that we could be relieved of our suffering—and released from purgatory and into heaven—was by having the living offer up their suffering for us. So, in this sense, we all had a vested interest in endless suffering here on Earth. We should have been rooting that the Mets never win another game. Ever.
This, of course, is a simplistic and outdated explanation of the mysterious concept of offering it up.
Fully aware of my ignorance, I reached out to a friend of mine: Sr. Margaret Carney, a Franciscan scholar and former president of my alma mater, St. Bonaventure University. She tolerated my airport analogy. She even laughed—a little. And then she said something that hadn’t occurred to me. “Offering it up is a way to help us understand that we are always ever-linked to humanity—the humanity of now and the humanity of the past.”
The communion of saints, then. Lowercase “s.”
The hope, Sr. Margaret said, is that in my suffering, I am working hard to achieve an attitude that is helpful to me, but also helpful to others. I like that. I don’t fully understand it. But as Margaret told me, it’s a mystery.
Now about my lived experience and how I apply it to the question: Why suffer?
You might like: An interview with Elie Wiesel about finding meaning in suffering
I have been a newspaper journalist for more than forty years. And in journalism, there is a saying that has served as a somewhat self-congratulatory mission statement: To comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. It has become a kind of journalistic creed. For the first half of my career, I tried to concentrate on afflicting the comfortable—the logical result, I suppose, of both being bullied and coming of age during Watergate. Looking back on those years, I realize that I was more interested in gotchas than in getting to know the people I wrote about.
At a small newspaper in Connecticut, I’d get weeks of copy out of some poor town official’s slight overpayment for a fire engine. At a larger paper in Rhode Island, I wrote about the state’s four branches of government: executive, legislative, judicial—and the mob. Then, somehow, I made it to The New York Times, where, as the City Hall bureau chief, I covered the goings-on of a mayor named Rudolph Giuliani, chronicling his many tirades and tantrums in the years before he became the rage-contorted face of stolen-election lies.
This was a full-time job, and I was fully invested: Hold the powerful accountable. Afflict the comfortable. And, just as my career was taking off, get cancer.
It is hard for someone who has lived through cancer to talk about the experience without sounding like the hero of his or her narrative. And I imagine that almost everyone has dealt with cancer in one way or another, either personally or through a loved one.
I was forty-one. Married. The father of a little girl who wasn’t yet two. Working at what I considered the best news organization in the world. And now I had a malignant tumor in my chest that was crushing my trachea. The matter was so dire, so grim, that at one point I was praying that I had testicular cancer—praying for testicular cancer!—because it usually responds extremely well to treatment. Sadly, I did not have testicular cancer.
The good doctors at Memorial Sloan Kettering did not have much hope. They eventually came up with a brutal chemotherapy regimen that required several extended stays in that forbidding, amazing hospital. The treatment, similar to having Drano pumped into your veins, resulted in the usual: constant nausea, steady weight loss, a look not unlike that of Uncle Fester—and long dark nights of fear, of grief, of suffering.
Did I offer up my suffering for the poor souls in purgatory? No, I did not, selfish bastard that I am. Never even crossed my mind. I was too busy suffering, or feeling sorry for myself, or muttering snippets of the prayer known as St. Patrick’s Breastplate:
Christ beneath me
Christ above me
Christ on my right
Christ on my left…
For me, there was no acceptance of my suffering. No thought that this was God’s will. Instead, I raged. I will confess that I peppered some of my prayers with choice profanities.
After several months of a Hail Mary regimen of chemo and radiation, I was miraculously declared cancer-free. I had gone through a kind of purification. The treatment had cleansed me of cancer cells. And the suffering had cleansed me of any desire to go back to City Hall and write about Giuliani, or the City Council, or anything to do with politics.
It didn’t occur to me until much later, but my cancer journey had begun to change my priorities and interests. My journalistic focus was shifting away from afflicting the comfortable to …comforting the afflicted? Maybe it was more like a shift to noticing the afflicted. Listening to the afflicted. Telling the stories of the afflicted.
