by K. J. Ramsey
NOTES
1 Eugene H. Peterson, A Long Obedience in the Same Direction: Discipleship in an Instant Society (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2000), 138.
2 C. S. Lewis writes, “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.” C. S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain (New York: HarperOne, 1996), 92.
3 1 Cor. 1:27–28.
CHAPTER 1
DISSONANCE
The Clash of Suffering in a Crescendo Culture
For grace to be grace, it must give us things we didn’t know we needed and take us to places where we didn’t want to go. As we stumble through the crazily altered landscape of our lives, we find that God is enjoying our attention as never before.
—KATHLEEN NORRIS, ACEDIA AND ME
I was wearing red pajamas with printed Valentine candy hearts the day I learned pain does not always elicit help. I don’t particularly like candy hearts, but that day I was too tired to dress myself. So I arrived at the University of Michigan rheumatology office with an unkempt combination of unbrushed hair, my favorite college sweatshirt, and pajamas from the restless night before. Not even two weeks earlier, my body had effortlessly climbed tree-lined trails, exhaustion a pleasant reward on the way to more adventures. Now I could barely hold myself up, fatigue crumpling my body into a curled lump on the crinkly-papered exam table.
This body was unfamiliar. I only knew myself as fierce, capable, and strong, not the weakened ball lying in the fetal position in a specialist’s office 615 miles from the college where I was living my dreams. I lay there in pain, in a body that had been sick only about six times in its twenty rotations around the sun, at once hopeful about the help I would receive and fearful about the way I sensed my life might be changing forever.
I did not know then that pain cannot always be treated effectively. I did not know that women in pain are often regarded with suspicion by doctors.1 I still occupied a reality where the proper response to suffering was empathy, not the cold, sterile world of ugly chairs in poorly decorated waiting rooms leading to smaller rooms of prodding, pushing, and questioning, followed by pricks of pain to fill vials with blood, carried away by people who wanted to know my name only to check against the charts that would become thick as encyclopedias in the years to come.
There was so much I didn’t know.
I was sick enough that the rheumatologist promptly ordered enough bloodwork to fill fourteen vials. I was sick enough to be ushered down the hallway to other specialists of things I did not know existed, to rule out diseases I had never heard of. But this would not be enough. My parents, who had rescued me from college a week before, now helped me walk down the fluorescent-lit hallways, hobbling past the jarring sight of wheelchairs I hoped I wouldn’t need. There was an odd, pungent smell of synthetic citrus soap mixed with a faint hint of decay. Dizzy from the blood draw, I made it back to the rheumatology office. But this time the doctor came with another, whom she introduced as a first-year resident. Then she turned around and left the room, allowing the resident to proceed with the appointment on his own.
In a world where most people are relieved to not get bad news, I quickly learned the devastation of no news. I was told my bloodwork had come back negative, a word I found more disappointing than comforting. The resident, who was barely older than me but clothed with the power of the white coat, began pressing my body for trigger points. From my quick online research, I had learned this was the definitive test for fibromyalgia, a disorder characterized by symptoms different from mine, a disorder that is sometimes thought to be psychosomatic.2 After the exam I sat down with my arms folded tight, safe in the cocoon of my college sweatshirt, and realized for the first time that young women in unexplainable pain are often considered mentally unstable. I recoiled in defense, instantly aware my pain and body had been misjudged.
Finding no proof of the pain drawing my hands into fists and my back into an unpleasant stoop, the resident had stopped listening to my pleas for help. That day, I started carrying the grief of my inconvenient body, sick but not sick enough to be easily diagnosed, desperate but not dying, suffering but unseen.
Finally, the rheumatologist returned, and only after hearing the insistent desperation of my parents, she prescribed the first of what would become more than fifty medications I would try in the coming decade to treat the pain one doctor thought was all in my head.
