Letting the light in

This wonderful line from Leonard Cohen, new to me, has to be shared:
"There's a crack in everything; that's how the light gets in."  Similarly, the medieval mystic Julian of Norwich spoke of wounds as "holes in the soul" where light--and life--can get through.

As I wrestled this week with pain and the body's various aches, I turned to this bit of wisdom, reminding me of life's imperfections and the positive lessons to be learned from contemplating a  global community that shares pain, fear (over the terrorism in Paris and elsewhere), and suffering.

What can pain teach us?  David Whyte has posed that question to himself many times, I would think, as his little book of reflections, Consolations, shows; and often there is an undercurrent of the positive breaking through the reality of suffering.

Although sometimes his sentences lose me by their level of abstraction so that he becomes opaque rather than lucid, Whyte has things to say about loneliness that illustrate what I mean.  Loneliness allows us to pay attention to others, he says, to find "the healing power in the other" even in the midst of our sadness.

In the silence of solitude, as Thomas Merton found, we can feel spiritually connected to other souls; and we can listen to our inner selves and the voices of authors we read before we emerge in the world again, ready to listen to those around us with real attention.

Without pain, would there be empathy?  For the Christian, of course, the crucified Christ embodies the world-suffering of humanity in such a totally unselfish way that the believer can feel saved, enlightened by the light that comes through the cracks.

Laughing at Pain

During the past year I have been wrestling with pain in two areas of my body: head (migraine headaches) and knee. Extensive walking is not easy, and I am easily discouraged, fearing that I will simply get worse and praying for an unlikely cure.

Luckily, I have been talking to a compassionate friend, a retired doctor, who has some similar health challenges, and we share the ups and downs of getting older. I quote to him ideas from Shakespeare (King Lear, especially) about the inevitability of pain as part of the human condition; and he, having seen great pain in his medical practice and having known spiritual pain from family members who underwent the horrors of the Holocaust, shares wisdom from the Jewish tradition. I tell myself each day, "this too shall pass," no pain is permanent.

And yet the fear is there, at least for me, that I am on a downward spiral. So it was of value that I ordered a copy of David Whyte's book of reflections, Consolations: The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words.   Whyte, a marine biologist in the Pacific Northwest, was raised in Yorkshire, with Celtic ancestry (Irish and Welsh). Not surprisingly, he is a gifted poet, as his miniature essays on selected words reveal.

I first chose his entry on "Pain," and was reminded of several positive aspects of this problem: first, that it is "the doorway to the here and now."  Whyte sees pain as a "way in" to interior healing. And to a sense of humility: "In real pain we have no other choice than to ask for help. . . Pain tells us we belong and cannot live forever in isolation."

In connecting us to others who share pain as part of the price of being human, Whyte goes on to emphasize how pain can lead to "real compassion."  And as we undergo the limitations caused by pain, we also find that bodily pain calls for a broader view, whereby we step back and look at our lives from a detached perspective.  Such a perspective is essentially comic: we can laugh at our predicament, at the physical absurdity that limits us.  This is hard for me, but a point to return to.

Finally, Whyte says that although pain takes us on a lonely road that no one else can truly know, it also offers the possibility "of coming to know others as we have, with so much difficulty, come to know ourselves."

It took several readings of Whyte's concise reflections for them to sink in; when they did, I felt a relief that was less physical than emotional, a sense of solidarity with others who suffer. And I was reminded of the saying that "pain is inevitable, but suffering is optional." We have some choice in how we respond to the body in need of healing, how we turn despair into some kind of hope.  I can experience physical pain, but I don't have to suffer and be miserable.

Whether I can laugh at my infirmities is a greater challenge, one that another author, Kelly Carlin, the daughter of the comedian George Carlin, notes in her new book, A Carlin Home Companion, a memoir detailing her progress from substance abuse and family dysfunction to healing.  She, too, notes the need for detachment, the ability to step back from self-absorption, and look at the bigger picture:

"When you can learn to laugh at your pain, then you have a chance of finally moving on from it."  She is able to do this through writing her life story: in organizing her life story into a narrative, she is able to shift her relationship to trauma and pain.  They become "an object outside yourself."

For Kelly Carlin, as for David Whyte and millions of others, the art of writing becomes the means of detachment, a kind of therapy of healing the soul, if not the body.  I am grateful to have come across both of them at the same time.

Pain and Affliction

For the past few months, head and neck pain, the byproduct of too much writing at the computer, has re-surfaced, slowing me down, making my posts infrequent or brief.  I have re-learned certain things about pain: that it isolates, cuts me off from communicating as I wish; it is also hard to explain to people, that is, the exact quality of the pain, since I hope that their understanding would somehow alleviate it.

Pain tends to dominate my life, creating anxiety, telling me I am cursed to a life of suffering. I feel sorry for myself. I fear that it will grow progressively worse and my pain will take over my life. Then I realize that I supposedly believe that pain is not the same as suffering (pain is inevitable, suffering is optional). I tell myself that no pain lasts forever while realizing that reason has little effect on feelings like fear. I find myself too preoccupied by something that is not life-threatening but annoying, chronic, seemingly inescapable. I then tell myself that others are worse off, and as I pray for them, I gain some comfort, feeling myself part of a human community in which pain is part of life.

I try various therapies, some helpful, or distract myself with music or movies or anything that will get me away from my desk and computer.

I recently returned to a classic essay by Simone Weil, "The Love of God and Affliction" to see if her notion of affliction would return me to the context of prayer. To see, that is, if pain makes any sense.

Weil can be tough going, adding to my headaches, and I don't understand some of her dense, mystical statements nor do I agree with all of her assumptions. Yet this "secular saint," as she was called, this Jewish philosopher steeped in ancient Greek thought who was drawn to Christ and Catholicism but never could accept baptism, offers a deeply felt understanding of how affliction, when it is consented to in a spirit of love, is different from suffering.

