Facing Sufering

Series: Seeds of Hope

Title: Facing Sufering

Original title in Spanish edition: Frente al dolor

Author: Roberto Badenas

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Translator: Darlene Stillman

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October 2013: First Edition

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Dedicated to all those with whom pain has united me:

To those to whom I have caused pain,

And to those who have made me suffer;

To those who have shared their sorrows with me,

And to those with whom I have shared mine….

And especially, to the millions who suffer

not being able to do anything for them,

Apart from writing presumably on their behalf.

Roberto Badenas

holds a Doctorate in Theology from Andrews University (Michigan, USA). He is a specialist in Biblical Studies and professor of New Testament. From 1990 to 1999 he was dean of the Adventist Theological Seminary at the Adventist University of France (Collonges-sous-Saleve), and from 1999 to 2010, president of the Biblical Research Committee, and director of Family Ministries and Education (EUD, Berne, Switzerland). Before this book, Professor Badenas published many other texts in other languages (including numerous articles), and the books Christ the End of the Law. Romans 10:4 in Pauline Perspective (JSOT Press, Sheffield University, 1985) and Meet Jesus (Autumn House, 1995), also published in Spanish, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Romanian, and Catalan.

Contents

Introduction: An Ever-Present Enemy 10

Part i. Awareness 15

1 What We Mean By Pain 17

2 Expressing Our Pain 29

3 Heeding the Warning Signs 39

4 A Hard Why to Accept 55Part II. A Clooser Look 71

5 The Enigma of Evil 73

6 Traditional Explanations 89

7 God’s Silence 103

8 Faith and Healing 119Part iii. Support 141

9 Learning to Ease the Pain 143

10 The Keys to Survival 161

11 Aging With Serenity 177

12 Being There at the End 189

13 Facing Death 205

14 Grief and Mourning 225

15 Epilogue: No More Pain 207

Introduction:

An Ever-Present Enemy

Few human experiences are as universal as pain. It is almost impossible for us to go through life without suffering from a health problem, without having an accident, without a friend or spouse, failing us, or without a loved one dying.

We only have to exist to suffer and cause pain. From Adam to the most recent newborn, from Job and Jesus, to the most uncelebrated soldier from the most forgotten war, the shadow of pain darkens the lives of everyone. We are not safe from suffering, regardless of how well we plan our lives. We are all exposed to suffering in one way or another, from our first baby teeth to the last aches of old age. Disease, decrepitude, remorse, existential angst, heartache…. If someone claims never to have suffered, that person has lost his memory. In a myriad of forms, be it acute, violent, dull, excruciating, or persistent, pain wears down the body and oppresses the spirit. It abounds in the life of the poor and ruins the life of the rich. It makes a child cry, disfigures a young person’s body, mars an adult’s face, and slumps the shoulders of the elderly. From the cradle to the grave, our suffering is relentless. Work and pleasure, dependence and freedom, virtue and vice, love and hate, all can make us suffer. Pain is part of our human condition.1We could say that we are no longer children when we realize that a mother’s kiss cannot take away all of our sorrows….

We only have to open a newspaper, walk down the halls of a hospital, or visit any cemetery to prove that this is the reality of life. Suffering haunts us and plagues us.2 In the last years, while I was writing this book, twenty people I know well have gone through some sort of intense suffering, and ten of them have since died. One of them was my father….

In the face of this unforgiving reality, our first instinct is to rise up and rebel in a thousand ways. Any twinge of pain puts the sensitive defense mechanisms of our bodies on alert. Like Ponce de León,3 we seek the fountain of eternal youth or of happiness in pleasures, medicines, therapies, treatments, and a thousand other practices…Like Ponce de Leon we fail to find it. The risk—and the certainty—of suffering and dying dominate our naive dreams. We attempt to avoid or fight both realities, but ultimately resign ourselves to accept them when we have no other choice. The question of suffering is so vast and complex that it would be pretentious to try to cover all of its dimensions ––medical, psychological, social, philosophical, and spiritualin a single book. Thus this book only addresses some of the more practical and existential aspects of pain in our daily life, from my personal perspective of believer. Despite millennia of reflection and research, the realm of pain has yet to be completely explored. This book attempts, in all modesty, to help us face suffering with dignity and realism.

Part One of the book, which is of an informative nature, outlines an awareness of the complexity of the issue and its various implications. Part Two presents a series of theoretical and practical reflections regarding the ultimate why behind suffering and attempts to understand its meaning. Part Three, with the layman in mind, provides simple resources to face suffering with compassion, effectiveness, and tact. The goal is seeking to avoid pain in the first place, and when that is unfeasible, to alleviate it.

The ultimate objective of this book is to help face and cope with the reality of pain as much as possible.

