(2) Reckoning Further With Pain

With a little help from my friends

Photo by Sean Stratton on Unsplash

In my mid-century Catholic childhood, I could “offer up” pain to lessen time in purgatory, for myself or for others. That gave the pain meaning, and made it more bearable.

The Search for Meaning

There are many other ways to find meaning in pain. Parenthood, from childbirth on, is filled with it, borne willingly (if sometimes grudgingly!) for the sake of the child. Science requires discipline and sacrifice. Gardeners risk insects, poison ivy, sunburn. And so on. Political ideals are particularly powerful.

After the Soviet Union dissolved, Russia fell into chaos. In her extraordinary book Second Hand Time, Svetlana Alexievich documents the decades immediately after. Some citizens had long ago recognized the fraud that was Soviet communism; they were glad it was over. Others, though, had experienced their hardships as part of a cosmic struggle: They believed that what the USSR pioneered would eventually liberate the entire world. For them the loss of meaning was disastrous. Alexievich documents the confusion and despair: many suicides, including that of a teenager; a military officer who found his medal, comparable to our Congressional Medal of Honor, on sale at a flea market.

Religions and Suffering

Making sense of suffering is one of religion’s central functions. Ann, an academic scholar of religion, pointed out:

• In the Hebrew Bible the Book of Job challenges the idea that suffering is a punishment for sin. (The story’s happy-ever-after ending was added centuries later.)

• In Buddhism the world provides pain; it becomes suffering when we deal with it badly.   Confusion, hatred for what is, craving for what is not, all make things worse. Suffering arises not from sin, but from unskillfulness.

• Christianity posits a God who suffers.

That last gives rise to deep questions. As I moved away from Christianity in adulthood, I came across this passage in the novel The Life of Pi. The title character (Pi) is the son of a zookeeper. Born Hindu, the boy learns of Christianity and is astonished.

“People sin but God’s Son pays the price?”  He imagines his own father telling him that the lions have run amok, killed their llamas, a camel, a stork, and more. Something must be done; the father tells Pi that the only solution is to feed Pi to the lions. The boy responds:“Yes, Father, that would be the right and logical thing to do. Give me a moment to wash up.” Hallelujahs all around.

In spite of this gentle send-up, Pi eventually adds Christianity, together with Islam, to his birthright Hinduism. The novel is a whimsical fable, delightfully thought-provoking. The thoughts it provoked sent me searching for ways the Crucifixion has been interpreted.

With Ann’s help I found a range of positions. Some theologians reject the idea that God chose the crucifixion. Jesus’s death at the hands of the Romans was simply the terrible consequence of living and teaching when he did. For these thinkers, the divine message is in Jesus’s life, not his death. Worth thinking about, but it seemed to me to hollow out Christianity as I had understood it.

Michael, a former Jesuit priest, agreed with me. He noted that there is no univocal Catholic teaching on the death of Christ. (This astonished me. I had assumed that there was a single church teaching on essentially everything, captured in the familiar Baltimore Catechism. I’m glad I was wrong.)

Michael suggests ‘accompaniment’ as the best lens through which to view the story.

“To oversimplify, God so loves us, and so grieves at our situation of bondage that he became one of us, to accompany us through agony and death. The resurrection, no matter whether it actually happened, means that death is not the end of the story. Life prevails.”

On this interpretation, then, God chooses to be with us in our pain.

Do we, in turn, choose to accompany others?

The Pain of Others

David, a hospital chaplain, wrote me of

“the value of ‘witnessing’ in the face of intractable suffering. Beyond just acknowledging the suffering . . . really seeing and being present to someone else’s suffering when there’s nothing to be done to alleviate it. Community in solidarity.”

Ann added

“The only time Job’s friends got it right is when they first sat silently with him and tore their garments – but they (and perhaps all of us) find it hard to stand that for long.

How hard it is to do that. I’d appreciate practical advice. Several readers wrote that the post helped them deal with their own pain. I’m honored to hear that.

In sum

Ann puts it this way:

It is important to let ourselves feel rather than deny suffering.  We need practices that allow us to do that. Ultimately it is human community, solidarity, that allows us to bear the suffering that is built into life.

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AfterWords

• Photo by Mike Ko for Unsplash

• I worked for years in bioethics. The mission of health care is to lessen patients’ suffering. Soon I’ll explore the complexities of that effort.

• Ann, Michael, and David are frequent careful readers, each a friend and a generous consultant. Each brings a rich background to the task. I am grateful to them.

• As I shared various drafts of this post, Michael remarked with urgency that one mid-century teaching was deeply unorthodox: Attributing the crucifixion to a vengeful God. That’s not something I learned, so I had no need to unlearn it. As I’ve said earlier, the story felt to me almost like moral mathematics. Just as God cannot make the square root of two into a rational number, so God cannot change the necessity of balancing wrongdoing with suffering. I wrote earlier that this “moral math” may arise from a need for revenge. Or perhaps it’s a quest for justice. But it’s quite problematic.