Letting Pain Be Pain, Part Two

It would be hard to maintain our humanity if we didn’t ask spiritual questions about pain. The Bible is loaded with “heroes” who did this very thing, including Christ himself, who from the cross issued the famous phrase found in Psalms 22: “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?” Questioning in this way is not only natural, but also appears in both the Jewish and Christian texts as an affirmation of our human need to wrestle with the “why” of pain.

I have only one real issue with the questioning of God and pain in our modern world. It comes when a person has rejected the faith life because of the problem of pain and yet, simultaneously, accepts the story of evolution as a beautiful thing, despite the clearly painful history it details. I don’t believe these two world views are mutually exclusive and personally hold to both as examples of beauty rising out of pain.

Natural selection indicates that the evolution of life on this planet hasn’t been solely random, at least not in the way we might commonly hear it described. Life adapts and evolves simply because survival beats the alternative. The science tells us that environmental pressure and strife (or pain) generate at least three alternatives for all species: extinction, cooperation, and initiative—the latter two are what promote adaptation, or change. The response to pain produces subtle changes that when magnified over time become significant changes.

Cooperation and initiative are as essential to evolution as an amino acid or strand of DNA. The biological building blocks are attached to their functions like water is to wetness. I see this as sacred in more ways that I can describe in this brief article. As life adapted to pain, beautiful ingenuity emerged—from the smallest cells to the group behaviors of large herds. That’s the scientific story in a nutshell, but it also strikes me as stunningly spiritual.

Since natural disasters were mentioned in an article below, we could start with the reality that volcanoes, earthquakes, and plate tectonics play an important role in supporting life on our planet by managing the release and absorption of carbon dioxide. A list of nature’s hidden benefits from environmental stressors (or pain) could go on for many pages.

Natural “disasters” are often held up as a reason for people to question the existence of God. How is it that God can be blamed for having made something terrible when that same terrible thing is essential in promoting and maintaining life on the planet? In science, nature gets a free pass on cruelty when one takes the long view of resiliency such pain produced. Why can’t God be in this story?

The answer we return is typically, “God could have done better.” To ask if God should have done better than the system we have is a genuine human response and a question have I asked many times. But scientifically speaking, it is like asking for a square without right angles. Whatever life God might have made absent pain, I can’t imagine it would be us. I can’t imagine such a life would be truly human, at least not as we understand it. Pain is a driving factor (perhaps even THE driving factor) of what makes us who we are… let’s not be so eager to shoot the horse we rode in on.

At stake for us then is really a deeper question, “Would we trade who we have become for whatever we would be in a world free from pain?” Personally, I would not; however, I can accept that answers may vary for others.

Admitting our propensity to cause pain (or turn a blind eye to it) is confession. Learning to cooperate with God’s solutions to pain is redemption. Cooperating with God and each other to eliminate suffering is justice. Demonstrating initiative and stepping out in the belief that light is greater than darkness takes faith; and all of these things— confession, redemption, justice, faith—these, and so many like them, give rise to a beauty inside that we could not know otherwise.

I believe that moving from the “why” of pain to the “what now” is infinitely more productive; it brings out the best and brightest in us. It’s what God did when He became human. He passed through the penumbra of pain “for the joy set before Him” (Philippians 2). In Romans 8, Paul says that all of creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth up until now. He says that the frustration of the universe and its enslavement to decay eagerly awaits the day when it will be freed from bondage. He says that creation sits on the cusp of a peculiar kind of cure: God’s children revealing His glory (which is His character, image, and presence) in the cosmos.

That’s ultimately where I want to be—I want to see us adapted, evolved, transformed into His image, to see the destructive power of a storm pale in comparison to the loving response that follows it; to see every suffering experienced in our world met with the fortitude that rises up from a life of joy and hope; to see humanity continue to reveal God’s character, likeness, and presence by eliminating pain through sound science, practical wisdom, and the spiritual compassion of Jesus Christ…to work in partnership with the Holy Spirit so that one day in the not so distant future, it might truly be “on Earth, as it is Heaven.”

As a human being, I have to let my pain be pain, meaning I don’t see how I get to this exact place and time without it. As a Christian, my response to pain requires cooperation and initiative as I try to walk daily with God, meaning I don’t see how I get past this exact place and time without adapting. Or as Paul puts it, I will remain stuck unless I am “conformed to the image of His Son.”

