Since I’m here…more on pain, suffering, and compassion

“Diseases which we never felt in ourselves come but to a compassion of others that have endured them; nay, compassion itself comes to no great degree if we have not felt in some proportion in ourselves that which we lament and condole in another.” John Donne

Every once in a while I return to Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions…which I first learned of through a movie called Wit … a movie that chronicles the process the main character goes through of dying from ovarian cancer.

Different portions of John Donne’s lamentations stick out at different times for me. This quote caught my eye this time. I guess that means I’m thinking again…

I wonder whether or not it requires suffering personally in order to have compassion for someone else’s suffering. Dictionary.com defines compassion as a feeling of deep sympathy and sorrow for another who is stricken by misfortune, accompanied by a strong desire to alleviate the suffering.

In order to have sympathy or a desire to alleviate the suffering of another, does it require personal knowledge of suffering first through experience?

John Donne seems to think so, at least compassion to a “great degree”.

When I was about 12, my best friend broke her arm while we were playing in my front yard. I remember how she just sat there and cried…wouldn’t stop crying. We couldn’t get a hold of any parents so we had to sit and wait it out until someone came home. I had never seen her cry like that before. I wanted so much for her to stop crying, stop hurting … and there wasn’t anything I could do to help her. I tried to make her smile, told her stories, talked to her, hoped desperately she would stop crying. I have never broken a bone before, but I had a deeply intense desire to stop the suffering of my friend who had just fallen and broken hers. But did it require of me some sort of experience of suffering in order to feel compassion for her, even if that experience wasn’t exactly the same…to allow me to “imagine” , for example, what it must be like to break a bone in the arm? Referring to suffering as “wanting things to be other than they are”, I was certainly suffering on her behalf, even though I had no idea what it felt like to break an arm. I wanted her arm to be alright again, and for her to stop crying. It seemed worse to me to watch helplessly as she cried without ceasing than it would have been for me to have my own arm broken. At the same time, there was no way for me to really know that since my arm wasn’t broken. She was having her experience and I was having mine. They were not the same, but we were both suffering nevertheless.

(Just as a brief aside to insert a rhetorical and probably irrelevant question or two … when did hero status get conferred on those who get the label “high tolerance for pain”? And who is it that decides where the cutoff is? )

Maybe the pain isn’t so much the variable, but the suffering is….

It just fucking hurts

I’ve been here before.

Pain isn’t enlightening. Pain just hurts, and when it hurts bad enough it doesn’t even afford you the luxury of suffering. James is right. It just fucking hurts.

In years searching for meaning through my chronic pain, I have convinced myself of a lot of bullshit. Chronic pain tends to afford you room to think all sorts of things, especially when it is at low tide. I have convinced myself (with a little help from others) it was an opportunity to draw closer to God, that God has a plan for my life, a plan not to harm me (refer to Jeremiah 29:11), that Job and I have much in common, that I have more compassion for people, I have an opportunity to use my pain to be a better, deeper, more enlightened person. I even remember a night years ago when in a dramatic display of my “faith”, I crawled out of a bed of high-tide pain and buried my face in the floor with my outstretched hands like Jesus on the cross and prayed for God to reveal Himself to me. The dramatic little story would be a lot better if I could end it by saying that in all His glory He came and sat on my bed and picked me up, cradled me in His arms, and told me everything would be okay. The answer was silence. I crawled back into bed. God either has a sick sense of humor, or really does know how to answer prayer.

When my pain is running high tide and no longer registers on a scale (every time a medical professional approaches me they want to know where my pain falls on a scale of 1 to 10), it isn’t very generous. It doesn’t allow me to be depressed, and doesn’t even allow me to suffer (wishing for something different - in this case that it would go away).

I’ve been here before.

I breathe. I drink. I eat (some). I go to the bathroom (sometimes with help). I cry a primitive cry of a child in response to pain. I take painkillers. I wait. I have an occasional thought here and there. No mystic experiences, no closeness to God, no enlightenment, nothing much at all.

It just fucking hurts.