I suggested there that there there were two components to pain: a primary sensation, and a secondary emotional reaction to that sensation; and that I had begun to find a way to "step down" the overall intensity by merely "noticing" the former so as to reduce the latter. I ended by wondering whether there was a specifically Christian "take" on this topic, given that what I had been practising was really Eastern in origin.
Roger asked,
If you believed in a Christ carrying a cross do you think he would be trying to manage that pain? Reduce it down?
Roger's "if you believed..." is, I think, because he and I disagree on whether the gospel stories of Jesus are historically true. He believes they are; I don't. I take them as symbolically true, which as I tried to make clear here, doesn't lessen their power for me at all.
So Roger's question opened up a dimension I hadn't thought about. I realised no, I don't think Jesus would be trying to do that. In fact, Matthew 27:34 says that before he was crucified, he was offered wine to drink to reduce the pain, but refused it.
The extra dimension, of course, is that of whether and when suffering can have a redemptive quality. At one extreme, the suffering of Jesus clearly did. That is why he went to the cross. At the other, almost banale extreme, it didn't occur to me that the kind of pain I described in my post, of a broken collarbone and an injection, could help to redeem anything except possibly my own attitudes. But then Roger says, "some of my important experiences with pain have been when I have just let my heart go out to all those suffering in the world." Maybe if I had let my heart go out too, I would have experienced something different.
And then there is the strange verse from Colossians (1:24), where Paul (or whoever actually wrote it; opinions differ) says "I rejoice in what was suffered for you, and I fill up in my flesh what is still lacking in regard to Christ's afflictions, for the sake of his body, which is the church". This suggests that it is not only Jesus' sufferings that can be redemptive, but (if I read it right) that there was something missing in what he suffered. I don't know what to make of that, because it doesn't seem to be an idea that finds any resonance elsewhere in the Bible. But Sheila Cassidy, a doctor who was tortured in Pinochet's Chile, comments as follows on this verse at the end of her book "Sharing the darkness" (pp162-163):
Perhaps then we can see Christ's redemptive act as an ongoing drama in which we are all players. The question which I ask myself as I write this is: can we see all unmerited suffering as redemptive? Or is its redemptive power contingent on the sufferer's mental attitude? One thinks of examples of the heroic fortitude of people like Therese of Lisieux, offering her suffering from terminal tuberculosis to God. Much nearer home, I recall a young Catholic woman dying of cancer who asked me one day, 'How can I use my suffering for others?' It is hard to imagine that such an offering is rejected; the pain of these women must somehow be taken up like a holocaust and used we know not how.
I sense that, to put it mildly, I need to do a lot more work on all this. For now, let me extend and revise what I said before. Perhaps there are (potentially) three components to pain: the primary sensation, the secondary emotional reaction, and, for some at least, the redemptive component. The first will, perhaps, always be there. The second will or can reduce as we heal psychologically, grow spiritually, and, in Ken Wilber's words, "learn to tell the truth about our insides". But the gradual disidentification with purely selfish concerns which enables the secondary component to be reduced will also, if we let it, open us to the third, redemptive component. I say "if we let it" because Buddhism, as I understand it, at least in its original form, seems not to step into this territory; it promises liberation from suffering, so that the idea of redemptive suffering for others, if not entirely absent, is at least not a major feature. But the Christian path does invite us to "take up our cross" and move in this direction.
Perhaps this is one aspect of what the author of Meditations on the Tarot (letter six) says are two ways to transcend selfishness, or the basic heart attitude of "me real, you not real". One is the Eastern way: "me not real, you not real". The other is the Christian: "me real, you real". Maybe the secondary component of pain has at its root the attitude "Why is this happening to me, the only real being, the being at the centre of the universe? It's not fair!". Either method of transcending selfishness should be able to deal with that. But it would make sense for the redemptive aspect only to be present for those rare people (I believe they are sometimes called "saints") who genuinely do view others as "real".
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