Letting Pain Be Pain, Part One

I read a story once about a girl who was born without the ability to feel pain. Normal things like cuts and scrapes would go totally unnoticed. She lacked the ability to tell the difference between cold and hot, or to retract her hand after touching something she shouldn’t have. Apparently, this is an extremely rare condition in humans.

This girl was apparently so immune to pain that her mother and father accidentally burned her in the bathtub when she was a baby and that’s how they discovered she had this condition. The hot water never caused her any discomfort; it never triggered any kind of response. Prior to being diagnosed, her parents had no idea they were hurting her.

As the girl grew older, she had to be constantly looked over. Some days she would show up from playing outside with her friends, bleeding all over her clothes but totally unaware that she had been injured. She spent weeks covered in terrible bruises that she never knew she’d received.
After years of living life this way, the girl’s parents began to pray every night that their daughter might one day wake up and feel pain again. They prayed she would feel pain so that she could live a full life. They prayed for pain to come their daughter and create for her a safer life. A strange prayer, indeed.

Pain is horrible and perhaps hurts us most when the ones we love are experiencing it. Which of us wouldn’t rather be on the surgeon’s table ourselves instead of watching a parent, or a child, or a spouse endure such suffering? Pain is no one’s friend. It is merciless and cruel.

And yet, by totally removing the experience of pain away from ourselves and from others, we would be subjected to an even deeper torture. Pain is nature’s most effective learning instrument. Because of pain and the responses it triggers, we avoid dangers, we live longer, and we stay healthier. Pain is everyone’s friend. Without it we wouldn’t survive.

It is no coincidence that in our culture today, we are just as private and locked up inside about our pains as we are our pleasures. Pleasure and pain make people uncomfortable when talked about openly because they are deeply connected and rooted in a total body experience. So like our pleasures, we privatize our pain and tuck it away, keeping it out of plain sight.

We keep our pain heavily sedated. Over 50 million antidepressants and anti-anxiety pills are taken in our country every day. Approximately 10 million gallons of alcohol are consumed in America every day. By the time the sun goes down today, Americans will have smoked 29 metric tons of marijuana. Today, our country will snort one metric ton of cocaine. America makes up only 5 percent of the world population and yet consumes over 80 percent of its pain meds. And that number has been growing by about 7 percent per year.

Western civilization seems to have real difficulty letting pain be pain, and personally, I believe we are made weaker for it. Like that child suffering burns in the bathtub, we have sedated ourselves to the point of endangering all that is best and brightest inside us.

I am not suggesting we dump all the Tylenol out of the cabinet or start berating people who are suffering from terrible disorders like depression and anxiety. But a quick look around reveals that we are terribly out of balance when it comes to letting our pain be pain.

I take a biblical perspective on pain and see in Jesus the following instructions for letting pain be pain from Mark 8:31-34.

1. Pain is not to be privatized. Notice that Jesus says openly and honestly that he will suffer many things. Private pain will drive us further and further into madness: into sedatives, sex, and shopping as a means to cope. Sharing our pain will bring us to embrace each other as fully human, fully aware, fully alive partners on this journey. Sharing pain promotes community and pushes us toward both human and spiritual solutions.
2. Not all pain should be prevented. Peter’s first response to Jesus’ public admission of pain is to try and stop it. Sometimes, that is our first response as well. As parents, would we ever allow our children to skip their vaccinations just because the needle prick hurt a bit? Some pain, certainly not all pain, but some of it, does in fact serve a greater good.
3. Pain should not be without purpose. Taking up a cross is pain with a purpose. No one is asked to sit and wallow in self-pity and pain. Nobody gets to wear pain on their shirt sleeve like some badge of honor. This kind of pain has purpose—we are going someplace together. We have a goal. And that goal is to pass through it to the other side.

Someone once said that “pain is the fuel we burn on the path to beauty.” I believe this is true. I have simply seen it proven to many times not to wholeheartedly believe it. Nature proves this to be true (and I would like to return with a follow-up article about this) and we know this is also true in art. As W. Somerset Maugham writes in his novel, “The Moon & Sixpence”:

“Why should you think that beauty, which is the most precious thing in the world, lies like a stone on the beach for the careless passer-by to pick up idly? Beauty is something wonderful and strange that the Artist fashions out of the chaos of the world in the torment of his soul. And when he has made it, it is not given to all to know it. To recognize it you must repeat the adventure of the Artist.”

For me, the cross of Christ is the quintessential work of art in human history. The medium it uses to create with is our very lives. To repeat the journey of the artist is not for the careless passer-by. To experience the beauty of it is to let our pain be pain. And to, as the master instructs, “take up our own cross” and follow.