Feb 10, 2019 Rev. Emily Wright-Magoon
“If we don’t find a way to transform our pain, we will always transmit it to those around us or turn it against ourselves… If your religion is not teaching you how to recognize, hold, and transform suffering, it is junk religion.”
Fr. Richard Rohr
At exactly this time of day, on a Saturday three months ago, I was in labor with our second daughter. With my first daughter’s labor, I had wanted a medication-free birth. But because of some complications with the baby’s positioning, it didn’t turn out that way. I ended up with various drugs and two epidurals. I totally affirm every mother’s decision around their labor, whether they have an epidural or a c-section or whatever. But four months ago, I found myself approaching this second labor all the more so wanting a medication-free birth.
BUT I was afraid of the pain.
My doula (someone who helps you through the labor) sent me an article ((“Finding the Path” by Kathy McGrath, MSW, LSW, FACCE, LCCE, CD – DONA)) comparing the process of natural childbirth to the hero’s journey – saying that pain is an important and necessary part of this transformational experience – this rite of passage – of bringing life into the world.
Opening to the pain opens us to the full experience, she said.
The pain is part of the process.
Yet in our culture we so often guard ourselves against pain – we numb, distract, explain, sedate…
So in my natural childbirth class, we practiced feeling pain without resisting it.
In an exercise which offered a miniscule window into what the real pain of childbirth is like, we held a piece of ice in our bare hands for many minutes. First we noticed what happened when we resisted the pain (and had a person next to us saying, “Don’t you really want an epidural?”) Then we took a break, and with a fresh piece of ice, we noticed what happened when we opened to the pain.
The pain seemed less; the minutes on the timer went by faster.
Like the Buddhists say, resistance to pain is what brings about true suffering.
I realized that one reason I was afraid of the pain is that I viewed pain as an indicator that something is wrong. In my first labor, I had some pain that did indicate something was wrong. The baby was in the wrong position. And when I get a headache, I think to myself: this pain is telling me that I’m dehydrated, or that I’m carrying too much tension – something needs to be fixed – like when I broke my wrist playing basketball in high school.
Indeed, sometimes pain exists to incite our fight or flight mechanisms: like the pain in a child’s hand when they’re curious about an oven burner. Like a wasp’s sting or a dog’s bite: “warning – stay away.”
Yet the pain of child labor is usually not indicating that anything is wrong. In fact, there are many times in our lives when pain is not a sign something is wrong:
The pain our muscles go through when mountain biking or stretching helps us get stronger. The pain we feel in therapy sometimes helps us get healthier. The pain of putting down that drink helps us get sober perhaps. The pain of setting a boundary helps us have healthier relationships.
But I was afraid that I wouldn’t be able to open to the pain of childbirth because my mind would jump in and say: “Something is wrong!” And that thought would trigger fear, and fear would trigger resistance and resistance to pain causes more pain. And I did not want more pain!
So I talked with my spiritual director about how to shift my thinking about pain.
I wanted this time to open to pain – to let it in.
We realized that my fairly traumatic first birth experience was holding me back. That’s how trauma often functions if we don’t heal from it. The psychologist Peter Levine says:
“Trauma is not what happens to us, but what we hold inside in the absence of an empathetic witness.”
Peter Levine
So I worked with someone who helped me walk through that first birth experience again. Not only did she serve as my empathetic witness, but she helped me lift up the other witnesses who were there, who perhaps I hadn’t remembered or valued: the steady support of my husband, my own resilience, the power of Spirit – loving me through it, the baby within me – doing her best to survive and indeed emerge.
Re-storying that trauma, lifting up those empathetic witnesses – helped me trust that I could open to pain when it came again.
But I’m not here to tell you that it was easy – or some brilliant spiritual experience.
I’m not here to preach a sermon that sees pain with rose-colored glasses. I’ve been a minister long enough – including as a hospital chaplain – to know that pain is not fun. Whether it’s acute or chronic, physical or emotional, pain can be excruciating, crushing, heart-rending, awful stuff.
For years I had an intractable, daily pain in my side that no doctor could diagnose even after scores of diagnostic procedures. From that experience I’ve had a glimpse into the ways chronic pain can just wear you down. Getting out of bed, combing your hair, eating a meal – these daily activities can become trials.
