Holding Pain

Part I

Holding Pain

by the Rev. Liz Lerner

In the end, it is impossible to talk about pain without also talking about joy. Because the one is the price of the other. And yet, we do not struggle with how to bear joy. Our human spirits have myriad ways to bear and give voice to our joy. Song, dance, words, gestures—all are ready to our need and readily appreciated in the larger world. But pain is less welcome, much less welcome in the world, and in each of our worlds. And with so unwelcome a visitor, we find ourselves often unready when it comes.

What does it mean to hold pain? To contain it? To overcome it? To live with it? To deny it? Our answers many not be the same, even one’s own answer may change over the course of our lives. And though in this case my focus is mainly on spiritual, emotional, life pain, some of this may overlap with physical pain as well, not least because the physical and the psychic are so strongly linked. And in turn, the physical and psychic are linked with the spiritual - our topic this morning is a fundamentally religious question, a challenge for all people, in all times.

Holding pain means living with pain, understanding that living with pain means learning to bear it, increasing our capacity to bear pain, learning that having pain doesn’t mean the pain will never abate. Pain will abate, sometimes lift, sometimes vanish, will always also return in some form or another, soon or late. Life is pain but not only pain, not always pain. How do we hold pain?

Every week, at the end of Joys and Sorrows, I say: For the joys which uplift us, and the sorrows that deepen us, may we share together a moment of silence. But that’s very simple - too simple in some ways, in many cases. Do sorrows deepen us? When sorrows come upon us, we don’t feel the anticipation of deepening, that’s for sure, we feel dread and despair - the possibility that what we love, what makes our life, perhaps our very selves, might be destroyed by what we face. I don’t know how the human spirit has the capacity to bear such heartbreak and cruelty and evil as weigh, as destroy, as prevail in the world.

I don’t need to offer a litany of pain in the world to remind us of what I’m talking about, or for us to compare to our own hurts and struggle. We all know the kind of pain I’m talking about, the kind of pain we don’t know how to find our way through, the kind of pain that justifies CS Lewis when he spoke of ‘God the Vivisectionist.’ We see another faced with deep hurt, violence, loss, grief and part of our empathy comes from our own experience.

Many years ago, when I was still in divinity school, there was a time I was in so much pain I felt incapable of anything. I went to professors offices and cried, and left my work undone. I went to my supervisor and asked him: how can I be a minister, do ministry, now, when I am so empty? I have nothing to give, nothing. All my memories of that time are dark, and frankly, few. I don’t know what I did each day or how time passed. People who knew me then tell me I left my home each morning and came home each evening, so I must have been doing something, but I don’t know what it was. One of the few memories I do have of that time was one afternoon when I went to the divinity school cafeteria. A friend of mine was there, a buddhist-UU ministry student. On the table in front of him was a tall tower of books, mostly by the Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh. On the very top of the pile was one called “Breathe. You Are Alive.”

It was like a revelation, an annunciation, straight from God or the Cosmos. It seemed spoken, aloud in my mind, the path, the comfort, the oh-so-modest prescription and assurance: breathe, you are alive. So few words meant so much. Breathing was about all I could do, but I could do that, heck I was already doing that. The words of that title showed me that in doing that, I was doing something, even so little as merely breathing those days, was something, and that in being alive, only that, I had grounds for hope.

Sometimes breathing is enough to help us live with our pain. Sometimes more help is required, or available, if we can take it in. A good book or friend, whose words bear just the message we need. Warmth after cold or the long-awaited dawn after a dark night. Nature’s cyclical, eternal, undeniable message about renewal and rebirth after diminishment and death. Sometimes even duties and necessities are hidden supports; they get us out of bed and dressed and out in the world, and in the world, time passes, and time’s passing helps us hold pain. And of course community can help. That old truism, that a joy shared is doubled, that a sorrow shared is halved, is true for many of us. Sometimes the support of a community - of family, of beloved friends, of a congregation that places its care around us like arms, - is the difference between pain that can be borne, even if only just, and pain that is more than we can stand.

In the end, all of us know what it is to feel such pain. And all of us have found ways, similar and different, through that pain, which allow us not only to live, but also to love, and to feel enough hope and relation to the dark and light of life as to help us keep living. Our stories, our pain, are the same, even as they are separate and unique. We live, we die, we love, we yearn. We learn, in living, the price of joy and love. We learn, in growing, how to bear that price. Pain, when it comes upon us, cannot be shunned. It commands a kind of courage from us. Even if all you can do, in the face of it is to breathe, then do that and know you are courageous as you do. In life we learn and relearn how to bear the price of living.

Part II

Holding Pain

by Megan Foley

Good morning! My name is Megan Foley. I’m going to give you some background about myself and then talk a little about some thinking I’ve done about understanding pain over the past few years.

Almost exactly three years ago, my 29-year-old husband, 18-month-old son and I—six months pregnant—moved from our treetop apartment near the beach in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, to a temporary apartment near a strip mall outside of Minneapolis, Minnesota. It was early February—we endured a 100-degree temperature drop in order to transfer to Minnesota, and moved both seasonally and symbolically into the longest and coldest winter of my entire life. Ten days after that flight north, my husband suffered a massive grand mal seizure and was subsequently diagnosed with what would turn out to be an extremely aggressive brain tumor. By spring of that year, which came right on time at the end of June, we had educated ourselves not only about Stefan’s condition but also about every traditional and cutting-edge procedure available to treat it. We had gone through brain surgery at the Mayo Clinic which, although successful in removing the tumor, left Stefan paralyzed on his right side. By that June, Stefan had gone through four weeks of inpatient physical therapy, seven weeks of radiation therapy, and was slated to begin the world’s most aggressive and most effective form of chemotherapy, which involved administration of the drugs under general anesthesia twice a month, every month, for an entire year. We had also sold a house, bought and moved into a house, and I had given birth to another wonderful baby boy, whom my husband called his lucky charm.

