Sitting with Pain
October 11, 2015
Hebrews 4:12-16
Job 23:1-9, 16-17
Psalm 22: 1-15
These are hard
passages that we read today. Today’s
lectionary passages are the anger, the pain, despair, the bottom-less pit, the
grief of human experience. Unlike most of the rest of the year where we hear
the grace, the comfort, the love or the challenge of being God’s people, today
we are given the passages in which the writers feel God’s “absence” or feel
betrayed somehow, abandoned, and hurt by God. These are the feelings we are
least comfortable with, as a whole, in our churches. But while we are
uncomfortable with these emotions, they are in our scriptures and as such they
call us to take a closer look, to spend time with feelings we would otherwise
wish away. Usually we reserve this look for Good Friday or Passion Sunday as we
remember Jesus’ journey to the cross. But as it came up in the lectionary
passage for this week, I felt that though these emotions are uncomfortable, we
have a call to look at them, to honor them, and to listen for God’s words even through
these words of anger, of pain, and of railing against God.
Job had everything
taken from him - his wealth, his home, his living, his children, his health.
The only things that remained were his wife and several friends, but all of
them told him he must have done something to deserve his pain (an accusation
which is confronted and overturned by the story itself), and so their remaining
presence in his life was in itself an affliction. Psalm 22 we recognize as the
psalm that Jesus quoted on the cross – “My God, my God, why have you forsaken
me!” These passages reflect our deepest despair, those moments when it is hard,
so hard, to feel God’s presence, when we, too, might instead feel that God has
somehow forsaken us, is somehow not there.
Each of us has
gone through hard times. We’ve gone through hard times individually, I know
you’ve gone through hard times as a church community, and we’ve gone through
hard times as a nation, and as the world. We’ve experienced losses. We’ve
experienced deaths, divorces and other endings. We’ve seen our families and
friends struggle to find or hold on to work, some have experienced pay cuts,
we’ve gone through moves. The world is experiencing wars and droughts and
climate change. Things are hard. And sometimes we feel, each one of us, that
deep pain, that deep grief for what was, or what should be, or what could have
been. Kierkegaard put it this way, “the most painful state of being is
remembering the future…particularly the one you can never have.” I want to say
that again, “the most painful state of being is remember the
future…particularly the one you can never have.” We know that grief looks
different for everyone, but some of the emotions people may feel in grief
include denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance, pain and guilt to
that list. Job and Psalm 22 reflect all of these feelings. And yet still, it is
hard to be with those feelings, hard to acknowledge the grief, let alone allow
ourselves the time that it takes to really experience all of it. I was with a
group of pastors at one point several years ago discussing these lectionary
passages. And one of the pastors wanted to include the end of Job (though it is
not in this week’s lectionary) and the end of psalm 22 (also not in this week’s
lectionary) because those endings are more positive. Her justification was that
we cannot let our parishioners stay in the pain. But the reality was that this
was more a reflection of her discomfort in sitting with the pain of those in
her church. If we are honest with ourselves, we have to admit that someone in
every room is in pain, is in grief, and recognizing and naming that reality is
helpful and important. But again, it does appear to be fairly normal to want to
avoid it. We have sayings, trite things, that we say to one another as a way to
“help” that in fact are simply ways of avoiding sitting with one another in our
pain. I’d like to challenge a few of those.
Saying to someone in pain, “Remember, God never gives you more than you
can handle” may comfort the comforter, but it tends to be a way of discounting
the extreme pain a person is in. When you say this, the person hearing it often
hears, “oh, you’re fine. No big deal. Get over it!” Or worse, if the person
being told this isn’t handling it, they may add a feeling of failure to the other
feelings of grief they are experiencing. “Everything happens for a reason” is
also discounting. It is a way of saying, “because this is part of a great plan,
you shouldn’t be upset about this.” You may believe that to be true. But
saying it to someone in pain does not honor or respect the feelings they are
experiencing at that moment. More importantly, these sayings make it sound like
you are not willing to simply be with
the other in their pain.
Henry Nouwen in
his book, Out of Solitude wrote, “You might remember moments in which
you were called to be with a friend who had lost a wife or husband, child or
parent. What can you say, do or propose
at such a moment? There is a strong inclination to say, “Don’t cry; the one you
loved is in the hands of God.” Or “Don’t be sad because there are so many good
things left worth living for.” ...”Our tendency is to run away from the painful
realities or to try to change them as soon as possible. But cure without care
makes us into rulers, controllers, manipulators, and prevents a real community
from taking shape. Cure without care makes us preoccupied with quick changes,
impatient and unwilling to share each other’s burden. And so cure can often become offending
instead of liberating. It is therefore not so strange than cure is (often)
refused by people in need...it is better to suffer than to lose self-respect by
accepting a gift out of a non-caring hand.”
C.S. Lewis also
wrote about his struggles after the death of his wife, Joy, in his book, A
Grief Observed. And he, too, wrote
about these situations in which well meaning friends could not tolerate his
pain. They couldn’t tolerate it, and so they tried to shove it away with trite
quips. His favorite was “Well, she will
live forever in your memory.” And he found this created nothing less than an
intense rage within him as he struggled to grasp, daily, that she was no longer
alive, no longer with him in a way that he could recognize while he was in the
midst of his deepest grief. To tell him that she would live in his memory did
nothing for him but make him feel completely alone in his grief - in other
words, it had exactly the opposite effect of what was undoubtedly intended. It
did not make him feel better. It made him feel misunderstood, isolated, alone.
