the value of pain
Making sense of suffering
Some news just feels overwhelming, doesn’t it? This week it’s the devastating earthquakes in Turkey and Syria. Thousands killed, even more injured, families broken, countless people rendered homeless, houses and businesses reduced to rubble. How can anyone make sense of it?
It took me back to a book I read donkey’s years ago, first published in 1977, revised in 1990: Where is God when it Hurts? by Philip Yancey, which I still have on my shelves. I’d forgotten how honestly it addresses the difficult questions, and how much sense it talks, though I don’t share all his fundamental premises, nor indeed come to exactly the same conclusions. But Wondering about God is an almost universal part of the experience of suffering seems a fair starting point. And it’s eminently readable.
Many years ago, the young Yancey was blown away by the insights given to him by Dr Paul Brand who worked in a colony for lepers in India and taught him that pain is essential to life and health. Without the ability to feel pain – because of diseases like indifference to pain syndrome, leprosy, advanced diabetes and alcoholism – the individual is at great peril of damage and even death. The first 66 pages are devoted to establishing this fact in a most engaging way.
Looking beyond the medical dimension, the author points out the importance of perspective. Individual pain is a very different thing from a biological appreciation of the wonderfully designed nervous system, or a philosophical discussion of the sum total of human suffering.
Pain may have been intended as an efficiently protective warning system, but something about this planet has gone haywire and pain now rages out of control.
Perhaps suffering is a better word for our purposes to capture the breadth of agony humans are subject to. Look around you at the earthquakes and tsunamis, deadly viruses and bacteria, chromosomal anomalies and diseases, and the question becomes, How can God allow intense, unfair suffering?
Yancey sees much of the suffering on our planet as a result of two principles which operate: a physical world that runs according to consistent natural laws, and human freedom.
Suffering caused by man’s freedom? Well, we’ve all seen human’s capacity to foul things up – just look at climate change. But it’s bigger than that; as Yancey puts it, the inhabitants of this world have been emitting a constant stream of low frequency distress signals, for a long time. The planet is groaning. The God Yancey believes in is sorely displeased with what man has done on and to this earth; that it still exists is a measure of his mercy not his cruelty.
For CS Lewis, famed for his insight into suffering, God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pains. Pain is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world – to draw our attention to what mankind has done to ruin things.
Examples from real life are scattered throughout the book, but some sixty plus pages in the middle are devoted to details about outstanding people who came through catastrophic suffering and responded in astonishing ways – not all in accordance with Yancey’s own conclusions incidentally. There are, of course, many contrary instances of people destroyed by suffering, but Yancey’s examplars have all achieved a state of being, inner strength and courage, that leave me totally humbled. I’m pretty sure I would not have responded to unremitting pain, quadriplegia, and utter dependence as they have done. Does this hold a clue to questions about the value of suffering? You’d need to make up your own mind. But whatever else, these extraordinary lives of creative suffering will challenge you.
Yancey’s own experience of being alongside those who are struggling confirmed for him the ‘megaphone value’ of pain, and he has no glib answers. Knowledge of what pain is and how we deal with it can be used to handle its consequences better, but there are no definitive satisfying answers to the problem of Why?, no magic formula as to how to help effectively. What people need is love – especially when God seems to have forsaken them – the kind of love that instinctively understands and supports.
There are lots of helpful tips and hints in Part 4 of the book, hints on how to reach out to others when we have no answers, and how to learn acceptance – without blame or anger or fear – of those things which we simply don’t understand. But for the purposes of this post I’ll single out a few useful conclusions:
The Why? question is unanswerable and religious platitudes are at the very least unhelpful and can be positively damaging. It’s more important to ask, not ‘Why has this happened to me?’, but ‘What should my response be?’
Yancey would change the question, Where is God when it hurts? to Where is the church when it hurts? He writes: We form the front line of God’s response to the suffering world.
Meticulous controlled scientific experiments have concluded that hope, faith and a purpose in life are medicinal. Courageous hope can’t be taught, but it can be caught. Strong moral and religious conviction certainly play a significant role in coping and endurance.
Thinking less of oneself and more of others, looking outward rather than inward, can be hugely beneficial to personal growth and spiritual health.
The greatest happiness comes in sacrificial service – through pain we can find pleasure. We see the finest examples of this truth in those selfless people who devote their lives to helping others without recognition or remuneration.