Pain

In his anguish he prayed more earnestly, and his sweat became like great drops of blood falling down on the ground. Luke 24:43 NRSV

Pain is tossed around alot in sermons, messages, etc. It's often used without much context or meaning. This is a sign of laziness and leaves listeners guessing.

I sometimes hear about "the pain or sin of addiction." Addiction begins by providing more pleasure than pain. Maybe the pain of recovery is more apropos, since it's in recovery that I learn about my true self, the harm I have caused, the destruction I did to myself, the sense of time and opportunities wasted before recovery. (I suspect that addiction is yet another term thrown around without much thought or concretizing).

It's helpful to clarify the intended meaning of pain-- instead of using it as a blanket term covering anything distasteful or annoying (a pain in the ass).

The definition for pain in Merriam-Webster: 

a localized or generalized unpleasant bodily sensation or complex of sensations that causes mild to severe physical discomfort and emotional distress and typically results from bodily disorder (such as injury or disease).

Another commonly used meaning for pain:

        mental or emotional distress or suffering : grief. 

The text above -from Luke 23- is an example of the most extreme kind of mental and emotional distress. Remember that the sweat was "like" drops of blood. Whatever our faith allows us to believe, Jesus' distress is a human response to being abandoned by friends and God. (1). 

Consider that, before his torture and execution, Jesus's emotional distress is also one of human ego loss and grief. Jesus cries over Jerusalem, which refuses the gathering of the mother hen and her chicks. (2) The disciples' illusions of messianic deliverance and kingdom died a painful death: "we had hoped he was the one to redeem Israel." Luke 24:21  A disciple that Jesus hand-picked turns Jesus into the authorities for questioning. (3) The others in the inner circle run away as fast as they can, leaving their garments behind if  necessary. (4) Another disciple stays closer for awhile, until he denies any association with Jesus.(5) 

Jesus preaches the nearness and immediacy of God's reign and life in that kingdom, (6) which results, ultimately in his being taken into custody and losing all power over his fate. Those story-lines do not present Jesus' ministry as successful when contemporary measurements of church success are applied. The failure and humiliation was public even before the torture and cross. 

Ego-loss is not always something we associate with Jesus' Passion. But if the pain he experiences is not physical sensation but mental anguish, then there is something teachable and preachable here:

1. Use pain-- but explain it. Pain as emotional distress suggests a therapeutic, psychological framework. Sin is a theological idea. Brokenness is sometime used instead of pain or sin. Another concept from Korea, han, allows for the corporate nature of both pain and sin. (7)  

2. The mystics offer insight into emotional distress. The paradigm of Illumination --Purgation--Unification informs the ego-loss experienced in life with God. This is not a therapeutic scheme, but rather, a spiritual one. Although I am not a mystic, I can still learn from their experiences and writings. (8)

3. The ego thrives on false consolation and programs promising happiness which eventually cause more pain. St. Ignatius of Loyola set forth the discernment of spirits as essential in understanding our pain, and making decisions amidst uncertainty, (9)

(1) Matthew 27:46 

(2) Luke 19:41

(3) Mark 14:10 

(4) Mark 14: 50-51

(5) Matthew 26:69-75

(6) Matthew 12:28, Mark 1:15, Luke 10:11, 11:20, 17:21

(7) Han, according to Suh Nam Dong is “a feeling of unresolved resentment against injustices suffered, a sense of helplessness because of the overwhelming odds against one, a feeling of acute pain in one’s guts and bowels, making the whole body writhe and squirm, and an obstinate urge to take revenge and to right the wrong—all these combined." See Yes Magazine, August 24, 2022. 

(8) For a contemporary treatment of this, see Elaine A. Heath, The Mystic Way of Evangelism: A Contemplative Vision for Christian Outreach, 2008.

(9) See, Pope Francis, "Let Us Dream: The Path to a Better Future, 2020, specifically Chapter 2, "A Time to Choose.

            

 

Amazing: Frederick Douglass on Methodism

From AP American History (High School) to Afro-American History (Trinity University) to Black Church History (Duke Divinity School) to Doctoral Studies (Perkins School of Theology), the fact that Frederick Douglass' biography was not required was a monumental omission of the curriculum and leadership. Especially when Douglass' statements on religion, Methodists and Christian leaders are considered. I include two notable excerpts referenced below.