At twenty years old, with pain that could not be validated by a blood test or an X-ray, I began to feel less like a person full of potential and more like a number and a burden. This is primarily why suffering scares us, because it makes us feel like we are becoming less than human.3 If suffering lingers, when pain and disorders and grief stretch into years instead of lasting for days or months, we fear we will lose our very selves.
Pain threatens personhood.
Whether the pain that prompted you to pick up this book is physical, emotional, spiritual, relational, or psychological, it triggers the same neurobiological process.4 Pain—of all origins—is almost instantly processed in our brains and bodies as a threat to our existence. Because of this, when I use the word pain throughout this book, I want it to prompt you to reflect on the hard things in your life. When I refer to pain, I am speaking inclusively of all the stinging losses and sharp edges in our lives. From disease to depression, from grief to spiritual longing, from anxiety to trauma, all our weaknesses and struggles involve real pain carried and expressed in our real bodies. Remembering that your pain matters and is embodied will be like a compass, guiding you home to your body in your story as you journey through this book.
The moment we feel pain, our bodies instinctively pulse to protect themselves, and they struggle to do much else as our brains focus their energy and attention on survival. We feel less like ourselves and less connected to others when in pain, because pain itself prompts a “sensation of internal disintegration.”5 Our bodies intuitively shut down and shut others out to survive, making it incredibly difficult to access the parts of our brains that help us think rationally, keep perspective, and feel secure in our relationships. Social connectedness and pain are so intertwined, they share the same neurobiological pathway.6 When pain of any kind makes us feel less ourselves and less capable of engaging in relationships, we experience it as suffering.7 Feeling out of sorts and unlike yourself when in pain isn’t your fault. It’s an automatic, natural consequence of living in a body.
Suffering is coming to the edge of ourselves, to the place where we viscerally feel the truth that being human is being limited. All pain triggers a reminder, deeper than thought, buzzing through blood and bone, that we are fragile and finite. Suffering whispers, shouts, and screams the story no one wants to remember: we are not in control, and we are all going to die.
Suffering places our bodies and stories in tension with the story we’ve been soaking up our entire lives. The drumbeat of Western culture is that effort produces success. With enough foresight and determination, we each can create a life with minimal pain and maximum pleasure. We are proprietors of possibility, the doorkeepers of our own bright futures. Our bodies are vehicles of productivity, a currency that purchases success or an inconvenience that impedes it. With hands over our hearts, we pledge allegiance to the red, white, and blue ideal of an autonomous, uninhibited life of safety and ease. If we try hard enough, we will triumph.
The unspoken story of Western culture is that suffering is a problem we can avoid or annihilate if we work hard enough. When suffering lingers, we feel we have failed to reach the allegedly reachable American Dream. Held in the invisible grip of this story, lives including pain are problems to fix. So we march our bodies to the beat of progress, resolved to fight back the darkness that’s keeping us from the achievement and enjoyment we feel is rightfully ours. We’re God’s children, after all. Doesn’t he want us to be well? Doesn’t he want us to show the world the resurrection is real?
<
br /> Living in a story where suffering lingers makes us aware of the clash between the false music filling and forming our lives and the tune of the God who says he is good. The slowing of our bodies, the breaking of our marriages, and the shattering of our lives through abuse change the way we hear the background music that has been permeating our existence. All our lives, we have marched to the cadence of a culture that tells us we can avoid suffering through hard work. With a body that cannot work or a spirit crushed by loss, we feel like flat notes played a beat behind in a song whose tempo no longer feels achievable. Living with long-term suffering in American culture feels like being off-key. Suffering quiets and slows, but our culture prefers a crescendo.