And then there’s emotional pain – including the pain of watching your loved one in pain.
You may know that this Christmas Eve we rushed our 6-week-old baby Sofia to the hospital because she couldn’t breathe. She shrieked at one point in fear. And we could do nothing but watch as they attempted to find one of her tiny veins for the IV, and as they put in a catheter for the second time…. And we were relieved when the doctor said that because she was over a month old she didn’t have to get a spinal tap.
My heart went out to all the parents of children with special needs who have had to witness countless such procedures, or seizures, or surgeries, or worse. And my heart goes out to the adults caring for their elderly parents, seeing them through not only the physical pains of aging but also sometimes the psychological pains of dementia.
And there’s the pain we see in the news every day: migrant children separated from their parents, the wildfires in California, the mass shootings ….
Perhaps you have in your mind some pain that is rising to the front of your awareness right now.
What do we humans do with our pain?
The Christian author Barbara Brown Taylor says
“Pain can hurt so badly that it begs a reason, causing people to drum up all sorts of guilt and debt to go along with it. …There will always be people who run from every kind of pain and suffering, just as there will always be religions that promise to put them to sleep…Better they should stop doing the math and take a look around, since they may never see as clearly as they do when pain clears their sight.”
Barbara Brown Taylor
So, what do we humans do with our pain?
The question of pain is directly taken up by (at least) a whole book of the Bible – the book of Job, shared by Jews and Christians. Like every good religious story – (and Jewish stories are especially good at this!) – the text is less about easy answers than about the value of wrestling with questions that have no answer.
Job goes through unspeakable physical pain and human loss over and over, described in rich detail – he says it’s like being crushed by a tempest, like his bones burning, like being dashed to pieces.
In response to this pain, Job cycles through all the typical human questions, explanations, accusations, and pleadings.
And each time he is met with only silence from God.
God’s silence leaves Job in perhaps the deepest pain of all: meaninglessness. Isn’t that the big question we often have about pain… Why? And Why Me?
Job has three friends who come in to attempt to save Job from this meaninglessness. We’ve all heard the voices of these so-called friends (and sometimes these voices are in our own heads):
“You must have done something wrong.” Or: “There’s a higher purpose to this pain: God is in charge and ordained this suffering.” Or: “If only you will repent, this pain will cease.”
But Job knows better. He turns away from his friends and back to arguing with this silent God. Whether we view that God as our God, or as a metaphor for the search for meaning and truth – Job’s wrestling with God is about a mature faith that doesn’t accept superficial answers, nor gives up and curses life. Job keeps speaking out from his grief.
The Muslim Sufi poet Rumi talks about this longing for meaning, even in the midst of silence, as the heart of faith. He says:
This grief you cry out from
Draws you toward union
Rumi
In Job’s story God does finally speak – yet it barely seems to make sense. God responds mostly with questions – questions that humble Job:
“Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth? …Have you entered into the springs of the sea, or walked in the recesses of the deep? …Can you hunt the prey for the lion…Is it by your wisdom that the hawk soars, and spreads its wings toward the south? …Can you tilt the waterskins of heaven? …”
No Job cannot. No Job has not. No, Job does not know any of these things. ((I owe some of this interpretation of Job – and this line – to Barbara Brown Taylor and her chapter on Pain in An Altar in the World: A Geography of Faith))
Now, a superficial interpretation of this text would say – “Oh this is just one more example of that Old Testament God – angry, haughty, distant. There’s no meaning there for me.”
But many Jewish and Christian commentators say: think metaphorically. Look: somehow God’s questions DO settle Job. Job says, “Now my eye sees you.” And he is at rest, even though his pain does not cease and his losses are not returned to him.((At the end of the story, though, Job’s losses are in fact returned to him.))
Job’s suffering had propelled him to the center of his own universe.
It’s understandable: pain does that to all of us. It can turn us in toward ourselves, make our worlds very small. And then we suffer more. But God’s questions serve to remind Job of the vastness and depth of the world…
Because when we open to pain, pain can draw us toward union with all of life.
As Barbara Brown Taylor says, “His pain does not set him apart from other living creatures. If anything, it secures his communion with them.” ((An Altar in the World, Barbara Brown Taylor))
Job can finally let go of the “Why” question and shift into the humbling understanding that pain hits us all – and in that connection there is witness and wisdom and union.