I would never dare to suggest that having gone through cancer, I understood the depths of other people’s anguish. But—strangely, even beautifully—my cancer experience drew me to the afflicted. Made me do what I could for them, even though all I could do was to bear witness and tell their stories.
So, I didn’t go back to City Hall. But I did go back to Memorial Sloan Kettering.
Four years after getting past the first cancer, I was diagnosed with a second cancer, and this one was also a doozy: esophageal. (And, no, I never smoked—though, thanks to my parents and nearly every other adult in my life, my childhood was enveloped in a blue haze of cigarette smoke.) All the relief and gratitude that I felt after getting past the first cancer evaporated. Here I was, a guy with two young daughters now, minding his business, just trying to get by, a guy who thought he had already gotten the message about the preciousness of life.
Why me, I asked. But I knew the answer: Why not me?
The long dark nights returned. The profane prayers. The fears. The grief. The suffering. I’ll cut to the chase. The only thing more irritating than a guy talking about his bout with cancer is a guy who talks about his two bouts with cancer.
After several months of once again enduring the purifying flames of chemotherapy, I woke up from surgery one afternoon without an esophagus. (Call me crazy, but I always thought you needed one of those.) I recovered, put on my blue blazer and khaki pants, and returned to my job as a journalist. But my interests now had definitely been reordered.
This wasn’t a conscious thing. It’s only in looking back that I wonder whether, in the words of Richard Rohr, I had been “transformed.” It sounds a bit precious, but—maybe? Or maybe I had simply started to notice more acutely the suffering all around me. Maybe all my suffering had granted me the gift of recognition.
Since my second bout with cancer, my job has taken me to all fifty states. I’ve written too many stories to count, about too many people to name. But I remember nearly all of them, especially those who had—or were—suffering.
The condemned man in Tennessee whose execution I witnessed. The heroin addict in Ithaca. The massage-parlor worker in Queens. The struggling diner owner in Ohio. Those men with intellectual disabilities, exploited at a turkey-processing plant in Iowa. The assistant U.S. attorney who was fired for prosecuting the January 6 rioters. The immigrant arrested and cuffed by ICE in Maryland while his disabled son wailed in the back of the car. Suffering.
At one point, my travels took me to the Hawaiian island of Molokai, to Kalaupapa, where people with Hansen’s disease, or leprosy, were once kept in isolation: The true banished children of Eve, asking God and the world, “Why have you abandoned us?”
I met a married couple, Clarence and Ivy, who had been shipped off to the island when they were children, but who had made the decision to remain there when the colony was shut down. It was their home, they told me. Both had been disfigured by the disease. Both had endured a level of suffering I could not fathom. And both were filled with joy. They were already planning their trip to Rome for the canonization of Fr. Damien, the Belgian missionary who devoted his life to the afflicted of Kalaupapa.
Clarence and Ivy taught me that there are levels of suffering that I could never understand. It made me realize my own suffering was nothing special. It was just life. Faced with whether to be bitter or better, Clarence and Ivy had chosen better.
So, why suffer?
To be clear, I don’t look back on my suffering and think: Wow. Can’t wait to suffer some more. Also, to be clear: I’m not saying that you need cancer to suffer. We all suffer in our own ways. With depression, with addiction, with mental health, with worry, with grief—sometimes with just trying to get through another day.
But if we have to suffer—and we do—I think the challenge for us is to see suffering anew. Not submit to it, but transform it. To consider how suffering might lead to spiritual growth. How it might ground us in our humanity. How it might make us more resilient. How it might encourage us to have compassion for one another. To see one another.
To me, suffering is not so much about offering it up for the souls in purgatory. It’s for nurturing the communion of saints: here, now, and all around us.
We welcome your comments about this article. Please send your response to letters@commonwealmagazine.org. This lecture was given as part of a series of dialogues for the common good. The final event in that series, “Why Try?,” will take place on April 9, 2026. Learn more about the event and RSVP here.
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