When the notes of your life are in a minor key of somber limitation, you come to hear the sounds of shame screeching and scraping in all our lives under the pulsing beat of progress. Most people silence shame reflexively with busyness. If every moment of the day is full of the sounds of cars, drive-through lines, and paper pushing, we won’t have to hear the echo chamber of our worst fears. We hide in hurry, working hard to align our lives with the pulsating pace we sense everyone else is living at. The music blasting in our ears is energetic and bright, and without thinking, we ignore or shove away anything that doesn’t match the sounds of success. When suffering becomes chronic, no matter how good we are at numbing, we will hear the sounds of shame turning us into less than ourselves. As Kathleen Norris has expressed, “Our busyness can’t disguise the suspicion that we are being steadily diminished, not so much living as passing time in a desert of our own devising.”8
We live in a conqueror culture, vultures preying on weakness, fixed on gnawing our sorrows into stories of success. If we can’t protect ourselves from pain, we’ll overcome it. We’ll search high and low for its purpose, and having found it, we’ll show the world God’s strength.
Even this effort exhausts us, bringing us back to the barren ground of being in bodies that won’t do what we wish they would in lives that don’t look like we wish they would look. And if what we hear from God’s people is largely the language of try hard and triumph, the sugar-lipped expectation that we’ll get better and move on, when our efforts are futile and triumph seems distant, we might just believe that the story of Jesus isn’t for us or isn’t even true. Prolonged pain becomes shame, a hidden hurt that we might not be loved by God after all.
As we seek to make pain and weakness past-tense, the sweat of our effort blurs our vision of the goodness and grace that might already be here. With our attention aimed at finding a silver lining, our minds simply don’t have room to experience our actual lives in our actual bodies as valuable and worthwhile. We remain allergic to our actual lives, addicted to maintaining an illusion of control, desperate to whip our bodies and stories into submission to the story of self-sufficiency and the glory we think it affords.
Of course, none of us want to admit this.
None of us want to acknowledge the silent sin lacing the water we drink and offer each other. No one wants to face the fact that we live like self-appointed dictators over disembodied kingdoms, demanding happiness, safety, and security. When we don’t get the pain-free, protected lives we want, it hurts. It haunts. It opens our eyes and hearts to the truth: we aren’t God, and trying to be won’t give us what we thought we wanted.
The pain of no longer fitting into our culture’s story of success is immense. The sorrow of feeling betrayed by the bodies we thought would work better and work longer is serious. The loneliness of realizing there’s a weakness inside us that no amount of effort or faith can eradicate makes us feel like exiles. Living with suffering that lingers can feel like being an unwanted refugee in a country blind to pain. You feel outside grace, outside light, out of reach of what you think makes life good. Your body holds a story quite different than the story your culture says is worth living. And you’re not sure you want to, or even can, move forward with this body in this story.
In the story of our culture, the story driven by shame, suffering does not make sense beyond the scope of individual failure. But the losses that compelled you to pick up this book were likely not the consequence of dismal choices. This is why you are angry. This is why you shudder and spiral, even if you mostly do so within the privacy of your own home, where no one can see or judge. Where do you hang the weight of what ails you? Without remembering a bigger story, we hang the shame of suffering on ourselves and on God, rejecting our bodies, our current lives, and sometimes our faith as sources of disappointment.
The story of Scripture shows where our self-rejection, striving, and turning away from God originate. Further, within the story of God and his good, loved creation, we find our pain has a place in the plot that is neither final nor entirely our fault. Only within this bigger story can we face our real sin and shame and find the burden of brokenness lifted and shaped into something beautiful.
God spoke the world into being, from the molecules forming water to the pine tree that sways in the wind outside my window. He called it good. But when God made humans, he breathed us into being. From the dirt of the ground, he formed a reflection of himself. Humanity—the reflection of God formed from dirt. He called us good, very good indeed.
Our story begins as dust made matter, breathed out of the overflow of love between the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and named very good. Our story begins in joyful communion with God and dominion over his world. We were naked and felt no shame.9
God gave Adam and Eve purpose, provision, and relationship to fill the earth with the abundance of his blessing. “Look at what I have given you,” he said, pointing out the plants he formed from nothing and dreamed up with care to innately replicate and reproduce as plentiful food.10 God made food and fruit for feasting and filling. But one tree was off-limits. In Fatherly care, God instructed Adam that he must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, telling him that if he did, he would die.11 God gave boundaries to Adam and Eve out of love, creating a well-defined place to flourish.
