HEALING THROUGH OUR WOUNDS
I have bad news and I have good news. Because of the kind of person I am,
I’ll get the bad news over first. The bad news is that life is hard and
everyone suffers. Pain is simply a part of being human; if we are
conscious, we experience pain. The narrative of the Garden of Eden tells us
a deep truth about the relationship of consciousness and pain.
As you remember, the Genesis narrative tells us that originally humanity
lived in peace with God in the Garden of Eden, but God told his people not
to eat of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. But as we all know, the
people ate from the tree, and they became like God, having knowledge of good
and evil—what happened is that they became aware, they became conscious, and
having become conscious, became self-conscious and aware of themselves as
separate individuals. In becoming self-conscious, they lost their sense of
oneness with nature and with the rest of the universe; they became alienated
from God, from one another and from the environment. The loss of their
sense of oneness with the rest of creation is symbolized by their banishment
from Paradise.
We can never go back to Eden. That would be like trying to return to our
mother’s womb, to infancy. We must grow up. We can only go forward through
the desert of life, making our way painfully over parched and barren ground
into increasingly deeper levels of consciousness. It is in our
consciousness that we come to understand the pain of existence—the pain of
dealing with our aloneness, our alienation from creation and from one
another. Often we try to avoid experiencing the pain of consciousness, the
pain of growing up and maturing. We may live surface, uncommitted lives,
abuse alcohol or drugs, or become unfeeling and cold.
If pain is great when we are young, we may learn how not to feel pain—if we
have no feelings, nothing and no one can get to us. For example, when I was
little, my brother would hold me down and tickle me. I learned how to
control my feelings so that I would not feel tickled. If I did not react,
it was no fun for him, and he quit. It sort of became my way of dealing
with pain—I pretty much didn’t feel things. The problem was that it wasn’t
specific; there were many things I didn’t feel. I had to learn to let
myself feel things in order to grow in consciousness. My situation was
mild; imagine what it is like for a child who is truly emotionally or
physically abused. That child may grow into a person who feels no pain, or
who escapes to drugs or to alcohol, or perhaps who grows through the pain
and becomes a saint.
To deal with the suffering of life and work through it, we need to change
our attitude toward pain. This is where the good news comes in: the good
news is that the pain serves a purpose for us. The easiest way to deal with
pain is to accept the fact that everything that happens to us can be used
for our spiritual growth. Now, I am NOT going to tell you that God goes
about setting up traps to cause us pain; that would make God into a sadist.
Through our free will we are entirely capable of making our own obstacle
path. What I am saying is that God shows us the way to grow through our
suffering into maturity.
You have heard about salvation and probably wonder just what it means.
Salvation means “healing.” It comes from the same root word as “salve.” To
be saved, is to be healed. Similarly, “health,” “wholeness” and “holiness”
are all derived from the same root, and all mean about the same thing.
Thus, what Christianity is about is bringing us to spiritual and emotional
health in Christ.
The stories of Jesus healing those who came to him, pleading for health, are
more significant that we might initially think. We think about physical
healing in those narratives, but Jesus came to heal through the message of
God’s love for us; the physical healing he did was through that divine
love. We are to share God’s love with others. We don’t learn to love by
intellectual effort. We learn to love by becoming conscious, feeling
creatures, creatures that understand what it is to be in pain.
There is a story. A guy was walking along the street at night and fell into
an uncovered manhole. He found he could not climb out and was about to
panic, when along came a doctor. “Please help me,” he cried out from the
hole in the pavement. The doctor wrote out a prescription and tossed it to
him and went on his way. Then along came a priest. “Please help me,” the
man again cried. The priest stopped, quickly wrote out a prayer, and tossed
it to him. Finally a third passerby came near. “Please help me,” the man
cried yet again. The third passerby jumped into the manhole with the
fellow. “Why did you do that? You could have gone for help! Now we are
both trapped here!” “Don’t worry,” say the passerby. “I’ve been in here
myself, and I know a way out.”
One of the major reasons that AA and NA work is that the persons in the
group have been in the manhole themselves and know what it is to be trapped
there and how one might find the way out.
Dr. Bernie Siegel is a cancer specialist, who writes that he has learned
much of what he knows about love from his patients. He tells about Thornton Wilder’s play, “The Angel That
Troubled the Waters.”
In the play a physician comes periodically to the Pool of Bethesda:
it is believed that healing will occur there whenever an angel
troubles the waters. The physician …waits for the angel, hoping to
be the first in the pool and to be healed of his melancholy and
remorse. The angel appears, but blocks the physician as he is ready
to step into the water and be healed… The physician pleads, but the
angel insists that healing is not for him; and then come these
telling words from the angel:
“Without your wound where would your power be? It is your
melancholy that makes your low voice tremble into the hearts of
men. The very angels themselves cannot persuade the wretched and
blundering children on earth as can one human being broken on the
wheels of living. In love’s service only the wounded soldiers can
serve. Draw back.”
Later the person who was healed rejoiced in his good fortune and
turned to the physician before leaving the pool of Bethesda and
said, “But come with me first, an hour only, to my home. My son is
lost in dark thoughts. I—I do not understand him, and only you have
ever lifted his mood. Only an hour…My daughter, since her child has
died, sits in the shadow. She will not listen to us…but she will
listen to you.”
The physician had a gift to use his suffering to reach others. It is
because of our own pain, we become more sensitive to the pain of others, and
it is our own wounds that lead us to help others. I have some friends in
Reno and Sparks who have been conducting what they call “The Forum” in
juvenile facilities, in high schools, and in any place where there are
troubled teens. The invitations to make a presentation are numerous. What
these people have to offer is that they are all former prisoners, some
having served over 40 years and being on life-time parole. Often the
presenters will have totaled 140-150 years in prison! They fell, most of
them early in their lives. They tell the kids what they thought when they
were the kids’ age, what attitudes they had, what happened to them and to
their families, and what it has meant to their lives. They are turning
their own lives around through a higher power, and they want to help the
kids see where what they are doing will lead. Almost always, some hard case
teens with stinking attitudes are left in tears, when they realize where
their walk is taking them. These are not their parents, or a counselor or a
judge lecturing them. They can hear the clearly authentic stories from
people who have walked the path before them. No one gets paid for doing the
Forums. These ex-prisoners are going forth in love, the kind of love in
which a person lays down a part of his life for another. Do the guys and
gals who take the chance of letting these kids see their wounds get anything
out of it? You bet they do! They are in the business of helping God save
lives! They are givers, not takers! That is real joy and satisfaction.
Most of us can serve our neighbors by being thoughtful listeners. You
almost never can heal another person through advice you might think up off
the cuff. Each person has to work through to the solution that is right for
him or her. In short, DON’T TRY TO FIX OTHERS. Just listen to them, and
let the neighbor and God work through to what is needed. A good listener is
real angel.
In summary, life is painful and everyone is wounded. It is the human
condition. If we see our wounds as opportunities for spiritual growth with
God’s grace, we will have the problem of pain beaten. We can look upon our
wounds as gifts that allow us to experience God’s love in our own life and
give the gift of loving understanding to others. IN SHORT, DON’T WASTE
YOUR PAIN! Remember, “In love’s service only the wounded soldiers can
serve.”
(Given Lovelock Correctional Center, 8/14/04:
QUESTION: WHAT ROLE, IF ANY, HAS PAIN PLAYED IN YOUR LIFE?
HAS IT EVER BEEN A GIFT?)
