Prolonged and Chronic Suffering
When an injured joint becomes swollen and sore, and the slightest touch causes fiery pain, it’s no accident that we say it’s ‘inflamed.’ What could be the value of this, once the damage is already done? First, it can lead you to protect that site; thus helping that injury to heal; then it can make you feel sick and weak, both of which help to slow you down. So pain can promote recovery.
But it’s hard to defend the dreadful effects of those chronic pains that never end. Then we tend to ask questions like, “What did I do to deserve this?” Then if we can find to justify punishment—it may bring us relief to be able to think, “Now I can see why it serves me right!”
Most victims discover no such escapes, and find that much has been lost from their lives—but some others find ways to see suffering as incentives or opportunities to show what they can accomplish, or even as unexpected gifts to help them to cleanse or renew their characters.
F. M. Lewis: “Becoming an invalid can be a blow to a person’s self-esteem. However, for some patients, the sick role is seen as an elevation in status—deserving the nurturance and concern of others. The ability to assign meaning to an illness or to symptoms has been found to enhance some patients’ sense of self-mastery over a problem or crisis.”[38]
Thus certain victims find ways to adapt to chronic intractable pains. They work out new ways to make themselves think and rebuild their lives around those techniques. Hear Oscar Wilde describe how he deals with his inescapable misery:
“Morality does not help me. I am one of those who are made for exceptions, not for laws. Religion does not help me. The faith that others give to what is unseen, I give to what one can touch, and look at. Reason does not help me. It tells me that the laws under which I am convicted, and the system under which I have suffered are wrong and unjust. But, somehow, I have got to make both of these things just and right to me. I have got to make everything that has happened to me good for me. The plank bed, the loathsome food, the hard ropes, the harsh orders, the dreadful dress that makes sorrow grotesque to look at, the silence, the solitude, the shame—each and all of these things I had to transform into a spiritual experience. There is not a single degradation of the body which I must not try and make into a spiritualizing of the soul.”[39]
Recent research on pain relief has developed new techniques, first for assessing degrees of pain and then for successfully treating it. We now have drugs that can sometimes suppress some of pain’s cruelest effects—but many still never find relief—either by mental or medical means. It seems fair to complain that, in this realm, evolution has not done well for us—and this frustrates theologians: How to justify a world in which people are made to suffer so much? What functions could such suffering serve? How did we come to evolve a design that protects our bodies but ruins our minds?
One answer is that the bad effects of chronic pain did not evolve from selection at all, but arose as a sort of ‘programming bug.’ Perhaps our ancestral ways to react to pain simply are not yet compatible with the reflective thoughts and farsighted plans that more recently evolved in our brains. The cascades that we call ‘suffering’ must have evolved from earlier schemes that helped us to limit our injuries—by making the goal of escaping from pain take such a high priority. The resulting disruption of other thought, was only was a small inconvenience before we developed our greater, modern intellects. Evolution never had any sense of what a species might evolve next—so it never prepared for intelligence.
Grief
I cannot weep, for all my body’s moisture
Scarce serves to quench my furnace-burning heart;
Nor can my tongue unload my heart’s great burden,
For self-same wind that I should speak withal
Is kindling coals that fires all my breast,
And burns me up with flames that tears would quench.
To weep is to make less the depth of grief.
Tears then for babes; blows and revenge for me!
Richard, I bear thy name; I’ll venge thy death,
Or die renowned by attempting it.
When you suffer the loss of a long-time friend, it feels like losing a part of yourself, because grief involves our reactions to the loss of some of our mental resources. For, certain parts of your intellect must have over time become specialized for sharing ideas with the person you love; but now, the signals those brain-parts transmit will never again receive any replies—just as would happen with losing a limb. This could be why it takes so long to put to rest the loss of a friend.
Gloucester: Be patient, gentle Nell; forget this grief.
Duchess: Ah, Gloucester, teach me to forget myself!
Nell can’t comply with Gloucester’s advice because the links of affection are too broadly dispersed for any resource to erase all at once; they aren’t all stored in some single place. Besides, we may not want to forget them all, as Aristotle remarks in Rhetoric:
“Indeed, it is always the first sign of love, that besides enjoying someone’s presence, we remember him when he is gone, and feel pain as well as pleasure, because he is there no longer. Similarly there is an element of pleasure even in mourning and lamentation for the departed. There is grief, indeed, at his loss, but pleasure in remembering him and, as it were, seeing him before us in his deeds and in his life.”
So Constance can say, in the play King John, that mournful feelings mix with pleasant memories:
Thus Shakespeare shows how people clutch their griefs, and squeeze them till they change to joyful shapes.
Today, there is a widely popular theory that, normally, recovery from a grievous loss or injury goes through a sequence of stages with names like denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. I like the following skeptical and constructive analogy to this:[40]
As an example, apply the 5 stages to a traumatic event most all of us have experienced: The Dead Battery! You’re going to be late to work so you rush out to your car, place the key in the ignition and turn it on. You hear nothing but a grind; the battery is dead.
Denial --- What’s the first thing you do? You try to start it again! And again. You may check to make sure the radio, heater, lights, etc. are off and then..., try again.
38
F.M. Lewis, “Experienced personal control and quality of life in late stage cancer patients.