Engaging Pain

Pain is an inevitable part of life. The American Medical Association defines pain as “an unpleasant sensation related to tissue damage.” Such a definition is reflective of only one type of pain, physical pain. Such pain originates in the body. It’s the result of swollen joints, fluid filled lungs, damaged nerves, invading tumors, among many other causes. Often you can lay your hands on such pain. You can literally touch the place it hurts.

Break Open by Lisle Gwynn Garrity, A Sanctified Art

Feeling such pain is inevitable; it is going to happen at one time or another. It doesn’t really matter what the pain is, we typically don’t choose it, which is why most of us don’t think of feeling pain as a spiritual practice.

But what we do when we are in pain is a choice.

We can try to avoid pain altogether. We can deny pain. We can numb it. We can fight it. Or we can engage it.

The biblical book of Job paints a picture of what it might look like to engage pain.

The opening verses of Job make clear that there is no question that Job is good. He is a blameless and upright man who fears God and turns away from evil. Even God agrees with this assessment.

It’s what prompts the Satan-figure to choose Job as a test case of faithfulness. Satan argues that Job only fears God because God has always blessed Job, giving him his health, his family, and his prosperity. And so, “Hurt him,” Satan says to God, “hurt him bad, and he will curse you to your face.”

And that’s exactly what the Satan-figure does, with permission from God. Job’s livestock die, a house falls on his children, and finally Job himself is covered with festering boils from the soles of his feet to the crown of his head.

Job knows pain, both physical and emotional. And what does he do? He doesn’t turn away from God, but he also doesn’t hold back. Job curses the day he was born. He defends the justice of his cause. He tells God to go pick on someone God’s own size. “Will you not look away from me for a while,” Job rages, “let me alone until I swallow my spittle?”

Barbara Brown Taylor puts it this way, “His physical pain is beyond words. The losses he has suffered are unspeakable. Yet Job will not shut up. With nothing else to do and nothing left to protect, he uses every verbal tool he has to pound on God’s door: curses, tears, insolence, sarcasm, humility, indignation, reason.”

It’s called lament, and, in my opinion, lament doesn’t get the time or space it deserves. But lament is a way to engage pain, to face it head on, refusing to let God off the hook for the painful realities of life.

Lament may not change the situation itself, but it opens the door to something else.

Barbara Brown Taylor goes on, “There will always be people who run from every kind of pain and suffering…for those willing to stay awake, pain remains a reliable altar in the world, a place to discover that life can be as full of meaning as it is of hurt. The two have never cancelled each other and I doubt they ever will, not until each of us – or all of us together – find the way through.”

Grace and peace,

Kimmy