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Finding Purpose in Pain

I feel a little inept at commenting on poet Cairns’ book (The End of Suffering: Finding Purpose in Pain by Scott Cairns), simply because I’ve already dealt with the universal problem of suffering in Eve (for myself).  That statement sounds more grandiose than I intended.  “Dealt with suffering” is never as final as a door slammed in your face.  It’s more like a festering wound that refuses to heal.

The problem of pain is a real and tangible barrier to some–a veritable nullification of God–so to pretend that I, or anyone else, can definitively answer the question of suffering would be to think I am more capable than I am.

Instead, I’ll give you text tidbits to chew on.  I’m always looking for ways to see things differently.  In this way, my understanding can shift slightly, changing a morbid problem into a tolerable one…and that’s always a good thing, in my humble opinion.

Jacket cover note by Cairns (I love this personal introduction!): “Like most people I, too, have been blindsided by personal grief now and again over the years.  And I have an increasingly keen sense that, wherever I am, someone nearby is suffering now.

“For that reason, I lately have settled in to mull the matter over, gathering my troubled wits to undertake a difficult essay, more like what we used to call an assay, really–an earnest inquiry.  I am thinking of it just now as a study in suffering, by which I hope to find some sense in affliction, hoping–just as I have come to hope about experience in general–to make something of it.”

His prologue reminds me briefly of John Piper’s recent rant.  Cairns is not referring to Piper, simply to the plethora of accusations that fly when disaster strikes.  “I don’t especially want to point fingers, but I am pretty sure that most of us have had our fill of the disturbing pieties that swirl about in the aftermath of suffering and loss, most of which strike me as being, at best, the unfortunate hybrids of good intentions and poor theology.  And I am pretty sure that we would all like to feel less tongue-tied as we attempt to comfort a friend who has suffered a devastating loss.

“Whenever I hear such commonplace yammerings as “God took him,” “God needed her in heaven,” or “we don’t know why God would send us a hurricane,” my heart registers a particularly heavy weight, and my dim wits teeter in chagrined incredulity.

“I wouldn’t say that my current purpose is all that Miltonic; that is, I don’t feel compelled, exactly, to ‘justify the ways of God to man,’ but lately I do feel a pressing need to mitigate some of the nonsense that we habitually lay on the invisible God, presuming, as we seem to do, that He is the only one who has acted in every case.

“That is to say, while I am nonetheless confident that He and His bodiless messengers have kept me and mine from harm, off and on, I am similarly confident that when harm does come to us, He is not necessarily the one who sent it.

“His ways are not our ways–true enough–but I am not convinced that our every disaster or tragedy or accident is rightly attributed to be one of His inexplicable ways.”

He acknowledges that pain is a problem: “One of the great commonplaces among aggrieved agnostics or atheists is the perennial–if nonetheless rhetorical–question, How can anyone believe in an allegedly loving God who allows the innocent to suffer?  It is true that I am neither an atheist nor exactly an agnostic, but in my own way, off and on, I have had occasion to ask much the same question.”

He includes the eleventh section of twelve-part poem that he published in 1993.  The title: “Pain.”

No new attempt at apology here:
All suffer, though few suffer anything
like what they deserve.

Still, there are the famous undeserving
whose pain astonishes even the most
unflinching disciples

whose own days have been consumed by hopeless
explanation for that innocent whose torn
face or weeping burns

or ravenous disease says simply no,
not good enough.  This is where we must begin:
Incommensurate

pain, nothing you can hope to finger
into exposition, nothing you can
cover up.  A fault

–unacceptable and broad as life–gapes
at your feet, and the thin soil you stand
upon is giving way.

He speaks of “recovery” as a process.  I’ve never heard salvation described in quite this light, and I find it refreshing (should we actually and truly need to be saved from anything…for if you’ve been reading a while, you’ll know that I am sorting this out for myself…more on this tomorrow).

“For the monks on Mount Athos, salvation–or better, ‘being saved’–does not have to do with a discrete and isolated instant of conversion; it is not a matter of cinching a done deal.  The traditional understanding of salvation indicates our moving toward and into a continuously thickening reality.  If you have read C.S. Lewis’s beautiful little book The Great Divorce, you will have a likely image to accompany this vertiginous prospect of a thickening reality and of the human person shifting from airy shadow to illuminated substance.”  Hmmm…I have to ponder that one a while.

In another section, he mentions people (like me) who use a certain language to explain how they’ve fallen away from organized religion.  “I have many beloved friends, men and women, whom you would recognize immediately as genuinely loving people, exceedingly good people, if you were to spend a day with them.  They are, without question, serious, kind, deeply spiritual believers of one stripe or another; they also share an insatiably deep hunger for community, which they try to satisfy with worthwhile activities.  They also, oddly enough, share an abiding sense of alienation from the body of Christ, at least as that body is expressed in the media and quite often in their local churches.

“Many of them have blithely said–to my very puzzled and grimacing mug–that, while they may be spiritual, they are not religious.  I comprehend the unfortunate distinction being made by their parsing of terms, and that distinction continuous to strike me as the result of an insidious and ongoing failure–theirs, ours, mine.”