I am not an expert on the subject of pain. I have no doubt that many of my readers, through personal or professional experience, know more of the subject than I do. I write only as a witness, almost as a “suffering subject.” If my optimistic nature tends to dodge pain, my philosophical training, and above all my personal and pastoral experience, have made me quite sensitive to the subject.

This book has been much more difficult to write than my previous books, and undoubtedly it would never have come to fruition without the collaboration of an excellent group of especially dear people. First I would like to thank my physician friends, José Manuel Prat, Miguel Gracia Antequera, Marcelle Lafond, and Caleb Mercier, who were kind enough to review these pages from a professional point of view, and who have provided me with much invaluable advice beyond their respective specialties. My gratitude also goes to my dear colleague Roberto Carbonell, hospital chaplain, who daily confronts suffering and death, for generously sharing his personal testimonies with me; to chaplain Dr. Mario Ceballos, for his helpful contributions in bibliography; to Dr. Angel Manuel Rodriguez, for his useful theological insights; to Dr. Herold Weiss for his intelligent and sensitive thoughts on the subject; to my young friends, Ramon Junqueras and Guillermo Sánchez, for sharing the priceless contributions of their creative talents with me; to Juan Fernando Sánchez, for his tireless and competent editorial assistance, and again, to Marta Prats, for her valuable literary advice and unconditional support.

I write this book out of solidarity with those who suffer, out of a sense of duty, I would almost say “in self-defense,”4motivated by my own rejection and powerlessness in the face of our common experience. This book seeks to answer the following questions:

To what extent is it possible to avoid pain? What can we do to understand pain or learn to control it? How do we transcend pain in order to put this minion of death to the service of life?

As Leon Gieco sang:

“I only ask God

That I not be indifferent to suffering,

That skeletal death does not find me

Empty and alone, without having done enough.”

The Author

1 . «The most basic human experience is pain: “Human reality by nature is doomed to suffering” (Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, London: Routledge, 2003 (1958). “Let us imagine a number of men in chains, and all condemned to death, where some are killed each day in the sight of the others, and those who remain see their own fate in that of their fellows, and wait their turn, looking at each other sorrowfully and without hope. It is an image of the condition of men” (Blaise Pascal, Pensées [Thoughts], § 199). Cf. Eugene C. Kennedy The Pain of Being Human. New York: The Crossroad Publishing Company, 1997.

2 . See Paul Heubach, The Problem of Human Suffering, Hagerstown (Maryland, USA): Review and Herald, 1991, p. 4.

3 . Juan Ponce de León (c. 1460-1521), conquistador from Spain, was the first governor of Puerto Rico and the discoverer of Florida (USA). According to legend, he sought the Fountain of Youth in his travels.

4 . See Ronald Dunn, Quand le ciel est silencieux [When Heaven is Silent], Marne-la-Vallée (France): Farel, 2003, p. 23

Note on Bible versions used: While writing this book, the author simultaneously used three different versions of Scripture: the New International Version, the NASB, and the Message. As the content of the biblical texts cited above is essentially the same, the reader is invited to consult his or her preferred version, even if it is different from the versions mentioned above. The author turns to other versions only on rare occasions (as outlined) or to his personal translation.

Part I

Awareness

“He who increases knowledge increases sorrow.”

Ecclesiastes 1:18

1

What We Mean

by Pain

“Happiness is a fundamentally

negative feeling: the absence of pain.”

Gregorio Marañón

It’s midnight. Our first child, a premature baby boy only two months old, who we had just brought home from the hospital, wakes us crying. His diaper is dry. He doesn’t want the bottle. He doesn’t have a fever. His mother takes him in her arms, coos to him, trying to calm him, but he keeps on crying. He can’t say what’s wrong, and we, his first-time parents, don’t know how to interpret his cries. Indigestion? An ear infection? Just plain fear? Undressing him completely one more time, trying to find the reason for his crying, we notice a bulge that turns out to be an inguinal hernia. Not even the pediatrician could tell us if the hernia was the cause or the consequence of his crying.

Quite some time later, I awoke with a strange pain in my upper jaw up near my wisdom tooth or behind it. The pain, vague at first, became increasingly widespread and intense. I could not get a dentist appointment for several hours and my teeth had never hurt this way before. By the end of the day I no longer knew if I had a terrible toothache, headache, earache, or everything all at once.

Many years later, my wife, a happy and cheerful woman who spends her days singing, began to feel ill without being able to say exactly what was the matter.

“I don’t know what’s wrong. I don’t feel good, and I can’t say why. Could it be menopause? I don’t feel like doing anything. I feel exhausted, weak. Everything bothers me. I’m sad. Every little thing makes me want to cry. I just want to sleep, to get away from everyone and from myself.”

My wife couldn’t seem to put a name to her growing depression.

These three simple, personal experiences, among thousands of others that we could mention, serve as an example to illustrate how difficult it is to describe pain.

