I deeply appreciate your post, Nathaniel. The things I have gone through, while incredibly minimal on the grand scale, have both devastated me beyond what is warranted, and taught me some of the charity I once prayed for. My pain has lasted for five years now, since its nominal cessation. It has stolen my ability to try to form an eternal family again, and driven a wedge (in a way) between me and God, but it has also given me the ability to open my heart to the pain of others in a way I don’t think I would have otherwise been able to.

I have found that by accepting my own pain, I’ve given other people permission to accept and suffer their own. They don’t have to “positive think” their way through life. Suffering is not desirable in itself, but it is not something to be avoided at all costs, either. And, despite my loss of faith in my relationship with God, I have found that by opening my heart, I believe I have come to understand Him better, and form a relationship with Him that I never suspected was possible.

So I no longer believe that all the promises which have been made to me will be realized, nor that good behavior brings particular blessings. But I do believe that if I humble myself and have faith in Christ, my unbelief won’t matter as much as my desire to be a place of safety for His children. And that IS religion, after all.

…a reduction of self-experienced pain leads to a reduction in empathy for pain in others as well.

I know a couple of people quite well who have experienced some measure of pain and difficulty—and who are particularly sensitive with regards to how they are treated or what happens to them—but who seem sincerely almost unable to understand or even recognize the pain/feelings/difficult others experience. It’s very hard to understand.

When I meet someone who is generally insensitive to others, but also has a thick skin or, conversely someone who is both personally sensitive and very empathetic, it makes more sense. But the combination of taking many things very personally but offering little to no empathy to others is hard to explain.

I think the injunction to ‘mourn with those that mourn’ is very similar to the rule that we must bear one anthers’ burdens. We must actually feel the weight of others’ sorrow. This can only ever be done imperfectly, because each burden is shaped to the bearer, but the more our experience has shaped us to each others’ burdens, the more readily we can help to bear the weight of a too-heavy sorrow.

I also spend a fair amount of time thinking about the nobility of suffering, and wondering how to approach that. I had an interesting conversation with my bishop, in which he implied that it was the difficulty of a commandment that made it valuable. I am interested in this timeless drive to do hard things for no other reason than that they are hard (though I seldom feel such a drive), and the implied equality of hardship / difficulty / suffering and righteousness / spirituality.

Mosiah’s admonition that those who accept baptism should “be willing to mourn with those that mourn” and “comfort those that stand in need of comfort” stresses empathy. He might well have added “feel pain with those in pain,” although when it comes to real pain, most pain-feelers would prefer simple pain relief to empathy.