When I was a kid, I misunderstood the title of R.E.M.’s “Everybody Hurts.” I thought they were singing, “Everything hurts.” At the time, I assumed it must be a song about getting old. Now that I am getting older myself, I am beginning to think my childhood interpretation may have been more prophetic than mistaken. Everything does seem to hurt a little more than it used to…
R.E.M. released “Everybody Hurts” in 1993 on the album Automatic for the People. The song was deliberately written in a direct, simple style, and its message became closely associated with comforting people experiencing grief, loneliness, depression, and despair. Rather than offering complicated explanations, it sounds almost like one person sitting beside another and saying: you are hurting, other people hurt too, you are not alone, and you need to hold on.
That makes the song particularly fitting for “Almost Christian,” a series examining the spiritual themes found in popular media through the lens of Orthodox Christianity, showing how these works can reflect fragments of truth while falling short of the fullness of the faith. There is remarkably little in “Everybody Hurts” that an Orthodox Christian needs to argue against. Its limitation is instead what it cannot finally provide: it recognizes suffering and calls for endurance, but it cannot tell us why suffering does not have the last word.
Everybody Really Does Hurt
Suffering is one of the few truly universal experiences of human life. The details differ greatly, but nobody escapes grief, disappointment, loneliness, sickness, fear, loss, or eventually death. The Orthodox Church does not promise that becoming a Christian will exempt us from any of these things.
In fact, Scripture is remarkably honest about pain. The Psalms are filled with crying, questioning, mourning, fear, and even the terrible feeling that God has become distant. Again and again we hear some version of the question, “How long, O Lord?” Biblical faith does not require suffering people to pretend that everything is fine.
This is one of the first things “Everybody Hurts” gets right. It does not begin by minimizing suffering or trying to explain it away. It simply acknowledges that sometimes life hurts terribly, and there is something deeply pastoral about acknowledging another person’s pain before trying to explain it.
Think about Job. When his friends first arrive, they sit with him for seven days and seven nights without speaking because they see that his suffering is very great. Their problems begin when they start trying to explain everything. Sometimes the most loving thing we can do is sit beside someone and admit that what has happened really is painful.
Hold On When You Cannot See the Way Forward
The central command of the song is remarkably simple: “hold on.” When someone is overwhelmed by suffering, the immediate task may not be understanding why something happened or discovering how everything will eventually work out. Sometimes the first task is simply making it through the present darkness.
Endurance is also a deeply Christian virtue. Christ tells His disciples that “he who endures to the end will be saved” in Matthew 24:13. St. Paul writes in Romans 5:3-5 that suffering produces endurance, endurance produces character, and character produces hope.
Orthodox Christianity does not teach that suffering is automatically good or spiritually beneficial. Pain can soften the heart, but it can also produce anger, bitterness, isolation, or despair. Suffering becomes spiritually meaningful when it is brought to God and when we allow ourselves to be carried by His grace and by the people He has placed around us.
Sorrow is not the same thing as despair.
This distinction is important in Orthodox spiritual life. A person can experience tremendous sorrow while continuing to pray, love, repent, and hope. The saints were not people who escaped sadness, and holiness does not mean becoming emotionally untouched by tragedy.
Despair says something more dangerous. It tells us that nothing can change, nothing matters, nobody cares, and there is nowhere left to turn. It takes the pain of the present moment and turns it into a judgment about the whole of reality.
That is why the repeated encouragement to hold on matters. The song is not merely describing sadness. It is trying to interrupt despair before despair convinces someone that the darkness he sees right now is all that exists.
Everybody cries.
Tears are not evidence of weak faith. The Orthodox Christian tradition speaks frequently about tears, mourning, repentance, and compunction. The saints weep, grieving parents weep, repentant sinners weep, and Christians standing beside the graves of people they love weep.
Most importantly, Scripture tells us that Jesus Christ wept at the tomb of Lazarus in John 11:35. God does not look upon human suffering from a safe distance. In the Incarnation, the Son of God enters our wounded human condition and knows hunger, exhaustion, betrayal, grief, pain, and death.
That changes how Christians understand tears. We do not have to hide our grief in order to prove that we trust God. Faith can say both “I believe” and “this hurts” at the same time.
