Pain

Some times, it seems as though one theme is playing in diverse places and people at the same time.  This week it's emotional pain.

I'm not good at pain, and I know that's one reason why I drank.  Of course, this suggests one of the biggest challenges for those in recovery: how do you react to pain when you are working very hard not to dull it with drink or drugs?  Making matters worse, for many of us, our pain is the unavoidable result of our addictions: the broken families, the loneliness, the confused reaction to our environment that accompanies recovery.

This has been a bitter week for me for a litany of reasons.  It has presented a very real challenge, but not to my sobriety.  I have no desire to drink.  It's a more subtle struggle to react to adversity in a healthy way, in a way that is consistent with the faith I profess.

To me, Christ's Passion was intended to show us that we are to love through the suffering.  In the desert, Satan offered Christ comfort and power; Christ rejected these, maintaining his fasting and prayer in preparation for his ultimate act of love.  Even though he was tormented, he offered forgiveness.  Even though he felt abandoned, he gave himself to his father's will.

I don't know that Christians can expect more suffering than anybody else, but it seems that suffering is part of the deal.  Heather King pointed to a text from The Mystical Doctrine of St. John of the Cross:

O souls that seek your own ease and comfort, if you knew how necessary for a high state is suffering, and how profitable suffering and mortification are for attaining to God's great blessings, you would never seek for comfort anywhere...This is the way God deals with those whom it is His will to exalt: He suffers them to be tempted, afflicted, tormented, and chastened, inwardly and outwardly, to the utmost limit of their strength, that He may deify them, unite them to Himself in His wisdom, which is the highest state.

Where Christ asked the rich young man to give up his wealth, we live in a society where we are urged to buy more and more.  A sexualized society can only challenge, if not torment,  those who try to lead chaste lives.

For me, the most difficult lesson to learn in sobriety is how to react to days of profound sadness. Exercise helps.  A lot.  Perspective, for pain is the inevitable by-product of my brokenness.  Gratitude for how far I've come.  Most of all, I have to know that pain is the ground in which growth is rooted, that this is a time of great potential and beauty that I shouldn't waste.

And beauty pain creates.  Eve posted an excerpt of a poem this week, In Praise of Pain by Heather McHugh.  Here's the entire poem:

In Praise of Pain

BY HEATHER MCHUGH

A brilliance takes up residence in flaws—

a brilliance all the unchipped faces of design   

refuse. The wine collects its starlets

at a lip's fault, sunlight where the nicked   

glass angles, and affection where the eye   

is least correctable, where arrows of

unquivered light are lodged, where someone   

else's eyes have come to be concerned.

For beauty's sake, assault and drive and burn   

the devil from the simply perfect sun.   

Demand a birthmark on the skin of love,   

a tremble in the touch, in come a cry,   

and let the silverware of nights be flecked,   

the moon pocked to distribute more or less   

indwelling alloys of its dim and shine   

by nip and tuck, by chance's dance of laws.

The brightness drawn and quartered on a sheet,   

the moment cracked upon a bed, will last   

as if you soldered them with moon and flux.   

And break the bottle of the eye to see

what lights are spun of accident and glass.