In the lush garden, while goodness lingered and flowed from every living thing, a serpent slithered onto the scene, tricking the first couple into questioning God’s trustworthiness and kindness. The serpent aroused fear in Eve, leveraging her left brain’s capacity to analyze by considering right from wrong, evoking the emotional experience of distress.12 The tide of all history turned in the conversation between the serpent and Eve, as the serpent twisted God’s words of provision and protection into words of malicious intent to withhold good from the children he supposedly loved.
Eve wanted what wasn’t given. She wanted the wisdom hidden in the tree, the knowledge of good and evil, an awareness that was bigger than her body could hold. By the end of the serpent’s exchange with Eve, she took the only fruit God had instructed them to not eat, and both she and Adam were left naked and ashamed.
Sin and shame disrupt the human story, diminishing the spaces between us, reducing them from communion to separation. Shame defeats the human story, igniting doubt about how loved we are by God and turning us away from the One who provides to attempt to provide for ourselves. Self-sufficiency is our first response to shame and suffering. Realizing their nakedness, Adam and Eve tried to cover their exposure, sewing together fig leaves for themselves and hiding from God when they realized he was near.13 God doesn’t turn from those he loves, and he came to find Adam and Eve. He pursued them, even after they disobeyed. He did not turn away from their shame.
“Who told you that you were naked?” he asked,14 offering an opportunity to acknowledge how the conversation between the serpent and Eve provoked their terrible exposure. God’s questions invited the possibility of repair, of connection.15 But Adam responded to God by doing what shame often stirs us to do—blaming someone else. Blamed before her Maker, Eve continued the cycle of shame by pointing her finger at the serpent. Instead of responding to God’s invitation to be known in what they did, the first humans put up a relational barrier between themselves and Go
d by blaming, deflecting, and disowning.
Our human stories of striving, self-rejection, and hiding from ourselves, others, and God all originate in the garden. So does our suffering. God keeps his promises, and his promise of the consequences of eating the fruit has stood.16 Death now lines every strand of our DNA. Decay is in every body, every story. Every relationship is cracked and crumbling from holding more than it was made to hold. Our relationships with God, ourselves, the created world, and one another are fractured by sin.17
Like Adam and Eve, we continue to reach for a life beyond our bounds. The desire to be limitless is our original sin.
Just like the first humans, we want what we do not have and reject what we’ve been given. We don’t want the bodies we have. We don’t want the history that’s shaped us. We don’t want the stories we are living. We don’t want our shame to be seen.
So we reach. Like Eve, we want a wisdom too big for our bodies to hold. We desperately desire the knowledge of good and evil, the secret sagacity that would make our hurt make sense. Since God isn’t giving us what we want, we try to get it on our own. We try to be self-sufficient, to find the purpose in our pain, to create the relief we long for, and to get back to enjoying what seems delightful. Except we don’t call it sin. We call it “redeeming what is broken” and “creating beauty from ashes.” Instead of living fully within the borders of the lives we’ve been given, we plot an escape and call it faith.
Sin is the echo of Eve, inclining us to name our bodies and their limitations as bad. Sin is the shadow of the serpent, tempting us to believe God is less than he says he is and will provide far less than he has promised.
Oddly enough, many of us learn the sin of disembodied self-sufficiency in church. We’re a people formed around worshiping the God who so loved us embodied people that he became one of us, but we treat our bodies with suspicion and contempt instead of sacred awe. Our bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit, but we often see them more like burning receptacles of Satan’s power. We learn from childhood to mistrust our bodies, minimize our emotions, and elevate the mind as the seat of all that is sacred. As Christian philosopher James K. A. Smith has noted, Christian worship, education, and worldview formation have long treated humans as primarily thinking beings.18 We are so much more than walking heads.19