When things go well for us, she says, we don't think of our "almost infinite fragility."  But we can be thankful for affliction because it tells us of the fragility of life since it can result in a state of mind "as acute as that of a man facing death at the guillotine."  And because our weakness can make possible a union with the crucified Christ, the universal emblem of self-denial.

Awareness of affliction, says Weil, is at the center of Christianity.
(I think of the compassion Pope Francis showed last month to a grossly disfigured man.) Love is the key:

"The man who sees someone in affliction and projects into him his own being brings to birth in him through love, at least for a moment, an existence apart from his affliction." What causes this process is the identity of human beings across times and cultures.

Affliction, like beauty, compels us to ask, Why? Why are things beautiful? Why does my pain, turned into affliction, transform me? He who is capable of listening to the answer to such questions, she says, will hear the answer: Silence. "He who is capable of listening but also of loving hears this silence as the word of God."

I don't know if this brief synopsis of a complex essay makes any sense; reading it again brought me some comfort from an un usual source: a  woman who died in 1943 of self-imposed starvation so she could be in solidarity with those in occupied France dying of hunger after a life of intense reflection on affliction and the love of God.

Pain, Suffering, and JFK

Reading Chris Matthews' recent book, Jack Kennedy: Elusive Hero, reveals (at least to me) some new facets of this president's complex character. Along with the glamor and charisma, the womanizing and idealism, and all the rest, there is the skinny, lonely kid who learned early on that he was not likely to live long. He also had to endure amazing coldness on the part of his ambitious family.

His favorite poem: "I Have a Rendzvous with Death." His family and friends are unanimous in saying, "he never complained"--even after multiple hospitalizations for pneumonia, stomach pain, severe back pain and surgeries, injections, Addison's disease, etc.

Instead of suffering, he chose humor, looking for people with whom he could share a laugh. And he turned to reading, creating an inner life based on the old heroic model of what Hemingway called grace under pressure. He was determined to live every minute as if it were his last, no matter what the doctors said, no matter how great the pain.

I suggested earlier that pain is inevitable; suffering is optional. The two terms are often used interchangeably, yet suffering, for me, is the mental anguish and worry that we tend to fall back on when faced with pain. There are times, and JFK is an example, of how we can choose not to suffer.

As I was reading this book, my wife, in another instance of the synchronicity that often occurs in my life, handed me a 2006 article by Margaret Roche Macey, who was then dealing with terminal cancer.

She begins with a reflection on watching late into the night for the moment when darkness comes and overtakes the light: to her surprise, it never actually came. Instead, "the darkness actually grew [since]...it had always been there just waiting for the light to leave..."

She then asks, Do we likewise always carry our death within us rather than wait to meet it in a hospital bed? From this question comes an insight that God (light) is within (inside the darkness), "at the center of all that you most fear."

JFK developed a strong will; Macey developed a deep sense of prayer leading to an insight that death, like darkness, is not an "other" experience--separate from us--but an inseparable part of life and thus not something to be feared.

Both Kennedy and Macey seemed to transcend pain and avoid suffering by turning inward to the Spirit. As I deal with my own (minor) back pain now, these experiences of courage and faith are of inestimable importance, as I know they are to many others.

Managing Pain

Lately, while dealing with my own minor muscular pains, I have been mindful of three friends with much more serious, chronic pain. One of the women is dying of cancer; the other two have tried various treatments with no success. I hope my prayers for them do some good.

I am reminded of the saying: Pain is inevitable; suffering is optional. Viktor Frankl in his classic book, Man's Search for Meaning, is emphatic in saying that is that our ultimate freedom is to "choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances." He believes, based on his experience as a young man dealing with the Holocaust, that a positive attitude toward pain can circumvent suffering. If we have a reason to live, if we choose to focus on love or a positive goal, we can overcome any temporary pain.

But so much depends on the individual's sensitivity and tolerance for physical pain. As Joan Halifax points out in an important chapter in her book Being with Dying, suffering is the story we tell ourselves about the pain we feel. If suffering is an attitude we choose, can we rise above it, putting even the pain in its place?

As an experienced caregiver, Halifax has some valuable insights. While believing that pain medication is often necessary, she suggests that pain can teach us various lessons (about compassion, patience) if we don't let our fear overwhelm us.

Why do we fear pain? Do we fear that we will become its victim as it grows worse and worse? We become afraid it will devour us. "But when the pain is really great, we might feel so desperate to deal with it that our desperation generates the courage we need to meet it."

I am reminded of Tolstoi's great classic, "The Death of Ivan Ilych," in which the dying man, after great agony, finally--at the very end of his suffering--lets go and is somehow able to distance himself from his body and its pain. His soul comes alive, as his body dies, and he begins to ask the ultimate question, What is it all about? Why have I not lived the right kind of life? Somehow, Tolstoi has convincingly dramatized the reality of suffering giving way to release, taking us closer to this fictional character than we are ever likely to get to a real person.

Halifax says that some patients are able to focus their attention away from the pain to something pleasant or healing; distraction can be helpful. Sometimes, being fully present to our own pain can decrease its negative experience.

Each person's experience in dealing with pain, as Halifax wisely shows, tends to be different. But it's clear that the tendency many of us have to obsess about our condition, to allow our fears to build, makes matters worse and can be changed. Having the caring presence of another is very helpful, but even when we are alone, as we ultimately are in such cases, we need not despair. Pain does not last forever. "Even great pain is impermanent. More importantly, it is not who we really are." Thank you, Joan Halifax, for this and for helping me think about the fear associated with pain.