Happiness or meaningfulness?

 The most deep-seated American misunderstanding of religion is the presumption that the purpose of religion is to produce happiness. The primary function of religion is not to generate happiness but to construct meaning. Human beings can endure the most intense suffering with resolve and confidence as long as they believe their distress has a place in a larger context of meaning.
The threat of meaninglessness is deeper than the threat of pain, suffering, and guilt. When a system of meaning is threatened, the problem of evil is not primarily how to fathom and thereby endure particular experiences of suffering with equanimity but whether understanding and meaning are possible at all in the face of the apparent irrationality of the suffering.
Tyron L. Inbody, The Transforming God p.16 (Westminster John Knox Press 1997)