Going with the pain

Suffering can be united with the cross of Christ and turned into an occasion of grace.

Bishop Scharfenberger

A priest friend of mine, whose mission is as a hospital chaplain, recently informed me of a situation in his own country — he is an African — wherein doctors are urging pregnant women to avoid natural childbirth. The reason is not that it’s necessarily safer for the woman or the baby, but that the cesarean section can be a less painful procedure. Never mind that, like other surgeries, it generates more cash.

Reduction or elimination of pain can be a worthy component of medical treatment. Probably more avenues could and should be explored and developed to alleviate the sufferings of those with terminal illnesses such as cancer. In itself, pain has little value. But then again neither does pleasure. Either one, if done only for its own sake, is not quite a human experience. It may be the experience of human beings, but it is not uniquely human.

Animals most certainly experience sensations of pain. Observers of nature are well aware, however, that a wounded animal can be particularly vulnerable to predators. Often, therefore, the afflicted creature will not signal being in pain. Anyone who has witnessed the death of a pet cat, for example, may have noticed what seems to be an extraordinarily heroic-seeming calmness in the face of its demise.

For human beings, it is often quite different. When in pain, a far more human response is to do everything to draw attention, to cry out for help. Not that this does not occur with some animals as well. But humans seem to be looking for more than just notice and quick relief. They want understanding, sympathy and, yes, compassion — a sense that someone is actually accompanying them, going with them, and co-suffering, as it were.

I don’t know how many of our mothers would actually think, let alone say, that they wondered if any of us appreciated the pain they went through in bringing us into this world. I am not only talking about the delivery itself, which can be an excruciatingly long process in some cases, but the long nine months during which they prepared themselves for our arrivals throughout more than a few seasons. The wonders and the worries as they shared with us in the most intimate of ways we will never know, their thoughts and feelings as they felt our movements and our still points, pausing at the staircase landing or waking suddenly in the middle of the night, hoping all is still well. One can only imagine. The patience that is a sweet form of suffering because it is necessary in order to allow a life to grow. It is something that will continue throughout the life of the child, after birth as before, perhaps even more so till death.

Parents suffer great pain and anxiety due to choices their children make as they approach and enter physical maturation, often well before mind and reason can catch up. What to say to a child struggling with a first love, or even relationship with their own body, as we hear of almost every day as if it were the norm, not an exception. Much advice is offered (sold?), more self-assured than can ever honestly be correct in the face of so much inconsistent information and experience. The impulse to employ medical violence, with such short-sighted finality, the possibility that the pain of a few years of waiting and reflection would be more fatal than the inalterable consequences of following every surgical impulse.

Is pain to be avoided at all costs, even if it causes more pain to the survivors, the grieving family? I think of the pressure to legalize assisted suicide. I know a woman, a saintly lady, who underwent numerous treatments for her terminal cancer for the sake of her family. She loved life and yet would happily have allowed nature to take its course without extraordinary interventions. But her children — who mostly were thinking of their own children, her grandchildren — persuaded her to hang on till the next birthday, the next graduation, the next wedding. And she did. Much longer than even God would have expected of her. Was she wrong to have gone with the pain for the sake of love? For her loved ones? I know that this woman had one focus in her life: Jesus Christ and his cross. Yes, she loved her family, but her prayer was most certainly to do what God invited her to do for the love of her family. From this she derived her strength and the wisdom that so many who came to her for advice and counsel sought.

St. Bonaventure was asked once where he got his spiritual wisdom. He was a contemporary of both St. Thomas Aquinas and St. Francis and he knew them well. In his “Journey of the Mind to God” he wrote, “Christ is both the way and the door. Christ is the staircase and the vehicle … A man should turn his full attention to this throne of mercy, and should gaze at him hanging from the cross … full of wonder and joy, marked by gratitude, and open to praise and jubilation.” Bona­venture found great joy in uniting himself with the pasch of Christ, imagining he was crossing with him through life’s Red Seas, lying even in the tomb with him, through the pangs of death itself. “My flesh and my heart fail me, but God is the strength of my heart and my heritage forever.”

Mother Teresa was certainly a kindred spirit. Enduring many years of spiritual aridity as she worried, wept and walked with Kolkata’s teeming masses and absorbed what must have felt like the emptiness of their senseless suffering, gave herself — or, rather, the Christ she clung to as the center of her life — to them in order to console them. Not as “the masses” but, as she was fond of saying (and doing), “one person at a time.”

The imitation of Christ can as much become the accompaniment of one, single person on a long and hard road, as a friend, a spouse or a secret prayer intention — yes, one can choose to pray for someone from afar who has no idea they are the recipient of the prayer — a road that might endure for life, making patient sacrifices. This pain and suffering may never be noticed by anyone but God. And yet … how would you or I ever know that there is some person doing just that for us?

I am not suggesting here that suffering has any value for suffering’s sake. But, as I mentioned above, neither does the pursuit of pleasure have any particularly human meaning if it is just for its own sake. Being happy alone is as pointless and devoid of meaning as aimless suffering. Unlike pleasure, however, suffering can be united with the cross of Christ and turned into an occasion of grace, of intercessory prayer, of love for the one prayed for or visited or simply thought of. Understood, embraced and lived in this way, no suffering is useless, even if it be in silence.

Simon and Garfunkel once eulogized in “The Sounds of Silence,” the song they popularized, written by Paul Simon, the emptiness of the people who “bowed and prayed to the neon god they made.” Their plaint echoed poignantly the lot of the thousands of “people talking without speaking … hearing without listening … writing songs that voices never shared.” Ever lost as the “memories, like tears in rain,” to quote the line of the dying replicant, Roy Batty, an android in the movie “Blade Runner.”

No memories need be lost, even in the awful throes of those suffering from the many forms of dementia, like Alzheimer’s, if those who love and remember the love of the ones who likely spent years of their own lives commiserating and sharing the growing pains of their children and grandchildren, abide with them in prayer and loving presence. Somehow in the mystery by which Christ embraced the sufferings of all in the loving arms of his merciful compassion on the cross, somehow all of us are invited into that all-encompassing, all-forgiving love that blesses even as it is rejected by a sinful world.

It is never easy to choose a path that leads us directly into the darkness, again in the words of St. Bonaventure, “silencing our anxieties, our passions and all our fantasies.” So that, “we may hear with Paul: My grace is sufficient for you; and we can rejoice with David, saying: My flesh and my heart fail me, but God is the strength of my heart and my heritage forever.”

 @AlbanyDiocese