December 17, 2007 – I’ve been writing here for months about the Problem of Pain, namely, why we have it, and whether or not a God we loved would make us feel pain if he had it in his power to take it away. If there were a God and he were omnipotent, why wouldn’t he spare us pain? Either he isn’t all that good or he isn’t all that omnipotent. Or, as the priests would tell us, he knows stuff we don’t.
I am learning this year that we need pain, or at least I do. It is valuable.
It cuts through stubborness, blindness, arrogance and the intrinsic obliviousness and various disorders that infects my life and cloud my judgment. It forces me to learn,makes me grow, to listen to people who are smarter than me.
The monks are right. We are weak. We are humble. We will fall, not once but again and again. No wonder they retreated to monasteries.
Pain lets us know something is wrong. It gets my attention, forces me into action, makes me face the truth about my life, rethink the things I’ve done, requires me to deal with the problems that create pain. Without it, I wonder if we would be vegetables, drifting from one thing to another, from crisis to crisis, drama to drama, without all that much incentive to confront truth. And even in pain, we rarely see the truth about ourselves. Facing that truth is awful sometimes, but beautiful. It is unique, I suspect, to humans, among all of the species.
For my animals, I think, pain is different. Rose feels pain when she cuts herself on barbed wire, or her leg goes lame from all of her running. Pain tells her – and me – to slow down. Since animals don’t deal with complex emotional issues, or make the kind of woeful decisions I do, pain is not necessary for them beyond their physical well being – sickness or injury.
We humans – I should speak for myself here – suffer great emotional pain because our decisions and emotions take us well beyond the necessities of living, and often get us into trouble, and more pain.
This year I’m getting a graduate course in issues like help, pain, loss and growth, and it’s high time, and for better or worse. What a great motivator pain is.
Some of my pain comes from a struggle over how to help, not only others but myself. Help is a tricky issue, and it’s easy to go off the track with it. Boundaries are murky, and there are lots of people with strong ideas about it, from ministers to 12-steppers. We are supposed to listen to ourselves, yet sometimes, that just doesn’t take us far enough.
It’s easy to help too little. Or too much. Sometimes, when you help someone, it is a viscerally selfish thing – you are helping yourself, making yourself feel good, creating myths about yourself and just pretending. Sometimes when you help others, you are crying out for help yourself. Should help come from without? Or within? What is the line between believing strongly in someone, and in crippling them by carrying too much of their weight? When do you let go? When do you hang in? When do you walk away?
When is helping yourself more important than helping someone else? And when is it selfish? The prophets argued that you ought not help others at the expense of yourself, yet to me helping others at the expense of yourself is the essence of selflessness. Isn’t that what Jesus did all the time?
When is help an expression of loyalty, or a destructive act of enabling? When is helping someone noble, and when does it become something else, something unhealthy, something that wounds rather than heals?
And when do you stand up and say, I just don’t really now.
Okay, it’s my turn, and I don’t really know. I used to know. I used to think I know. I now know I know little, something I learn often enough.
Sometimes – this is tough for me – you help people the most by not helping them, but by letting them come to see how and when they might help themselves. But how do you know when that is? Where are all these answers when you have all these questions?
I have good friends who are Christians and they say people have to carry their own loads. I have friends who are 12-steppers and they say help is only meaningful when it comes from inside, not without. That I can’t help anyone but myself. Walk away, they say. I have trouble with that.
These philosophies are strong and powerful, but they all leave holes and gaps for me. I am, truly, lost sometimes in the shadows. But there is something in all these ideas, much in sorting them out, listening, facing yourself, understanding the limits of yourself, balancing good intentions with the harder realities of life, friendship, loyalty, responsibility and self-determination.
When you are wrestling with these issues, you can’t see them. When you come out of the shadows, you can sometimes better see the truth, and then you bear the pain of it.
So that is perhaps the real Problem of Pain. We need it. I suspect it is even true that it is good for us, because pain is followed, inevitably and invariably, by something different, something better. Pehaps that is the point of pain, as well as its problem. Personally, I’m ready for the next thing.
17
December
Help, and The Problem of Pain, cont. (out of the shadows, 4)
by Jon Katz