(1) Reckoning With Pain
Explaining it, easing it, and inflicting it
I hurt my knee the other day. Nothing serious, said the doctor, but it’ll hurt for a while; take some ibuprofen. I did, and it helped, but still it hurt. Suddenly I longed for the days of my Catholic childhood, when I could “offer it up.”
The idea was that suffering is necessary to atone for sin (the Crucifixion was the ultimate atonement). Most people after death spend some time in purgatory, being purged of their sins. That time can be lessened by suffering on earth, one’s own, or that of others who transfer the credit. “Offering it up” made my suffering a kind of currency, something of value.
Making suffering meaningful
Most religions offer a way to deal with suffering. It may be called a test of one’s faith, or the cost of giving people free will: some will misuse it and hurt others. In some traditions your present life is a result of what you did in past lives, and therefore deserved; doing better this time will earn you a better slot next time. All of these accounts make suffering meaningful, make it into something necessary for a larger good. Those beliefs help one let go of the useless resistance that makes things worse.
It can be useful to distinguish pain from suffering, pain being the hurtful experience, suffering the responses to it that add to the hurt. “I hate this.” “I don’t deserve it” (or “ I do deserve it, because I’ve been bad, or stupid).” In various ways most religions undercut those responses. When I could “offer it up,” pain helped me accomplish something good. It still hurt, but I resisted it less. And, more relaxed, I hurt less.
These beliefs can have dreadful consequences. They can justify not just one’s own suffering but that of others. They can encourage passive or masochistic ways of life. They can be the opiate of the people. But deployed wisely they can lead to a fuller life and clearer vision.
Secular ways to ease suffering
There are other ways of coping. Many of these are secular versions of what religions make sacred. Meditation is a familiar example. Others include rituals, especially those of bereavement: funerals and memorials expressing both loss and gratitude for the life that has ended. Whether or not God exists, attention to the world, the universe, around us evokes awe; it heals by taking us outside of ourselves. And companionship, whether in a congregation, a support group, or friends and family, helps make pain bearable. Add to that the practical means we’ve developed over millennia, from cold compresses to chicken soup.
Health care and its discontents
Medical science, from penicillin through neurosurgery, has done astonishing things for us. We live with much less pain and disability than our ancestors did. Terrible diseases have been eradicated, wounds and broken bones treated more effectively. Those measures prevent a lot of pain, but of course much remains; so medications from aspirin through opiates block pain. The opioid epidemic is only one face of a profoundly important struggle to lessen pain. The news has told us a lot about the greed of the Sacklers and the tragedies of addiction, but has had little to say about the way chronic pain destroys lives. Health care still deals clumsily with it. More about this in the third of this series.
Pain and punishment
“Offering it up” was one expression of the Christian doctrine of redemptive suffering, paradigmatically in the Crucifixion. That doctrine is itself an expression of the powerful but troubling intuition that wrongdoing must be punished, whether by the victim, or the government, or fate, or God. A sort of inexorable moral mathematics seems to require it.
Our criminal justice system, for instance, doles out punishment for many purposes: to deter crime, to keep the wrongdoer from doing more, to rehabilitate, sometimes to compensate victims or satisfy the general public – the satisfaction of knowing that the wrongdoer is suffering. That moral scales have been balanced.
Emotionally it is easy, more than easy, to understand that satisfaction. But looked at closely it is hard to justify. It would make sense to require wrongdoers to do disagreeable work that society needs — deal with garbage, clean up streets, whatever. It would be fair to make those who damaged the world repair it. But does inflicting suffering simply for its own sake improve the world? I don’t see how. But the intuition that it does is hard to shake, and it infects our criminal justice system. Another topic for another day.
How do I reckon with pain?
No longer a Catholic child, I cope with pain as anyone does: I try to lessen it, then to cope with it, using all the means available – meditation, community, sometimes ritual. At times I find meaning in it: Surgery is no fun, but it might save my life. Failure is miserable, but it can be instructive. Essentially, though, I finally understand that suffering is built into my life as a highly sentient mammal on planet earth. I very much appreciate that life. And should I forget, almost any work of literature will remind me.
"His mind was freshly inclined . . . toward the fact that the world was full of sorrow; that everyone labored under some burden . . . that one must try to remember that all were suffering, and therefore one must do what one could to lighten the load . . ."
Lincoln in the Bardo, by George Saunders
AfterWords
In writing this I learned that the notion of redemptive suffering is being challenged by a number of theologians. I’m glad.
Perhaps there’s a survival advantage to this instinct to make wrongdoers suffer: knowing that they face retaliation keeps some of them in line, for a while. But like any instinctive response, this one needs to be channeled
For a detailed scientific appreciation of the way rituals and practices help us meet life’s challenges, listen to the podcast “How God Works.” It’s really about how religion works.
For a helpful meditation on relaxing with pain, see “Developing a Healing Attention” in chapter 5 of Jack Kornfield’s A Path With Heart. Later meditations are also useful.
Thank you, Judith. This is especially relevant as we all age. Pain is inevitable, psychological, emotional or physical. Distraction works temporarily, opiates work (but come with other consequences); getting a perspective on pain, as you offer here, may be the most helpful response. Helping someone whose pain is worse is my go to salve.
I especially appreciate your distinction between pain and suffering. A friend, who is physically disabled and experiences a lot of physical pain, always makes clear they are not suffering. Their PMA (positive mental attitude) keeps them from feeling they are suffering. I do worry sometimes that their stoicism may conceal the harsh truth of how much pain they live with.