The Purpose of Pain

Our meditation yesterday and today has been adapted from the draft of a book called, the Morality of Drug Use by John Mark Miravalle

The Purpose of Suffering and Pain

Suffering itself is not an evil. Evil is evil. Evil is the problem. Evil – whether physical, psychological, or spiritual – is the thing to eliminate. Salvation from evil is the main objective of God. Salvation from suffering is not the goal. If it were, we would just create a government office that distributes freely morphine, opioids, pot and meth. Or we could just organize a concerted drop of nukes on as many human habitations as possible – we’d all die instantly and painlessly and no one would ever suffer again.

Within the broader category of suffering, it’s helpful to distinguish between pain, which begins in the body, and sorrow, which begins in the soul. Pain motivates people not to harm themselves, not to stick their hands in the fire or poke forks into their eyes. People who can’t feel physical pain tend to hurt themselves much more regularly, even if they’re aware that their activities are objectively damaging their bodies. Pain is a basic response system for which there is no substitute. And the same goes for sorrow.

Sorrow, for instance, can cause us to reconsider what we think about everything. Where do we come from, what happens after death and what is the meaning of life? Do you think you came from nothing, and that you’ll just dissipate back into nothingness after death? The sorrow provoked by that empty outlook should prompt a more careful assessment. If you don’t know what the meaning of life is, and you’re unhappy about that, good – you ought to be! Victor Frankl, the Austrian psychologist and Holocaust survivor suggests, we should not numb the pain, the pain is good, it has a purpose, to motivate us to go in a search for meaning that will lead us to union with God. If we just numb the pain then we never seek or find God.

Sorrow        

Sorrow can motivate us to change from a bad to a good person, from vice to virtue.       If you find yourself deprived of some good, your spiritual dissatisfaction may make you reflect on how you’ve either neglected that good, or, worse, discouraged that good by directly acting against it. Loneliness, for instance, might make you realize that you haven’t put enough effort into friends and family, or that your habits of greed and envy and lust and anger are consistently cutting you off from other people. When the sorrow becomes great enough, you will be motivated to change. But as long as the pleasure of the vice outweighs the sorrow, you will never change.  Sorrow, like pain, has a purpose.

Leading Us to God

The purpose of pain and suffering can only be understood within the overall context of the purpose of the human person. The ultimate purpose of the human being is union with God. Suffering can be, is meant to be, a spur that drives us forward towards the divine destination, and it plays a crucial role at every stage of that journey.

          To begin with, suffering wakes the soul from spiritual sluggishness, and demands that we take the question of our own existence seriously. CS Lewis writes:

We can rest contentedly in our sins and in our stupidities; and anyone who has watched gluttons shoveling down the most exquisite foods as if they did not know what they were eating, will admit that we can ignore even pleasure. But pain insists upon being attended to. God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but SHOUTS in our pain: it is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world.[3]      

Suffering will not let us rest content, because it is itself discontentment. It demands we seek an answer, a solution to the human question. Before we even begin our journey to God, suffering motivates us to search for a path to a better mode of being.

Only in God

Once we’ve found the path – the one road to God, the one way, the one Mediator, Jesus Christ – suffering may prevent us from idling, from procrastinating, from holding back too long. Augustine knew he was supposed to be a Christian, but he simply couldn’t motivate himself to take the plunge into the Church and give up his old way of life. Then suddenly he sees the alternative clearly, he sees the truth about Christ and His Church and his own base character, and the pain forces him to a decision. God would not leave Augustine comfortably uncommitted. We were made to commit, and commit to Him, and anything less is unsatisfying – unpleasant, painful. And even after we make the decision to follow Christ, the temptation to mediocrity resurfaces, the temptation to treat God as an insurance policy while focusing our energies and hopes for peace of soul on this world. Again, pain prevents that deadly program for succeeding. Again CS Lewis says:

Now God, who has made us, knows what we are and that our happiness lies in Him. Yet we will not seek it in Him as long as He leaves us any other resort where it can even plausibly be looked for. While what we call ‘our own life’ remains agreeable we will not surrender it to Him. What then can God do in our interests but make ‘our own life’ less agreeable to us, and take away the plausible source of false happiness?[4]

          If a person hadn’t eaten for a long time, and was hungry, there’d be no mystery to it. By the same token, there’s no mystery as to why people are dissatisfied with life. They’re dissatisfied because they were made for Heaven, and they don’t have Heaven. That dissatisfaction, that suffering, is perfectly appropriate to our condition. Our emptiness should motivate us to seek for fulfillment in God.

Purification

Getting into Heaven requires perfection, since “nothing unclean” shall enter it (Revelation 21:27). But perfection means letting go, being purged, from every evil that our disordered wills and passions have come to rest in. Addiction to a toxic substance means finding pleasure in something unhealthy, or at least pain in its absence. But the addiction can only be broken as these false goods are taken away – with profound suffering as the result.

Hence the familiar theme in the spiritual tradition of the “Dark Night of the Soul,” wherein God’s favored holy ones are ruthlessly purified of any worldly attachment to self-satisfaction.