“No pain, no gain.” We’ve heard it a thousand times. It’s a spiritual truism: You find God in pain and suffering. You find God when you learn how much you need him. Pain, failure, and suffering are your friends and teachers. Don’t run from pain; face it, and find God in it. Leonard Cohen’s lyric says it: “There is a crack, a crack in everything / That’s how the light gets in.”
That’s true enough, but it’s also true that pain and suffering destroy people. Their lives are permanently scarred by childhood trauma. They never recover from the divorce, the sudden tragic death, the bankruptcy, or the family member’s suicide. Chronic pain, the losses of aging, grief, and regrets are troubles and misery that don’t always lift people up; they grind them down instead. Leonard Cohen’s crack is very wide, the light is blinding, and not everyone can look at what the light reveals. Let’s not rush to embrace pain but first ask, How do I find God in suffering?
The novelist and pastor Frederick Buechner wrote about pain often and eloquently. He said, “Beneath our clothes, our reputations, our pretensions, beneath our religion or lack of it, we are all vulnerable both to the storm without and the storm within.”
Buechner had much pain in his life, beginning with his father’s suicide when he was a young boy. He often spoke of this and wrote about it in fictionalized form in his novels. One day a friend, noting this, told Buechner that, “You have had a fair amount of pain in your life, like everybody else. You have been a good steward of it.” Buechner was taken aback. A steward of pain? What does that mean?
It’s an odd word; we don’t hear much about stewards these days. Female flight attendants used to be called, awkwardly, “stewardesses.” “Stewardship” is something of a churchy word, a circumlocution for giving more money to the parish. But stewards are all over the New Testament. Jesus speaks often of stewards: good stewards and bad stewards, foolish stewards and wise stewards.
Stewards in the New Testament manage households, property, money, and substantial assets. They protect things and manage them. The first lesson for stewards of pain, then, is this: your pain doesn’t belong to you. It’s not you. It’s something life has handed to you, an experience, an opportunity, the consequence of bad choices made by other people or perhaps by you, and the result of living in a fallen, tragic world. It’s something that happened. Pain is yours for a while, but it’s not yours to keep.
The second lesson is: manage the pain well. Learn what it has to teach you. Don’t bury it in the ground like the servant in the parable of the talents; put it to work like the other two servants did.
The third lesson is: give the pain back to the master. When you’re finished with it—when you’ve mined it for gold and extracted its treasure—give it to God.
The climax of the Spiritual Exercises is the prayer known as the Suscipe. It’s the great prayer of surrender:
Take, Lord, and receive all my liberty, my memory, my understanding, and all my will—all that I have and possess. You, Lord, have given all that to me. I now give it back to you, O Lord. All of it is yours. Dispose of it according to your will. Give me love of yourself along with your grace, for that is enough for me. (SE 234, Ganss translation)
“Surrender” in a religious context can be a vague term. This prayer is quite specific. You surrender your liberty, memory, understanding, and will. Add your pain to the list. It’s hard to conceive of a surrender more complete and thorough than that.
Photo by Fa Barboza on Unsplash.