What is pain?

Although we all feel its sting in some way during our lives, it is not easy for us to define suffering. The experience of pain is very broad and extremely complex to convey because it affects our lives differently, experienced by each individual in a personal and unique way. Pain is, in reality, a mystery.

The term “suffering” has, in many languages, a double meaning that includes both the feeling of unhappiness or displeasure and the feeling of sorrow or grief. If in pleasure we enjoy the sensations of the body, in pain they become a disagreeable nuisance. In joy, we feel exultant; in pain, we know we are powerless. Facing pleasure, our whole being reaches eagerly for new experiences; facing pain, the body recoils as if to protect itself from an intruder. Health takes for granted “the silence of the organs”; physical pain is felt, to the contrary, like “a cry of the body.”1

If health is a state that permits us to live an independent, happy and full life, as much in the biological sense as in the psychological and social senses, pain upsets this state in all its dimensions.

A lot of ink has been put to paper to try to define the elusive contours of human suffering, without convincing results. The philosopher Spinoza defined pain in the 17th century as “a fundamental affect, contrary to pleasure.” The International Association for the Study of Pain defined it in our times as “an unpleasant sensory and emotional experience, associated with actual or potential tissue damage, or described in terms of such damage.”2 But we no longer limit the definition of pain to the effects of an injury. This classical definition has been revised many times, with results not yet satisfactory for everyone.3

Pain and suffering

There are those who distinguish pain and suffering as two different realities. They argue that pain is organic, while suffering would be more psychological in nature. According to this thesis, what hurts is the body. Rather, suffering affects the spirit, our ability to think. In that sense pain floods the being, suffering faces it. The concrete nature of pain makes experiencing it doable and facilitates therapeutic action. Suffering, however, is expressed in a dark form and its innermost center remains in darkness, including for those who suffer from it.4

Science has the means to fight organic-physiological pain, but suffering is a more complex reality that can, although not necessarily, include the presence of pain, and whose therapy requires other treatments. So, a paraplegic has no reason to feel pain, but the patient can suffer from it beyond what is imaginable.

Cicely Saunders, founder of the Hospice movement,5 coined the term “total pain,” which includes, in addition to physical discomfort, emotional, mental, social, and spiritual suffering, because all these aspects are interrelated. Suffering is linked to the circumstances that affect us in our whole being and in that sense it becomes more all-encompassing that the pain itself. But the popular use of the terms pain and suffering make them almost interchangeable.6 They are concepts that often are intertwined and get mixed up. Here we will refer to them interchangeably.

Physiologists describe pain as a protective reflex designed to alert the person to avoid worse harm. According to them, pain would involve, in the first place, an alarm signal through which the body indicates that something is not right, warning of some form of aggression7 or approaching danger. The burning sensation that causes us to avoid fire prevents us from suffering more severe burns. A thorn prick keeps us away from thorns and prevents us from worse injury. And so on.

Although this positive definition of pain is valid in many cases, it is not applicable to all situations. If pain is capable of protecting us from destruction (for example, keeping us away from fire), it is also capable of destroying us. As it has been observed,8 for all those who in direct contact with the sick, pain is no more than a contingency, a harmful symptom, distressing and injurious, that often makes an already irreversible situation more grievous and unhappy. We should dismiss the idea that pain is beneficial in all cases. Pain is too often a grim gift. It debases us and makes us fill sicker than we really are. The professionals have the inescapable duty to prevent it, if they can.9

Friends or foes, pain and suffering always need to be taken seriously.

Pain, a personal experience

Although pain repulses us all, it has different effects on each individual. We don’t all suffer in the same way. It could be said that instead of kinds of “pain” or “suffering” there are people who suffer. My pain or that of any other person is always a personal experience. Perhaps there is no experience more personal than that of suffering. It affects the whole being: the body and the spirit. Whether physical or spiritual, pain reminds us of the fragility of our existence; it focuses our attention on our own discomfort and turns getting rid of it into the highest priority.

Pain and suffering are perhaps the human experiences that most isolate us from others. No matter how much we may have read about the subject or how well we are able to sympathize with those who are suffering, their pain will always be theirs alone, personal and unique.

In reality, there is no way to share pain.10 Our suffering is a circle that is closed to the outside. “You cannot feel the pain of any other, nor can any other experience yours […]. Holocaust, famine, pandemics…. It does not matter. Suffering always comes in individual packages.”11

Our difficulty in understanding pain is further complicated by the fact that, permeating all the aspects of our being, it affects our objectivity to a greater or lesser extent. Whether it comes upon us suddenly in an accident or we get forewarning with a chronic illness, we are never prepared for pain: it disrupts our lives and can paralyze it completely.

Each time pain comes crashing into our lives, we somehow become passive victims of what is happening to us. No matter how responsible we are for its causes, we always perceive it as an intruder attacking us.