And on a number of occasions, I have felt abandoned not only abandoned by the church, but by God.  Maybe you have, too, if you believe in Him.  If you do not believe in such a Being, then you won’t have felt this way, so this may only be a curiosity to you–how anyone could struggle so much over a non-entity.

I liked Cairns’ section on prayer, because I think it’s true.  At least from personal experience.

Cairns encourages a habit of prayer that engages both mind and body.  He tells of two separate conversations with “two very wise fathers” during his pilgrimage to Mount Athos, the Holy Mountain.

“In the first case, a father at one monastery helped me to see that prayer was itself an ongoing struggle; he likened the matter to that of Jacob’s wrestling with the angel of the Lord, and he helped me to glimpse that even the pain of that struggle was to be recognized as a blessing.  ‘You have to plead with Him to meet you here,’ he said with a gesture to his heart.  ‘And when he arrives you must hold onto Him, and not let go.

“‘Like Jacob,’ he said, ‘you must hold on to Him.  And like Jacob,’ he said, ‘you will be wounded.  Like Jacob, you must say, ‘I will not let You go unless you bless me,’ and then the wound, the tender hip thereafter, the blessing.

“‘He is everything,’ the father continued, ‘and ever-present.  He is never not here,’ he said, once more touching his heart, ‘but when you plead to know He is here, and when He answers you, and helps you to meet Him here, you will be wounded by that meeting.  The wound will help you know, and that is the blessing.’

“Some months later, as I spoke with a father at another monastery, much of this mystery was confirmed.  ‘It is not you who prays,’ he told me.  ‘This is why you must listen.  You must learn that it is God who prays.  When you descend into your heart, it is God you find, already praying in you.’”

And finally, this last part is beautiful–if it’s true–(again more on that tomorrow).

A lovely description of Christ.

“Well, the story goes that He has descended into the very thick of it.

“We may recall that some among the first-century Jews in Jerusalem–in particular those who believed Jesus to be the Messiah–were both surprised and disappointed that He didn’t ‘redeem Israel’ in quite the way they had assumed He would.  The thief being crucified beside Christ was not simply baiting Jesus when he asked of Him, ‘If you are the Christ, save yourself and us’; he was probably thinking that if this bloodied man hanging beside him were truly God’s anointed, then any reasonable, self-respecting Christ would do just that–save Himself.

“The Christ, in any case, had bigger fish to fry–enough to satisfy the multitudes.

“Which is why He did not save Himself, but rather gave Himself.

“He did not come simply to rid the Jews of the oppressive Romans any more than He came to trump the other oppressive circumstances that His oddly beloved creatures have continued to construct for themselves and others.  On the contrary, He came to suffer the results of those cosmic bad choices with us, and by so doing to both show us how we might survive them and to enable our survival–in Himself.

“That is to say, He did not come here to undo our choices, but to move through them victoriously, and to show us how we might likewise move.  He did not come to eclipse us, or to overrule our persons.  On the contrary, He came to endow our persons with the self-same unending life.”

Now, I’ve come to a personal confession.  I read this book back-to-back with Ehrman’s Lost Christianities, hence the hesitancy in my voice in parts of this post.  As I’ve mentioned above, if you’ve been following this blog, you’ll know I’m trying to answer some very basic questions for myself, because in all my Bible training, in all my religious schooling, I’ve never been taught the origins of what I believe, and that, to me, is an outright crime.  Isn’t that what they call indoctrination?

So, tomorrow, I shall tell you what I learned from Ehrman’s Lost Christianities: The Battles for Scripture and the Faiths We Never Knew.  If you shy from doubt (or questions), you can skip tomorrow’s post!  Or who knows?  You may find it invigorating.

I hope that by speaking to myself (and hashing it all out in a public forum), I’ll be speaking to at least one other person out there, who has puzzled over the same questions…and not come up with a satisfactory answer.

It is a hard thing, sometimes, to rest in the questions.  Time only seems to multiply them.

[Post image: Partial of The End of Suffering cover]

2 Comments


  1. f451
    Mar 12, 2011

    I’ve lived with pain. I’ve learned through pain, growth begins.
    I just read The Count of Monte Cristo again (free on Kindle) and one of the parts brought me to near tears.

    While Dantes was held captive in his dungeon he met an aged man named Farias. While in captivity the old man had drawn astounding works of art and written amazing pieces of literature.

    Dantes asks the old man a question: ” What would you have accomplished if you had been free?”

    Farias: “Possibly nothing at all; the overflow of my brain would probably, in a state of freedom, have evaporated in a thousand follies; misfortune is needed to bring to light the treasures of the human intellect. Compression is needed to explode gunpowder. Captivity has brought my mental faculties to a focus; and you are well aware that from the collision of clouds electricity is produced — from electricity, lightning, from lightning, illumination.”

    Love this. Pain promotes growth. Tough times makes a man focus inward and on what’s important. Through the fire one emerges refined and shining like a thousand suns.


    • Elissa
      Mar 12, 2011

      What a lovely example. I, too, have read Count of Monte Cristo, but I had forgotten this scene.

      It’s true. Life is made of ups AND downs, and both are needed…whether we like it or not…

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