Few experiences are truly universal. Pain is one.

To be sure, anyone who tells you, "I know just how you feel," probably doesn't. My broken arm is not just like your broken arm. But every person has known pain, from tummy aches to cuts, from burnt fingers to cancer.

Because of the universal experience of pain, pain is also a universal metaphor. We speak of the pain of shattered dreams, or the pain of divorce. We may describe an annoying person as a "pain in the neck" (or elsewhere!). In every language I know, the word for pain has both literal and metaphorical meanings.

Years ago, Philip Yancey and Paul Brand wrote a book entitled The Gift of Pain. Dr. Brand was one of the world's leading experts on leprosy. He discovered that the horrifying disfigurement characteristic of leprosy was caused by impairment of the nervous system; people with leprosy could not feel pain, did not know when their bodies were suffering injury. Brand came to see pain as a marvelous gift, a warning system for danger. As Yancey put it, "Indeed, pain is a gift that none of us want and yet none of us can do without."[1]

Emotional or spiritual pain may also be a gift: a sign that something is wrong and needs attention. Pain does not always need to be "fixed." We may need to embrace our pain, to enter it fully and explore its depths, before we can cross through to the other side of pain.

The prophet Jeremiah charged that religious leaders of his day, "treated the wound of my people carelessly, saying 'Peace, peace,' when there is no peace" (6:14). Jeremiah, writes Walter Brueggemann, practiced the ministry of articulating pain, breaking through the numbness that kept people from recognizing the depth of their pain. The prophet's focus was not on addressing behavioral problems or even calling for repentance. No, Jeremiah "has only the hope that the ache of God could penetrate the numbness of history. He engages not in scare or threat but only in a yearning that grows with and out of pain."[2]

                                              - Bill

                                      --by Jan 

      She seemed to be crying yet her eyes were dry. Her voice cracked at any mention of pain. She finally admitted that if the sluices were opened, torrents of pain would pour out, unstoppable. Pain had become her friend, her constant companion.  She suffered rightly. "To suffer rightly is to have a secret with God."[1]  She, an old friend in Kansas, suffered properly, in an appropriate manner, but "she" could be any one of us.

     Few would dare write our own de profundis,[2] when in the depths of pain. Prayer is difficult, impossible, or even non-existent. Once, in 1991, during our Spiritual Directors formation class, someone asked our guest faculty, Fr. Victor Goertz, what he did when he was in pain and unable to pray. Victor lowered his eyes and spiraled deep into himself and sat silent and still. Then he lifted his face, looked at us, and said soulfully, "I hurt." 

     Sometimes that's all we can do, is hurt. Particularly in instances of acute pain, we acknowledge and reverence the pain until the alchemy of time, language, and experience neutralizes the pain. Jungian psychoanalyst Dr. Marga Speicher describes it this way: When we are struck with a sharp, deep pain, it is like dropping a rock into a well. At first the rock makes a violent splash and sends waves through the many layers. In time, the water becomes still again. The rock is now on the bottom, causing no disturbance to the water. Our pain, like the rock, remains still, but still there.

[1] Provocations: Spiritual Writings of Kierkegaard, p.386

[2] Out of the depths, Psalm 130