Pain and the silence of man, or Trust is not a skill

Several months ago I put up a video called "Pain and the Silence of God" about my abrupt descent from robust good health into agonizing and apparently incurable bad health. That video has garnered a lot of views, and I hope it's been helpful to someone.

Not to beat around the bush: I am not getting better, even gradually. Symptom severity simply goes round and round, one day to the next, with no positive trajectory. The medical establishment has no solutions and isn't even very good at managing pain as a symptom. I have recently started taking a new pain medication that is having some slight effect, and I'm grateful for that, but the effects shouldn't be exaggerated. 

In passing, I always swore if I ever were chronically ill I wouldn't be one of those people who tell other people what not to say, but...here we are: When talking with a chronically ill person, it's not the best idea to say, "You're not better yet?" or, a recent favorite, to sign off of a phone call where you were discussing other topics with a chipper, "Glad you're feeling better [click]," leaving the person on the other end saying to himself, "Wait, what? Did I say that?" (Apparently the ability to discuss topics other than one's illness without using an agonized voice means that one is "feeling better.")

In the course of recent days and nights I've been reflecting on the extreme difficulty of expressing the soul-making theodicy in a way that is going to make sense to a person, perhaps especially a Christian, living with long-term, significant pain. The soul-making theodicy, as readers probably know, is the idea that God allows suffering to make us holier and more spiritually mature than we would be otherwise. It has ample Scriptural warrant. (James 1:2-4, I Peter 1:6-7, I Peter 5:10, Romans 5:1-5, II Corinthians 4:16-18, and more.)

But that theodicy can be surprisingly difficult to spell out in more detail, and more and more as I live through this (and perhaps I have decades more of it to live through), I begin to think that almost any way of expressing it, though true as far as it goes, will be inadequate. In other words, I'm beginning to think that perhaps there is something incommunicable and mysterious, something that we'll understand only in heaven (if then) about what suffering does for us and to us that is valuable.

Take any expression that "suffering teaches us that..." A good example would be, "Suffering teaches us that this world is not our home and that we shouldn't be too comfortable and at home here." Let me tell  you right now: For any serious Christian who already believed that in theory, it would take only a few weeks at most of severe daily, even hourly physical pain to have him recognizing fully in every pore of his body that heaven is a much better place than this and that he is not at home here on this earth. Indeed, the far greater temptation is to long for death. Yes, certainly--to depart and be with Christ is far better. Amen. I've got that lesson down, Lord!

Or "God sends suffering to teach us that our blessings shouldn't be taken for granted." Yep, got that one too! When you've suffered significant pain even for a while, you definitely learn to appreciate things you never appreciated fully before. The ability to sit, stand, and walk without discomfort and without thinking about your body, just for starters. The ability to concentrate fully on something other than your own body, and to enjoy concentrating. The ability to lie down in bed and relax all your muscles, to slip from thoughts into dreams, to drift into sleep slowly, deliciously, rather than knocking yourself out abruptly with drugs, going from pain to oblivion. Far too many blessings to list. And there are blessings that I still have: My wonderful husband, for example, whom I appreciate more now than ever before. You promise God, yourself, your spouse, your family, your ancestors, the sky, stars, moon, and sun, the saints, the people on the Internet: If I ever get better, I will never again take x, y, or z, p, d, q, r, or s for granted! I'll be grateful for them all the livelong day! Please give me the chance to prove it!

Don't misunderstand me: I'm not saying that these statements about what God teaches us through suffering are false. I'm just saying they are inadequate.

The idea that God sends, or allows, suffering to teach us how to do something (rather than to teach us a propositional truth) is a little less inadequate, but still...

"God allows suffering to teach us to take one day at a time." Well, yes, that's true. Jesus said it, "Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof." You certainly get plenty of opportunities to practice putting away worries and even not worrying at all about certain things that used to seem big but now seem small next to The Big Thing. (The Big Thing is, will it be like this until I die?) You learn, a little anyway, to look no farther ahead than an hour, perhaps a half hour, perhaps five minutes, just to take from the Lord the grace given, moment by moment. But one is sometimes moved to reflect that the means used seem disproportionate. It feels rather like putting weights on the feet of a toddler who hasn't yet learned to walk and telling concerned strangers, "This is strength training. Just think what a strong walker she'll be if she can walk with those things on her feet!" Hmm, yes, if she ever learns to walk at all. 

