c. 2005 Religion News Service
(UNDATED) Does pain serve a purpose?
It is a classic question in pragmatic America in which many feel that everything, including art and religion, should have a purpose or be discarded or recycled. On the national pragmatic level, pain is not filed under “mystery” but under cost/benefit ratios.
The culture has glorified playing through pain; ignoring it, macho-style; or courting it, as in traditional fasting or in the fad that has revived walking over burning coals in order to rise above the world and grow spiritually.
Another version is on view in the facial grimaces of athletes who invoke the mantra “No pain, no gain.” But is there pain where there is no gain?
There is no gain for people suffering congenital insensitivity to pain (CIPA), a disorder affecting nerve endings so that people cannot sense pain at all and are vulnerable to a range of injuries that may debilitate them early in life.
Pain can be “good,” according to the Cleveland Clinic’s Dr. Edward Covington, because it “warns you your appendix is about to rupture or someone has stepped on your foot.”
Seventy million Americans, we are told, suffer from chronic, debilitating pain. It is little wonder that practical Americans want to know exactly what is causing their pain and that doctors often go looking for the underlying physical cause.
This is where mystery enters because, according to Covington, our pain often does not have a bodily origin. “In many cases,” he says, “the pain itself is the disease.”
As psychosomatic medicine attests, pain is a language through which we tell ourselves what has happened to us that has made a difference so great that we feel it throughout ourselves.
Our pain not only warns us about inflammation of such organs as the appendix but attests to our wholeness as human persons. Nothing happens in just one part of us. Life rings like a great bell throughout us, sending reverberations everywhere, a tocsin telling us that the pains deep inside us are outside the measure of time, that being alive involves us in a mystery that may be as hard to measure as it sometimes is to bear.
Do-gooders are by their nature the prophets of a painless universe. They promise that through their programs, and your tax dollars, they will do the greatest good for the greatest number, whether you like it or not and whether, strangely enough, it causes you pain along the way.
Is it any wonder that many Americans run from do-gooders to seek quick practical solutions for pain? The country is not called the “Prozac Nation” for nothing. Many people want injections or pills and nobody should scant medical advances in controlling and modulating pain in all its forms.
Yet there is a pain that does not respond well to medication, that stays awake even when we are sleeping. This pain is beyond all categories, beyond the reach of do-gooders and, indeed, does not have any purpose in itself.
That is the pain that goes with being alive, being made, among other things, to grow, to create and to fall in love. These goals sum up the purpose of our existence, not the pain to which they make us vulnerable.
Often this pain leaves no scars and cannot be detected by a MRI. There’s the invisible pain of heartbreak _ nobody can see how deeply we have been hurt, or how deeply we have hurt somebody else. This pain also includes the dreams we defer, the incidents we call bad luck or bad timing and, despite our national infatuation with winning, the impact that our inevitable losses, great and small, have on us.
This garden-variety pain is found in all our lives but hardly ever gets mentioned in scientific studies. It is living that has the purpose. To suffer it is a side-effect of existence, a revelation in itself of the grandeur and peril of our condition, the proof that we have lived rather than missed life.
MO/PH END RNS
(Eugene Cullen Kennedy, a longtime observer of the Roman Catholic Church, is professor emeritus of psychology at Loyola University in Chicago and author of “Cardinal Bernardin’s Stations of the Cross,” published by St. Martin’s Press.)
