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The Paschal Wisdom
Honouring the Pain
Life is very painful at times, but you must honour the pain.
Necessarily anonymous
Was it not ordained that the Christ should suffer and so enter into his glory?
Luke 24:26
P. Mark O’Loughlin cfc
Good Friday 2007
I am in the habit of putting what are for me memorable words of wisdom or delight on the front of my work desk or wall of my office, somewhere to keep them alive. I have some of David Ranson’s pearls on celibacy … Celibacy is the sacrament of hospitality … it is the openness to yet one more relationship in life. The biggest sin against celibacy is to live life as if relationships don’t matter. And the beautiful exchange between father and young adolescent daughter in Nikita Mikhalkov’s sublime film “Burnt by the Sun”. When sharing an intimate moment while boating together on their farm on a hot summer afternoon the father urges his daughter … Always work hard … Love the motherland dearly. And the girl responds … Father, you have no idea how good I feel when I am with you.
Recently I read again one of the pieces … Life is very painful at times, but you must honour the pain. A timely stimulus for reflection during Holy Week. The conviction was expressed to me by a young person who had rescued herself from a psychiatric abyss of catatonia and depression and despair and compelling urges to seek escape in oblivion. It would be presumptuous of me to call her a friend, but I was a privileged presence to her hellish journey. I know of nobody more worthy to offer some wisdom about pain. She grew up as a younger sister to numbers of obscenely abusive brothers in a dysfunctional family that was forever fleeing a violent father. She managed to survive her adolescence and successfully reached a second year of university studies when her life finally imploded. Her personhood and young womanhood had been all but annihilated. She no longer had any energy to face life. When admitted to hospital she had no sense of pain. She had no feelings. When I met her first I wondered whether she was a young man or woman. Her appearance was androgynous. In her deepest self she could not face being a woman.
Some empathetic and skilled psychiatrists facilitated her halting recovery over a number of years. She slowly reclaimed her life, and could remark to me one day … I have stepped into life, and am not about to let it go. And then added her observation about pain. I recall our going to see David Lean’s film of “Lawrence of Arabia” one Saturday afternoon at the old Astor in St. Kilda. In talking about this experience she remarked that at one point shivers ran down my spine. She recognized that this was in fact her first experience of “feeling”. As a result of her crushingly painful experiences her affective life had become totally repressed. But she did reclaim her affective life, and with it was able to recognize and reflect on the pain. At this moment I would love to be able to explore with her what she meant by honour the pain. But I think that at the time I heard the remark I knew what she meant because that was precisely what she had done.
And in honouring the pain she has grown into a remarkably aware and self-directed and energized and wise and generous and creative and integral person. I am aghast at how destructive of a person abuse is, but I am in awe at a human resilience that can journey so fruitfully through pain to wholeness. I anticipate that she would not be the quite wonderful person she now is if it had not been for the pain. Here was a death and a resurrection in their profound mythic meaning. This, surely, is the wonder of the Paschal Mystery.
There must be wisdom to be learned here. And this wisdom must be close to the heart of Holy Week and Easter. How do we honour the pain? I think that the first step must be to recognize and acknowledge and own it. Pain is there in all of our lives. It is deeply integral to our being human. However unpalatable and unfathomable, pain does have meaning and can be creative. We recognize this, of course, when we look at the journeys of a Nelson Mandela or an Edmund of Callan or a Jesus of Nazareth. But we are at risk of denying that we are in pain. We can spend our lives overwhelmed by it, or trying to escape it. I see much evidence of this within life and within our brotherhood. There is so much pain from our early life experiences. Pain companions us. The pain from loss of family, the denial of friendships, the exclusion from the other gender, the depersonalisation of being shaped to conform to a system, the tired theology, the pseudo-spirituality,
the un-negotiated “changes”, to name some sources. And then there is all that pain of loss during our life journey. What do we do with this pain? I often think of the reflection on life by the son in Eugene O’Neill’s “Long Day’s Journey into Night” … None of us can help the things life has done to us. They're done before you realize it, and once they're done they make you do other things until at last everything comes between you and what you'd like to be, and you've lost your true self forever. This is perhaps life’s greatest challenge, the danger of our true selves being lost forever. What potential pain!
I think that the drama of our human experience is laced with what I describe for myself as “un-dealt-with anger”.
Pain
that people carry in life so often generates mindless anger. People appear to have no awareness of their anger, let alone where the causes might be. Road rage is so often irrational. As are other incidents of simmering anger and rage. I have seen this often in teachers and students. And within our brotherhood. And within myself. It seems to me that if we are to honour the pain, then the first step is to own it, and a second step must be to ensure that pain does not become a stimulus for anger that is so destructive of life. Anger is invariably dumped on the other, and that heaps up injustice. If one is to grow through pain, then anger is the path to be avoided. Anger does not honour the pain.
How then does one deal with pain
when it is acknowledged? It seems that one must take the less frequented and more uncomfortable
inner path of grieving. Of allowing grief to well up in response to the acknowledged source of hurt and consequent pain. And we must accept the reality that grief cannot be managed, but must run its course. As it surely will. And therein is the pathway to healing and wholeness and resurrection. I dare to reflect that the Gethsemane experience of Jesus was about grieving, not fear. Jesus recognized the pain of the world, and owned it. His response was not one of anger, as it might have been. It was grief. And out of grief he rose.
The word “mystery” has lost its rich theological nuances of the transcendent and the sacred. It would be an awful human loss if “Paschal Mystery” slid further into meaninglessness. I dare to prefer “Paschal Wisdom”, because I think that Holy Week is deeply about the wisdom of honouring the pain if we are to rise out of potential death. And Paschal Wisdom is about “now”, not “back then”.
I often recall the words of Aesculus … And even in our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart, and in our own despite, against our will, comes wisdom to us by the awful grace of God. Aesculus seems to me to capture the essence of the Paschal Wisdom. It is not essentially different to the insight offered to the disciples on the road to Emmaus … Was it not ordained that the Christ should suffer and so enter into his glory? And Aesculus reminds us dramatically that rising out of the death of pain is no mundane human happening. It is through the awful grace of God. In our Christian tradition we articulate this as the work of the Holy Spirit. Furthermore, I believe that we are all in relationship with the whole created order, so that the Paschal drama is never experienced in aloneness. We are all involved.
I see much pain still to be honoured in our lives, but I rejoice that there is also much evidence in our Province story of pain being honoured and consequent growth towards wholeness.
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