You are not uniquely abandoned.
Suffering has a strange way of making us feel alone. We can look around and imagine that everyone else is living a normal life while ours is falling apart. Other people seem happy, healthy, successful, surrounded by friends, and untouched by the thing that is crushing us.
“Everybody Hurts” pushes against that illusion. Everybody hurts sometimes. That does not make our particular suffering less important, but it reminds us that pain is part of our common wounded humanity rather than proof that we have been uniquely forgotten.
Christianity goes even further. It does not merely say that other people somewhere in the world understand what suffering feels like. The Church says that through baptism and the Eucharistic life we are being gathered into one Body, so that another person’s suffering becomes a concern of the whole Christian community.
The Church must make “you’re not alone” concrete.
St. Paul writes, “If one member suffers, all suffer together; if one member is honored, all rejoice together” in 1 Corinthians 12:26. That is not meant to remain a beautiful theological idea. It describes what parish life is supposed to become.
We pray together, worship together, confess our sins, receive counsel, share meals, visit the sick, comfort the grieving, baptize our children, celebrate marriages, and bury our dead. Orthodox Christianity is not designed to be practiced as a private spiritual hobby. We are being saved together in a communion of love.
There will also be seasons when someone can barely carry his own hope. He may struggle to pray or even find the words to ask God for help. One of the great gifts of the Church is that when I cannot pray very well, the Church continues praying around me and for me.
Bear one another’s burdens.
St. Paul tells Christians in Galatians 6:2, “Bear one another’s burdens, and so fulfil the law of Christ.” Notice that he does not say explain every burden. He says to bear it.
We often want to fix suffering because another person’s pain makes us uncomfortable. We search for the perfect sentence that will make everything understandable. Yet the Christian response is often presence before explanation: listening, praying, bringing food, making a phone call, sitting beside a hospital bed, or simply refusing to disappear when someone’s life becomes difficult.
The restrained quality of “Everybody Hurts” captures something of this. The song does not sound like someone shouting advice across a room. Its slow rhythm and repetition make it feel more like someone staying beside you long enough for you to believe that you really are not alone.
Sometimes holding on means asking for help.
There is a danger in hearing “hold on” as though it means gritting your teeth and suffering privately. That is not Christian endurance. Humility sometimes means admitting that the burden has become too heavy to carry by ourselves.
Reaching out to family, trusted friends, clergy, physicians, counselors, or emergency services when necessary is not a failure of faith. God ordinarily cares for human beings through other human beings. Asking for help can itself become an act of courage and humility because it requires us to admit that we need someone else.
This is another reason isolation is spiritually dangerous. Pain tends to turn us inward precisely when we most need communion. The Christian life continually calls us out of that isolation and back toward God and our neighbor.
Hope is more than optimism.
Here we begin to reach the place where “Everybody Hurts” becomes almost Christian rather than fully Christian. The song tells the suffering person to endure, and that is good advice. But eventually another question must be answered: Why?
Optimism says that things will probably get better. Maybe the illness will pass, the relationship will be restored, another opportunity will come, or tomorrow will simply feel easier than today. Sometimes those things happen, but sometimes they do not.
Christian hope cannot depend upon circumstances improving according to our wishes. Orthodox Christians believe that hope rests ultimately in God, not in the probability that tomorrow will be easier. Even when circumstances remain painful, the Christian can continue to hope because suffering and death are not ultimate realities.
Christianity gives “hold on” an object.
This may be the greatest difference between the song and the Gospel. R.E.M. tells us to hold on, but Christianity tells us what we are holding onto. Hebrews repeatedly speaks about holding fast to our confession and to the hope set before us.
Christian endurance is therefore not simply willpower. We are not trying to survive by convincing ourselves that we are strong enough. We hold fast to God because He is faithful even when our own strength is failing.
The saints demonstrate this kind of endurance. Martyrs, confessors, monastics, grieving parents, persecuted Christians, and countless ordinary faithful people suffered without becoming Stoics. Their witness was not that pain did not matter, but that pain could not separate them from the love of God.
The Cross changes the meaning of suffering.
