Time for Pain

Last updated on: March 25, 2011 at 7:08 am by luxpickel

Time for Pain 2011-03-25T07:08:45-07:00 luxpickel

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Lent 3 Matthew 16: 21-26

Jesus, our brother, you followed the necessary path and are broken on our behalf. May we neither cling to our pain where it is futile, nor refuse to embrace the cost when it is required of us: that in losing ourselves for your sake, we may be brought to new life. Amen. Janet Morley

Pain is hard to talk about, to face, for me. So much pain in our world seems unescapable and unfathomable: the faces of loved ones looking through rubble in the wake of the earthquake and tsunami in Japan, the twisted bodies of those caught in cross-fires of national uprisings, the ravages of disease as it progresses in someone’s being, mind, souls and frame.

Yet pain is part of our reflective destination in Lent; the journey, the via dolorosa, leads to the cross. Janet Morley lifts up the reality that living with pain is sometimes a matter of choice. The gospels are clear about that–Jesus chose to walk toward and into pain, and that followers of Jesus will be given the same choice. That choice feels so counter-cultural for middle class North Americans. We’ve been led to believe that to choose to be where pain is or to enter pain is masochistic and a sign of weakness.

As I enter this third week of Lent, I am prompted by this prayer to question the pain that I encounter, that I meet, that I feel. How do I respond to the pain of Japan, Haiti, the chaotic strife-torn countries of northern Africa, the on-going grinding battles in the middle East? I do feel a need to measure the amount of news that I consume; more picture and details daily, hourly, do not give me more compassion and insight. So how do I let the pain of the world inform my prayers and my actions?

I also ask myself about my role in accompanying the pain of others. So many in my world suffer daily from disease of heart and mind that is excruciating and constant. I don’t have the power or skill to heal. Where do I place myself with them? This past week I had an opportunity to be among a group of suffering ones; they were suffering from a loss and betrayal that I shared too. Part of me wanted to truncate the expressions of grieving and despair, to set a task that was discrete, manageable, and to accomplish it. But it became clear that if there were to be a way through this valley of the shadow, we needed to sit down and weep together, to pray together, to be present to one another’s particular wounds. I needed to walk into their pain, be a witness to it…for Jesus’ sake.

On the other hand, I need to ask whose pain I am carrying that does not to belong to me. What hurts and slights from the past, what dramas of yore have lost their power? What wounds have been healed in actuality, yet the telling of the Tale of Pain keeps being rehearsed again and again, as if it is The Story of Identity and Meaning? As I review my own life, how do I relate a narrative that is truthful, acknowledging the painful places, the places of loss and disappointment, and hold them with gentleness that opens my eyes to the Grace and Redemption that attends them as well?

I am often baffled by pain, seek ways to avoid and dull it. Yet, sometimes I have wanted to cast myself as the “Maid of Constant Sorrow,” letting myself be the star of a melodrama that makes me the center of attention. Jesus calls us to something quite different: an ongoing attentive discernment to the pain of the world, in and around us, and then to the call to each of us as to where we need to go forward in presence and giving.

May I be granted the wisdom and courage so to do!

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