Is pain ever a good thing?
Certainly most of us would say yes!
It is, obviously, a built in warning system designed to protect the human organism from serious injury; even death. Some of us will agree that it can play a role in self-improvement. There may even be a few of us who accept it as a necessary element in the process of character building. But rarely do any of us seek it.
Actually, many of us consider the existence of pain or suffering as primary evidence that there cannot be a good deity. “How?” they ask, “could there be a good god when there’s so much suffering?” How could a “good god” allow little children to die?
In such protests lies a value judgment.
Pain is evil!
But we’ve just agreed that there are instances when it can be valuable. I’ve talked to people who’ve suffered a great deal yet insist that they are better for it. One man, in particular, suffering in the advanced stages of Parkinson’s, said, “If it weren’t for the ‘bug’ I wouldn’t know how important my Family and Friends really are! I wouldn’t know how much I need God!”
How would you account for such differences of opinion on something so common to the human experience?
W.H. Auden is considered to be among the greatest poets of the 20th Century. He was awarded a Pulitzer Prize in 1948. He was a Professor of Poetry at Oxford from 1956 – 61. In 1965 he was acclaimed the “foremost poet writing in English.” One of his longer workds is a Christmas Oratorio titled, For the Time Being. It features all of the characters in the biblical stories of Christ’s birth. At a critical point in this prodigious work one of the characters laments a threat to authority and the degeneration of “Rational Law.” “Knowledge,” he worries, “will degenerate into a riot of subjective vision.”
“A riot of subjective vision.”
How graphic! And how vividly descriptive of the present human condition. Auden wrote these words at the time of World War 2. The “subjective vision” of a “Master Race” engineering utopia had plunged virtually the entire human race into a worldwide war. Still, at no other time, has the “riotous” nature of “subjective vision” been more obvious than this present. Islamist extremists persist in terrorizing the world into acquiescence to Sharia. Tribal visions of power and the restoration of a magical, former way of life inflame nations across Africa. Our Presidential Election is a ridiculous carnival of candidate after candidate pandering to one “subjective vision” after another. “A woman’s choice;” “gay rights;” “black liberation;” “seniors;” “free Healthcare for everyone;” “animal rights.” There is no end.
“What,” you ask, “does this have to do with pain?”
This! A “subjective vision,” is a selfish vision. A vision of an existence where all self-interest is served. Just as my pain is proof that a god, if there is one, cannot be good, so no authority, nor form of government, that fails to serve my self-interest to my complete satisfaction is acceptable. “Ethics,” the humanist insists, "is autonomous and situational.”
How could supposedly intelligent people not see the seeds of “riot” and mayhem at the heart of such subjectivity? The raucous, cacophonous squawking of seagulls stuck in a mainsail crying, “Mine!” “Mine!” “Mine!” “Mine!” in the movie Finding Nemo, parodies what comes of it. To think that “I,” should not get what “I” want; that “I” – the supreme “me” – should suffer at all is anathema to the “subjective vision.” In His day Jesus made this astute observation. “How can I account for this self-indulgent generation? The people have been like spoiled children whining to their parents, ‘We wanted to skip rope, and you were always too tired; we wanted to talk, but you were always too busy.’ John the Baptist came fasting and they called him crazy. I came feasting and they called me a lush, a friend of the riffraff. Opinion polls don’t count for much, do they? The proof of the pudding is in the eating.” “Wisdom is proven right by its actions.”
Aleksander Solzhenitsyn is no stranger to suffering. Years of suffering and deprivation in the Labor Camps of Russia almost took his life. Yet he came out of those horrors with a remarkably wise understanding of the value of pain he and multitudes of his fellow “dissidents” suffered. “We have been through a spiritual training far in advance of Western experience. The complex and deadly crush of life has produced stronger, deeper, and more interesting personalities than those generated by standardized Western well-being.” “If,” he wrote, “as claimed by humanism, man were born only to be happy, he would not be born to die. Since his body is doomed to death his task on earth evidently must be more spiritual: not a total engrossment in everyday life, not the search for the best ways to obtain material goods and then their carefree consumption. It has to be the fulfillment of a permanent, earnest duty so that one’s life journey may become above all an experience of moral growth: to leave life a better human being than one started. … It is not possible that assessment of the President’s performance should be reduced to the question of how much money one makes or to the availability of gasoline. Only by the voluntary nurturing in ourselves of freely accepted and serene self-restraint can mankind rise above the world stream of materialism (and subjectivism).”
The writer of a New Testament letter to Hebrew Christians tells us that, “Though Jesus was God’s Son, he learned trusting-obedience by what he suffered.” It was, for Him, as it is for us, “in the crucible” of life’s struggles that we are refined until we become people of a metal so pure it can withstand the “slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.”
Such are the people in whom pain is transformed, as was Christ’s cross, from a tragedy to a source of triumph.
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