It is hard for us
to experience our own pain and it is hard for us to be with others in their
pain. Pain hurts. It is not comfortable. And in this fast paced, instant
gratification society, we don’t want to feel pain. We want to make it go away,
for everyone, right now.
But we now know,
from a psychological perspective, that grief that is not really felt, pain that
is not really experienced does not go away. If we really care about ourselves
and one another, we have to allow the grief to be felt. We cannot heal it by
avoiding it or denying it. We know this from the perspective of psychology. But
that doesn’t make it any easier to take when we are in it up to our necks.
There are some
cultures, however, that are better at living in the pain than others. Early
Israel was one such culture. The people who wrote the scriptures and, later on,
those who chose the books that would be part of our cannon recognized our
profound need to feel the pain that life gives us, to experience our losses and
to express them. Job is an entire book in the Bible, and with 42 chapters, it
is one of the longest Biblical books at that. The book of Job is about being in
the pain. The book is a description of Job’s experience of hurt and despair and
his feeling that God had abandoned and forsaken him.
As Henry Nouwen
continued in Out of Solitude, “… are we ready to really experience our
powerlessness in the face of death and say, ‘I do not understand. I do not know
what to do, but I am here with you.’ Are we willing to not run away from
the pain, to not get busy when there is nothing to do and instead stand
rather in the face of death together with those who grieve?” ... “When we
honestly ask ourselves which persons in our lives mean the most to us, we often
find that it is those who, instead of giving much advice, solutions, or cures,
have chosen rather to share our pain and touch our wounds with a gentle and
tender hand. The friend who can be
silent with us in a moment of despair or confusion, who can stay with us in an
hour of grief and bereavement, who can tolerate not-knowing, not-curing,
not-healing and face with us the reality of our powerlessness, that is the
friend who cares.”
There is more good
news in the face of grief. As hard as it is, there are gifts in grief. Some of
those gifts of grief include a larger vision of the world, a deeper
understanding of what is possible and what new futures we can envision to
replace the images of the ones we used to have. Through grief we become more
integrated, more whole in our experiences and our memories, making sense of the
past and building tools of fortitude and understanding for facing future loss.
Through grief we become more empathetic and have a deeper vision for the
compassion Jesus calls us to have for one another. Through grief we learn our
own resilience, our own strength, and learn about internal gifts and external
supports that we never would have known we had. Only through genuine grief can
we make room in our psyche’s to move forward into a new tomorrow with new
dreams, goals and hopes. Through genuine grief we say goodbye to the past, and
we open the door for God to bring about the resurrections that God promises us.
Robert Browning
Hamilton wrote:
“I walked a mile with Pleasure;
She chatted all the way;
But left me none the wiser
For all she had to say.
I walked a mile with Sorrow,
And ne’er a word said she;
But oh! The things I learned from
her,
When Sorrow walked with me.”
When we remember
grief, when we experience grief and when we read scriptures like today’s
passage from Job and even more, Psalm 22, we are also called to remember that
these words of pain, and of suffering are quoted from Jesus on the cross. Psalm
22 like Job ends with a recognition of God’s greatness, God’s comfort and God’s
love. But it does not start there. Some commentators who talk about Jesus
quoting Psalm 22 on the cross are so uncomfortable with the idea of Jesus
saying that God forsook him that they, too, discount Jesus’ pain and say that
Jesus was just beginning a psalm that everyone knew ended with a declaration of
God’s love and presence. But Jesus wasn’t quoting the end of the psalm. He was
quoting the beginning. He was in the pain. He felt abandoned by God. He felt
the despair that all of us have felt at one time or another. He felt it all. And
that is the best of the good news for today. That is the good news that we find
in the Hebrew’s passage as well when we are told that Jesus is not without
empathy, that he has felt all that we have felt and experienced all that we
have experienced. Our feelings of despair, of loss, of anger are not blasphemy.
They are not un-holy. They are mirrored and reflected in scripture itself.
Jesus, himself, felt all that we feel. And therefore, as today’s passage in
Hebrews tells us, he is not unsympathetic with our weaknesses and our
pain. Jesus felt our pain and he
expressed that pain. His expression likewise gives us permission to speak of it
as well. God can handle it, and God gives us the words to do it if we are
uncomfortable using our own words. We can read Job, we can pray the psalms,
knowing that God has heard them before, and that Jesus felt they were worthy
enough to be expressed that he himself said them too. We therefore have been
given the gift of being able to speak our feelings to God. Knowing this can
also give us the courage to stand with one another in each other’s pain,
too.
Just as we strive
to be the friends to one another who care, not by our sayings that try to avoid
or ignore each other’s pain, but by being willing to be with one another, in
silence, in love, just to listen, until we can move through and beyond the
pain; we are called to give ourselves the same grace of experiencing the grief.
Jesus knows our deepest pain - we see him on the cross, crying out, “My God, my
God, why have you forsaken me!” And while we can stand in the sure knowledge
that the other side of the pain is the resurrection, we have to truly
experience the death first before we can get there. Holding hands with one
another and with our God, we can get through this, and anything, together. Amen.
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