The Buddhist teacher Pema Chodron explains it this way:
“We think that by protecting ourselves from suffering we are being kind to ourselves. The truth is, we only become more fearful, more hardened, and more alienated. We experience ourselves as being separate from the whole. This separateness becomes like a prison for us, a prison that restricts us to our personal hopes and fears and to caring only for the people nearest to us. … Yet when we don’t close off and we let our hearts break, we discover our kinship with all beings.”
Pema Chodron
Now, if in my postpartum brain fog I can’t convey to you the subtlety of this explanation, I fear that I’ll only be to you like one of Job’s friends: telling you your pain has a higher purpose.
That’s not it.
But what I have found from being with people in pain, is that easy answers to the “Why?” question are rarely healing.
What is healing is connection: union with all that is.
I’ve seen people in pain who reach out to others who have experienced the unique pain they have experienced. What they find might not be called healing, but at least a mutual witnessing.
It’s the once-strangers who knit blankets together side by side in their chemo chairs and give them to children with cancer. It’s the way my experience with Sofia in the emergency room opens a new space in my heart to parents whose children have it even harder. It’s the healing I’ve seen happen in grief groups, where stories told with raw vulnerability –connections made across both sameness and difference – weave a fabric that lends warmth in the cold. It’s the gratitude and grace that can happen on a deathbed, when someone finally lets go.
It’s not easy.
I learned that in childbirth.
See, I had thought that opening to the pain would be just like letting go. Just let go and let the pain happen and then, at the very end, push.
I think we often think of letting go, of relaxing, or surrendering – at least I did – as this pretty passive experience. But it turned out to be the hardest work I had ever done – both physically and mentally, it required my very active engagement.
It took active work to get my mind and my body past its ingrained inclination to resist the pain.
My doula held my hand and in the few seconds between a contraction she told me: “Now here’s the thing: when you relax and open to the pain, you’re going to feel more pain. And you’re immediately going to want to tense up again. But remember: through the pain is where you want to go.”
I was not in a good mood.
She was right – the pain got worse when I opened to it. And I felt it and said: “I can’t do this.” And she and my husband said: “You CAN do this. You ARE doing this.” And it took all my mental energy, my determination, my faith in the process, my love for that baby, to keep opening to the pain.
And I did it.
But I’m not here to tell you that in the moment it was some beautiful, empowering, spiritual experience. Maybe for some women, it is, but for me: No. At the time, and even for the first several days afterward, all I could think was: “Oh my god, that was aw-ful. Why on earth did I not get that epidural?”
Again, for me it took re-telling the story, with witnesses, for me to re-member that pain as empowering.
Several days after the birth, my husband and I sat with our doula and for over two hours we recounted together the whole thing start to finish.
I re-membered not only the terrifying and harrowing parts, but also the funny and courageous parts.
The first witness is us – ourselves as witnesses to our own pain.
Pema Chodron says:
“Instead of asking ourselves, ‘How can I find security and happiness?’ we could ask ourselves, ‘Can I touch the center of my pain? Can I sit with suffering, both yours and mine, without trying to make it go away? Can I stay present to the ache of loss or disappointment in all its many forms-and let it open me?’ This is the trick.”
Pema Chodron
Before my experience with this birth pain, a sermon on pain from me might have been a little different. This pain taught me how much work we sometimes need to do to open to pain.
Like my doula said, each time we open, we may find it opens us to more pain. Opening to the pain of Sofia’s hospitalization meant opening to the pain that ultimately I cannot protect her from life… that she will feel pain, and I am not in control.
Sitting with those raw realities – whatever they are for each of us in our pain – is rough…but real.
This is the authentic and courageous spiritual life.
The good news is that it helps our broken but open hearts become more tender – more able to let everything in.
Brené Brown says:
“I went back to church thinking that it would be like an epidural … that church would make the pain go away. Faith and church was not an epidural for me at all; it was like a midwife who just stood next to me saying, ‘Push. It’s supposed to hurt a little bit.'”
Brene Brown
In our pain may we know we have loving witnesses all around us and with us.
And may it open us to life.
– Rev. Emily Wright-Magoon