How much does it hurt?

Pain is a very difficult sensation to measure. Measuring its intensity is still very random and differs considerably from one patient to the next and from one doctor to the next. Reliable techniques for measuring pain are very recent and are still not well-known or completely recognized.

Nor is it easy to compare some discomforts with others and assert that one kind of pain is worse than another. For example, an intense but short-term pain, like that in many natural births, kidney stones, etc., versus the rooted pain, much less intense, but much more persistent, of certain types of cancer or arthritis.

Chronic pain, albeit relatively moderate, can become unbearable precisely because of its duration. It affects a large percentage of patients for different lengths of time, during which it radically alters their lives.12 Chronic pain interrupts sleep, reduces mobility, impairs the ability to work and affects even the most daily routines like getting out of bed or going up and down stairs. Even walking can become an ordeal. Suffering from chronic pain without knowing the cause or without finding relief disrupts normal life and can even cause severe cases of depression and anxiety.

Reactions to pain

Attitudes toward pain are almost as varied as the people suffering from it. It is difficult to generalize on the subjective aspects of pain, because there are as many kinds and degrees of suffering as there are variations in sensitivity thresholds. Certain medical conditions can be borne incredibly well by those individuals who have suffered the most and particularly feared by those who have suffered less. Because of this, the assessment of suffering is very relative and varies by populations, individuals, and cases. In some wars, soldiers who went under surgery without anesthesia didn’t seem to feel more pain than that caused by their wounds. In certain ethnic groups, there are woman who give birth and go on working almost as if nothing special had happened.

Suffering transcends the personal circumstances of those experiencing it. As H.G. Wells wryly observed, “The Royal Crown cures not the headache.”13 This poses many interesting theoretical questions, though they are totally irrelevant from a practical point of view. Who suffers more, men or women? Adults or children? The young or the elderly? The well-informed or the ignorant? Believers or non-believers? And so on.

Because it affects us in such a personal way, when we suffer we tend to think that the adversity befalling us is unique, that no one else suffers like we do, or that our pain cannot be compared to any other. And that’s how it is, in a way.

Our developed societies have battled physical pain with undeniable success. Medicine and pharmaceuticals are changing the experience of pain into a technical problem. So they are to be blamed, fairly, for the risk of reducing pain to a mere malfunction of the body.14 But pain is a broader problem that affects the absolute uniqueness of human beings. In fact, no physiological law can entirely account for this experience.15 The privileged beneficiaries of what we call a “state of well-being,” we systematically resort to the healthcare system in our fight against pain, as if it were a fundamental right. Doctors prescribe us medications that take away our physical discomfort. Psychological therapies soothe our emotional problems. And if they don’t, drugs help us escape, even if momentarily, from our painful reality.

Today, in the West, the statistics on the use of painkillers and sedatives are on the rise. Other societies and other times have dealt with pain in ways that to us seem too resigned and cruel, attributing religious or spiritual dimensions that become more and more difficult for us to understand. They have regarded suffering and pain not as mere health or medical issues but rather as existential problems. But in our post-Christian world, the cures have ousted the curates. Medications and therapies have taken the place of fasting and prayer, and they have become the modern substitutes for what, in another time, depended heavily on personal strength, self-control, or faith.16

Is it true that no one wants to suffer?

Although in theory we all seek well-being and each one of us fights against pain in our own way, in reality suffering is also fostered. It is surprising to discover how determined we are to stay in situations that cause us suffering, and how much energy we are capable of exerting to maintain the causes of our problems.

Let’s look at a simple example. A child has a loose baby tooth that is about to fall out, but it doesn’t really hurt if he doesn’t touch it. Nevertheless, he feels the need to touch the tooth constantly (with his tongue or with his fingers), as if he wants to make sure that the pain is still there!17 At a much more serious level, countless victims of ailments that are a direct consequence of bad habits (diet, tobacco, alcohol, lack of exercise, etc.) would like to stop suffering, but they want to do so without changing their lifestyles. Instead of attacking the cause of their ills by changing their habits, they prefer to seek surgery or miracle cures that might free them from their undesirable consequences.

There are types of suffering that take forms similar to masochism. They are fostered by those individuals who gain some advantage through them. Many types of dependency, including forms of selfdestruction—some quick and some slow—“excuse” the patient from having to deal with unresolved problems, putting on others their own inability to solve them. There are degrees of illness whose seriousness silences any criticism or reproach against the one who is suffering, regardless of the cause of the situation.

That makes certain chronically ill persons acquire a kind of “dependency” that makes them less responsible than they would be if they were more autonomous. Through their behavior, by arousing pity, they get the help they want without having to ask for it.18 In some cases, their very suffering provides them with the perfect tool to punish someone—spouse, children, or parents—blaming that person indirectly for their own problems.