Until you've actually lived with severe chronic pain, you have no idea how impossible it seems to put away the obsessive thoughts: "Am I getting better? Is this ever going to go away? Oh, hey, it was better there for about an hour this afternoon. When is it going to come back? Here it comes! What is it going to be like tonight and tomorrow? Lord, please make it stop!" "Take no thought for the morrow" starts to sound like a cruel impossibility, and no matter how often one reminds oneself that strength is given only for now, not for tomorrow, that sounds somewhat academic in the trenches. So in a way you learn to take one day at a time, but in a way you "learn" just the opposite.

One of the best of the "to teach us to..." explanations is "to teach us to trust." It's just here, though, that language fails. For that formulation makes trust sound like a skill. And I'm here to tell you: When you are suffering, trust is not a skill. Like most apophatic utterances, that statement is a negation that doesn't communicate much. I'm well aware of that. Perhaps I can be a little clearer. Trust is not a skill because when you most need to trust, you have no strength to exercise any skill. So it follows that you have no skill. When you most need to trust you have nothing. "Where then is boasting?" says St. Paul on another topic. "It is excluded." Right. Precisely. To trust in those hours and minutes is not a skill but a mental and spiritual necessity, like breathing, in and out. Only it's like breathing when breathing is hard. "Help me. Hold onto me. Don't let me hate you. Help thou mine unbelief. Help so-and-so. Help that woman, I can't remember her name." And so forth, and so on. Childish prayers, incoherent prayers, weird prayers, trivial prayers, the mind confused at times and just trying to find a place to rest. Not a skill. But you can't say what it is. It's something you do because you have to survive. 

Here's a pretty good "to learn to..." You learn to take one joy at a time. If there is anything good, anything beautiful, anything true or straight or lovely, and for even one endless, timeless minute you are given leave, given the privilege, to focus on that thing, not feeling your pain or discomfort, by God, you do it. You learn to say, "Shut up!" and make it stick (at least briefly) to that internal trivial chatterer that accompanied you almost constantly before The Great Change and that ruined so many moments when your body used to let you contemplate beauty at will. So many hours and days that used to be wasted on nothing at all. So that's something. When you get a respite and there is something good that you are permitted to see, hear, smell, taste, or contemplate, without distraction, you learn, or start to learn, or take a first step to learn, not to waste the opportunity.

How well can that be expressed? Suppose I'm having a relatively-less-bad Sunday morning, or even five minutes of a Sunday morning, and something leaps out at me from the hymnal. How can I tell you what it was on a recent Sunday about the words, "Doubt and terror are withdrawn" from the hymn "Watchman, tell us of the night" that nearly had me in tears? I can say only that they were good tears, that it is a great gift to tear up in a fashion momentarily untinged by bitterness or self-pity, filled with a faint, imperfect perception of something solid and beautiful beyond the world, beyond the conceiving of man. But what exactly it was in that phrase that brought that sense? That, I cannot tell you. Nor can I communicate to you clearly what I saw or thought I saw, however briefly.

You might say that I have had such epiphanies before, when I had not suffered this much, and that surely it is not necessary for me to go on suffering so much (or even more) in order to have them. Is it? It can't be, can it? Right, it seems that way to me, too. I don't claim to understand. 

Perhaps the only final answer one can give to the question of what God is doing in each of us (and in a different way in each of us), using both joy and pain, intellect and emotion and will, is that he's making us into something else. (See here for a great preacher's approach to that truth, assuring us that none of our suffering is meaningless.) He is making us into citizens of the Country from which that epiphany came. Which is not quite "teaching us that...." nor "teaching us to..." though it has elements of both. It is something else as well. Something we cannot express. 

If one day we find ourselves together in that Country, we will look at each other and point, and we will say, "There! That! That's what it was all about!" And we will laugh.