It's A Really Real Pain

So what is the place of pain in this process?  I have a Christian-Buddhist-agnostic friend who says, “Suffering is pain plus resistance.”  By that I think he means that we add to the physical sensations of pain in order to make that pain into suffering.  We add questions about the meaning of the pain, the purpose of the pain, the source and duration of the pain.  When we add those questions to the sensation and do not received satisfactory answers, then we suffer.  

It is worth wondering whether it is our experience of pain or our impulse to resist that pain is the problem here.  This is especially true when it comes to the pain of grieving.  Is the task to “get over the grief and get on with my life”?  Or is the task somehow to integrate that deep pain into a new sense of who I am and who I can be?

In her book, An Altar in the World, Barbara Brown Taylor discusses “the practice of feeling pain.”  She calls Job, for example, “one of pain’s most eloquent poets.”  Like my spiritually eclectic friend, she notes that the experience of pain is not optional for human beings (or any other sentient being, I think).  We have options and choices, however, regarding how we deal with the pain.  Taylor writes, 

I can try to avoid pain.  I can deny pain.  I can numb it and I can fight it.  Or I can decide to engage pain when it comes to me, giving it my full attention so that it can teach me what I need to know about the Really Real. (page 157).

I think about a chance I had to observe some people in pain.  In May of 2004 a large tornado roared through southeastern Nebraska.  One of the towns hardest hit was Hallam, about thirty minutes southwest of Lincoln.  I spent a few days volunteering in the clean-up after the storm.  It was coincidence that I helped clean up the ruins of the United Methodist Church in the village.  

By the time I got there, the majority of the ruins had been removed.  What remained was the bare first floor of the church building and a basement filled with mud, debris and the functional remains of generations of worshipers and students.

While we worked, church members wandered in and out of the building.  Some of them picked up some of these functional remains on the floor or off the shelves.  For one, it was a Sunday School leaflet that brought tears and sighs.  For another, it was half a hymnal caught in a closet door.  The hymnal had been given in memory of a loved one whose name was still visible on the inside cover.  For another it was the few remaining dishes in the cupboard—mute witnesses to a hundred potlucks and wedding receptions and funeral luncheons.

The survivors picked up these items and then put them down.  They picked them up and put them down again.  It was almost as if the scattered items were hot to the touch.  It seemed that the church members couldn’t hold those items for long. The pain of memory was simply too much.  Even though the shards of the past were so very precious, they were also filled with loss and grief—almost like pieces of broken glass embedded in the paper or the china.  

A few people took items with them as they left that naked church basement.  Most of them put the items down, wiped their eyes, and left empty-handed.  Perhaps it was just too much to carry the pain with them out the door.  Perhaps they carried enough already.

“Pain is one of the fastest routes to a no-frills encounter with the Holy,” writes Barbara Brown Taylor, “and yet the majority of us do everything in our power to avoid it” (An Altar in the World¸ page 138).  I think she is right in this, but at first the pain is simply too much to absorb.  Numbness is a defense mechanism in the beginning.  Now, when I deal with grieving people, I am ever so grateful for the numbness and denial that make it possible for them to get through the first days and weeks of loss without simply collapsing and dying from the grief.

The inability to feel the depth of pain is only pathological when it later becomes the unwillingness to feel that pain.  I'd like to spend some time looking at the processes that make it possible both to feel the pain and to get on with life after loss.