So, as you can see, I was very busy, and it wasn’t until winter arrived—right on time in early October—that I was able to look up and say “What the hell was that?” You see, I was raised to believe that, overall, life is fun. I believed there was lots of love to go around; that some people are crazy or dangerous but those in charge are reasonable and responsible. I believed that people who made good decisions, who were upstanding, honest, well educated and well traveled, would be rewarded: they would be happy, and nothing really awful could happen to them. Most of all I believed that as a Foley I was exempt from the harsher realities of life, that by virtue of belonging to a family that everyone loved and respected, I was actually protected from the worst kinds of unfair, unrelenting pain. And so I began to ask myself that October if all that was wrong. I had kept up my end of the bargain but still bad stuff, really bad stuff had happened, and what was going to keep it from happening more? What was the barrier that kept me safe?

One day, when I was out shoveling snow and pondering this question, an image popped into my head. Slaves. I thought of people whose entire life could be a misery from birth until death. They worked and were beaten and raped and sold down the river, and worst of all their lovers and children were beaten and raped and sold down the river, and there was no barrier that kept them from suffering, and there was no barrier that kept me from suffering—in fact, I was lucky that I had suffered as little as I had.

So life is full of suffering. I’m hardly the first person to notice that. But still, something in the back of my mind called me to my original faith in the promise of happiness. And then I found a fabulous book by an American Buddhist named Sharon Saltzberg, called “Lovingkindness: The Revolutionary Art of Happiness.” She said:

We are always hoping that [the world] will somehow magically provide us only good things; there will be no bad things, no painful changes. Although the world actually is magically providing, that does not mean there is no pain. Pain is not a sign of things gone wrong. Our lives are actually a constant succession of pleasure and pain, getting what we want, then losing it. We experience pleasure and pain, gain and loss, praise and blame, fame and disrepute, constantly changing out of our control. This is what the world is naturally providing, and still we can be happy.

This was revolutionary to me. I believed pain and joy to be polar opposites. One was to be shunned and the other sought after; if one existed, the other wouldn’t. But here I was living in a world that I suddenly realized held a lot of pain, and I didn’t want to give up that promise of happiness. More to the point, I didn’t want to spend my life fearing pain, as if the arrival of pain would mean giving up all my joy. I was sick of being afraid of things that I couldn’t stop from happening, no matter how smart or how good or how deserving I had been. I thought I deserved to be happy, despite the fact that life can be unfair and cruel and unpredictable. If pain and joy were mutually exclusive, then I had a problem, because my life held a lot of pain, and I wasn’t ready to give up on joy.

After a lot more thought, and a lot of time, I came to believe in two givens about life: One, life is full of suffering, of all kinds, of all degrees. Two, it is our destiny as human beings to be happy. And when I say happy, I don’t mean happy. I don’t mean content, or pleased, or even joyous. I believe that it is our destiny and birthright to live in a state of bliss—in fact, I believe that when we living in this sort of bliss, full of love, compassion, and knowledge of both good and evil, that this is where we meet God. But how can we reconcile a reality of suffering with a destiny of bliss?

The reading today stated that “the deeper that sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain. They are inseparable. Together, they come.” It must be that the suffering is incorporated—not an anomaly at all, but part and parcel of bliss, as much as joy is, two sides of the same coin, equal parts happiness and sadness, turning one into the other and back again.

Wouldn’t it be great if my story had a happy ending? If this were the movies, we would all have been wiser, a little more broken, a little more healed, but healthy and loving each other happily ever after. But this is real life. Stefan went through over a year of chemotherapy, and successfully beat the tumor. His prognosis was good. He was exhausted and skinny and still weak on the right side, but his energy was coming back and he was really excited to move back to Connecticut to rejoin his company and his career. We flew out to interview and to buy a house, and in the airport on the way home Stefan lost his balance and fell, breaking his hip. Through a series of the most unfortunate accidents, he suffered extensive brain damage and died on Christmas Eve, 2001.

I’ll quote Salzberg again: “Our lives are actually a constant succession of pleasure and pain, getting what we want and then losing it…constantly changing out of our control.”

After Stefan died, I had enough money and enough experience with the world to know that I should move here, a place I’ve wanted to live in so badly that even now, seven months later, I still drive around town in a state of awe. My brother moved here too, and I was near friends, and I was settling in, when my mother phoned me at 1 am in October to tell me that my diplomat father had been gunned down outside their bedroom window, by what would be determined to be Al Qaeda operatives. So then we threw a four-day party in his honor in my house, and in this sanctuary we gathered three hundred people from around the world to think and talk about how much we loved him and how much good he did. I don’t know how much foreign policy will change as a direct result of my father’s death, but I do know that his memorial service alone resulted in at least one career change, one relationship, countless reunions of loved ones, and several conversions to Unitarian-Universalism.

Back and forth, pleasure and pain, around and around, this is life, as I know it. I really don’t believe in happy endings anymore, but I believe in life, around and around, gain and loss, suffering and bliss. And while of course I hope for an easier time of it from now on, I know that there is no wall or philosophy separating me from the hard times. And that is a hard thing to know. But on the other hand, I am happy.