The Cross prevents Christianity from becoming a religion of denial. We cannot look at a crucifixion and pretend that suffering is imaginary, easy, or unimportant. The Christian proclamation begins with the astonishing claim that God Himself has entered into the deepest places of human suffering.
The Orthodox Church teaches that the Cross does not make suffering pleasant. It reveals instead that suffering can be entered, carried, and transformed by divine love. God does not merely send instructions to suffering humanity from heaven. He enters our condition and passes through death itself.
This also keeps us from romanticizing pain. A person does not automatically become holy because he suffers. The question is whether suffering drives us into ourselves or whether, even through tears and confusion, we allow it to become a place where we encounter God and learn to love more deeply.
The song stops before resurrection.
This is perhaps the clearest way to understand why “Everybody Hurts” belongs in a series called “Almost Christian.” The song gives us something like Good Friday language without Easter morning. It recognizes suffering, encourages endurance, and offers companionship, but it cannot proclaim the defeat of death.
Without resurrection, “hold on” eventually means something like “survive as long as you can.” However noble that encouragement may be, death still stands at the end. Human companionship can make the journey more bearable, but companionship alone cannot open the grave.
The Christian proclamation is far stronger. Jesus Christ is crucified, enters death, and rises from the dead. The Resurrection means that Christians do not merely hope to endure suffering successfully; we believe that death itself will finally be overcome and creation restored.
The final Christian word is not suffering.
Everybody hurts, but that does not mean suffering is meaningless. Orthodox Christianity teaches that creation is wounded by sin yet remains loved by God and destined for restoration. Pain is real, grief is real, and death is real, but none of them is ultimate.
This is where the song comes remarkably close to something the Church knows deeply. When darkness surrounds you, hold on. When you are grieving, you are allowed to cry. When you think nobody understands, remember that you were never meant to carry life alone.
But Christians cannot stop at “Everybody Hurts.” Everybody hurts, but everybody is also called toward resurrection. The Gospel does not erase Good Friday; it reveals that Good Friday is not the end of the story.
From cultural hope to Christian hope.
That is what makes this song both beautiful and incomplete. It offers solidarity without full communion, perseverance without resurrection, and hope without clearly identifying the source of that hope. Those are not small things, but Christianity offers something deeper than encouragement to survive.
The Orthodox Church invites suffering people into a living community where burdens are actually shared and hope is practiced through prayer, worship, confession, the sacraments, meals, friendship, mercy, and love. It gives us generations of saints who demonstrate that endurance is possible without denying the reality of pain. Above all, it announces that the grave is not humanity’s final destination.
R.E.M. tells us to hold on because we are not alone. Orthodox Christianity agrees, and then goes further: hold on because God has entered death and opened the way to life. The final Christian word is not suffering, despair, or even death. The final word is resurrection.
If you have a film, television series, song, book, video game, or other work you would like to see covered in a future installment of “Almost Christian,” you can send your suggestion to me, Fr. Stephen, at frsteve@savannahorthodox.com.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is R.E.M.’s “Everybody Hurts” a Christian song?
“Everybody Hurts” is not an explicitly Christian song, but many of its themes are compatible with Christianity, including compassion, endurance, shared suffering, and refusing despair. From an Orthodox perspective, its message remains incomplete because it does not ground its hope in God, the Cross, and the Resurrection.
What does Christianity say about suffering?
Orthodox Christians believe that suffering is part of a creation wounded by sin, but suffering is not the final purpose of human life. God enters human suffering, remains present within it, and promises the ultimate restoration of creation and the defeat of death.
Is it wrong for Christians to feel sad or cry?
No. Scripture contains many examples of faithful people grieving and weeping, and the Psalms openly express sorrow, fear, loneliness, and lament. Christian faith does not require pretending that painful things do not hurt.
What is the difference between Christian hope and optimism?
Optimism expects circumstances to improve, while Christian hope rests in the faithfulness of God even when circumstances do not improve as we desire. The Resurrection gives Christians a hope that reaches beyond suffering and even beyond death.
How should Orthodox Christians help someone who is suffering?
Christians are called to bear one another’s burdens through prayer, presence, practical help, listening, and genuine companionship. Sometimes the most Christian response is not explaining why someone suffers, but remaining faithfully beside that person while helping him carry the burden.