In August, 1832, my master attended a Methodist camp-meeting. held in the Bay-side, Talbot county, and there experienced religion. I indulged a faint hope that his conversion would lead him to emancipate his slaves, and that, if he did not do this, it would, at any rate, make him more kind and humane. I was disappointed in both respects. It neither made him more humane to his slaves, nor to emancipate them. If it had any effect on his character, it and him more cruel and hateful in all his ways; for I believe him to have been a much worse man after his conversion than before. Prior to his conversion, he relied upon his own depravity to shield and sustain him in his savage barbarity; but after his conversion, he found religious sanction and support for his slaveholding cruelty. He made the greatest pretentions to piety. His house was a house of prayer. He prayed morning, noon, and night. He very soon distinguished himself among his brethren and was soon made a class- leader and exhorter.  p. 56

I assert most unhesitatingly, that the religion of the south is a mere covering for the most horrid crimes- a justifier of the most appalling barbarity,- a sanctifier of the most hateful frauds,- and a dark shelter under which the darkest, foulest, grossest, and most infernal deeds of slaveholders find the strongest protection. Were I to be again reduced to the chains of slavery, next to that enslavement, I should regard being a slave of a religious master the greatest calamity that could befall me. For of all slaveholders with whom I have ever met, religious slaveholders are the worst. I have ever found them the meanest and basest, the most cruel and cowardly, of all others. pp. 72-3

Comment

In my classrooms, any consideration of the nature of American human enslavement based solely on race, or Blackness, was overlooked.  Prior to 1865, to be Black  was to be enslaved. Those born into slavery, like Douglass, had no hope of freedom. Douglass' father was a white enslaver. It paid to multiply the enslaved through Black mothers.

Most of my education stopped with a cursory mention of indentured servants and slavery of the colonial era and pre-Civil War.. With no critical exploration of the workings of human enslavement, conclusions one could draw were wrong. For example, there is no comparison between indentured servanthood and human enslavement. 

Douglass suggests that the holidays were used to inebriate slaves into thinking they would forget about their hopelessness and think their lot not so bad after all. A drunken stupor was required to think the slave's life was acceptable. 

There were other vast shortcomings in my formal education. The institutional racism which was established before, during and after the Civil War was rarely, if ever, explored. What about the systemic inequalities that persisted because of race? What about the violence and lynchings that were perpetrated to support that system in the Jim Crow era?**

Whether it was the major labor unions excluding blacks from membership or banks systemically denying credit and home mortgages in the north, or requiring black children to be transported in worn down vehicles many miles from town to dilapidated, rural school houses in the south, why were these things not explored in my studies? We had debates about slavery vs. abolition, but had no exploration of the Civil Rights and Voting Acts of the 1960's, why these Acts of Congress were necessary. 

There is great resistance to learning of the black experience and history today, of course. State and local school boards attempt to limit or define which Black history can be taught and what should be excluded. For the most part, the outcry, or better, the backlash is about what Black history whites are most comfortable with. The resistance is hardened in our churches. Sunday morning in the U.S. remains the most segregated time of the week. 

Douglass' words can be discounted by white congregations today because, after all, enslavement is dead as an institution. The challenge of most congregations of the cultural middle would be to explore why, historically, inequities exist in generational wealth and educational attainment. The Pandemic exposed inequalities on a massive scale. *** 

Instead of seizing this as an historic teachable moment, the lazy dualism between material and spiritual, the corporate and individual, continues to be a dominant theme in preaching and teaching. The Advent Gospel is reduced to inner, individual peace. Lent is reduced to how Jesus and I feel about my sin. Easter is all about my private, individual eternal life, not entering more fully into God's rule and realm.  

*Originally published in 1845 by the Anti-Slavery Office. For pages cited, see Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Barnes and Noble,2003.

**James Cone, The Cross and the Lynching Tree, offers a rigorous analysis of the history of lynchings in Jim Crow, and their absence in the writings of  Reinhold Niebuhr. Niebuhr is still considered one of the leading social ethicists of the 20th Century. 

**See How Covid Exposed Racial Disparity in all Aspects of the Health Care System, NPR, 2022.

Is it possible or necessary to recreate the mythical past?

We came to believe that a Higher Power could restore us to sanity.* But what if sanity or clarity was always, from day one, the rarity? Recovery is a journey where I discover a new way of living sanely, safely, and with clarity about boundaries and inner resources-reserves.

1. It is impossible to change without a decision to do honest, searching, and blameless inner work.

2. Do I need restoring to a mythical past that never existed?  Is it possible? **

3. Doing differently requires practice and patience, and a willingness to be a beginner.

4. Find a fellow-traveler. The disruptive forces- the ones we choose and - those we don't - are too powerful to work with alone. 

*I speak for my own experience only, and I certainly to do not represent any 12 -Step program. I am sharing my strength, hope, and experience and that is all.

**Religion portrays a mythical perfect beginning for humankind, starting with Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, in Genesis 1-2. Is it total bliss? The presence of the serpent is part of the story. The serpent was part of God’s creation but also represents, to me, that as humans, we are a mixture of good and harmful intentions. I do not believe in talking serpents. 

***I used to think addiction involved only substances that are consumed. I now realize the the "inner drug store" (ACA terminology) is another source of addiction and dysfunction. Jim Jackson defines these as "ambient addictions," in A Guide to Behavioral Change," Banlican House Publishers, 2022. See chapters 15 and following.