The Purpose of Pain

Our meditation yesterday and today has been adapted from the draft of a book called, the Morality of Drug Use by John Mark Miravalle The Purpose of Suffering and Pain  Suffering itself is not an evil. Evil is evil. Evil is the problem. Evil – whether physical, psychological, or spiritual – is the thing to eliminate. Salvation from evil is the main objective of God. Salvation from suffering is not the goal. If it were, we would just create a government office that distributes freely morphine, opioids, pot and meth. Or we could just organize a concerted drop of nukes on as many human habitations as possible – we’d all die instantly and painlessly and no one would ever suffer again.  Within the broader category of suffering, it’s helpful to distinguish between pain, which begins in the body, and sorrow, which begins in the soul. Pain motivates people not to harm themselves, not to stick their hands in the fire or poke forks into their eyes. People who can’t feel physical pain tend to hurt themselves much more regularly, even if they’re aware that their activities are objectively damaging their bodies. Pain is a basic response system for which there is no substitute. And the same goes for sorrow.  Sorrow, for instance, can cause us to reconsider what we think about everything. Where do we come from, what happens after death and what is the meaning of life? Do you think you came from nothing, and that you’ll just dissipate back into nothingness after death? The sorrow provoked by that empty outlook should prompt a more careful assessment. If you don’t know what the meaning of life is, and you’re unhappy about that, good – you ought to be! Victor Frankl, the Austrian psychologist and Holocaust survivor suggests, we should not numb the pain, the pain is good, it has a purpose, to motivate us to go in a search for meaning that will lead us to union with God. If we just numb the pain then we never seek or find God. Sorrow     Sorrow can motivate us to change from a bad to a good person, from vice to virtue.       If you find yourself deprived of some good, your spiritual dissatisfaction may make you reflect on how you’ve either neglected that good, or, worse, discouraged that good by directly acting against it. Loneliness, for instance, might make you realize that you haven’t put enough effort into friends and family, or that your habits of greed and envy and lust and anger are consistently cutting you off from other people. When the sorrow becomes great enough, you will be motivated to change. But as long as the pleasure of the vice outweighs the sorrow, you will never change.  Sorrow, like pain, has a purpose.  Leading Us to God The purpose of pain and suffering can only be understood within the overall context of the purpose of the human person. The ultimate purpose of the human being is union with God. Suffering can be, is meant to be, a spur that drives us forward towards the divine destination, and it plays a crucial role at every stage of that journey.     To begin with, suffering wakes the soul from spiritual sluggishness, and demands that we take the question of our own existence seriously. CS Lewis writes: We can rest contentedly in our sins and in our stupidities; and anyone who has watched gluttons shoveling down the most exquisite foods as if they did not know what they were eating, will admit that we can ignore even pleasure. But pain insists upon being attended to. God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but SHOUTS in our pain: it is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world.        Suffering will not let us rest content, because it is itself discontentment. It demands we seek an answer, a solution to the human question. Before we even begin our journey to God, suffering motivates us to search for a path to a better mode of being. Once we’ve found the path – the one road to God, the one way, the one Mediator, Jesus Christ – suffering may prevent us from idling, from procrastinating.