VALUE OF SUFFERING, Hmmm

There was an interesting thought that crept into my consciousness today.  I read that some one on a religious Internet site asked the question, "Is it right to ask God to cure my suffering?"  You have to admit that this is not your ordinary cute little challenging question such as makes the rounds on the Internet now and then.  You know the kind of question I mean.  The famous question about why we "get into an automobile but get on a bus."  No.  This is not a George Carlin question.  This is a real one coming from a spiritually alert person.   Not that I am saying that Carlin was not a spiritually alert person.   The reason why the question intrigues me is that if I were suffering I would not be shy about turning to God and asking Him to get me out of the situation.  This is a question that could only come from a Christian, more than likely a Catholic one at that.  But is is intriguing.  Why would anyone think that suffering is a morally proper state to live in?  Just what could a suffering person accomplish for self and for others?  I do have some ideas that I will put on the table after I make a couple of short points.
~Suffering is not synonymous with pain.  EFR Dion lived for some 40 years with daily pain.  He led a fruitful life.  I saw him suffer for one whole year, one time, but not from what was causing him the pain.  He had Rheumatic fever and it was excruciating.  Not from the pain, but from the forced inactivity.
~I have a very exciting and fiery case of gout.  Since the age of  thirty-two I have endured this painful condition. I've never missed a day's work because of it.  I have it in just about every joint known to man and woman, and I suppose, God too.  Two years ago I was flat on my glutei maximi for a couple of months.  True, for a while the pain was "killing" me.  I was suffering from the situation.  I want you all to know that I prayed that I would walk through that valley and get high enough up on the sunny side of the hill to see something toward the future.  I did.
I think that the big difference between pain and suffering is that suffering is communitarian.  It affects the whole environment.  The pain of suffering is not necessarily physical.  In some cases it attacks your wallet more than your body.  In many cases it affects your identity as it relates to your place in the world.  I was in a wheel chair for about ten or twelve weeks and I have to say that I would have swapped an extra dose of bodily pain for freedom from that Satanical instrument of torture.

Let me give you a humorous example.  Take the lad in the picture.  What he is doing is more than likely not too comfortable.  I think that there are many who could get used to the occasional visit to a bed of nails.  That would be pain.  The suffering starts when that is the only place that you have to live.  You live on top of it and store your "treasures" underneath.  Now, you and I would perhaps agree that that would be suffering.  We would perhaps also agree that it would be difficult to define a value in such a situation.  
As much as I think that it would be perfectly permissible to pray to get out of suffering in general, I have one final comment, about which we may or may not fall into accord.  The value of suffering lies in the fact that it can be offered for the good of others.  The people who care for the suffering benefit from the love that they share with the patient.  Even if, and sometimes, especially if,  he/she is an impatient, cranky, patient.  Secondly, how about the good example that the patient patient provides to the community.  We have all heard it, "That poor thing is in a bad way but you never hear a complaint."  The lesson of quiet suffering is a precious one indeed.  Let me give you a powerful example.  
The Japanese cataclysmic nuclear disaster [Fukushima] caused and is causing monumental human suffering.  Look at the pictures.  People helping one another.  All of them suffering.  All of them supportive.  Seeing that attracts peoples from around the world to offer help.  The fiercely proud Japanese person learns that suffering can be healed by a strange helping hand and heart.  Come closer to home and think of what happens when disaster strikes here.  No matter how deep and vicious the suffering, it gets calmed by the generous human interaction that it invites.  
Finally, suffering is good because it teaches the one who goes through it and comes out the other side to pitch in and try harder to be a more valuable member of the community.  In my case, this part was done for me.  The Voice from the Kitchen promised God that if He got me through it, she and I would offer the rest of our lives working for Him.  Now you know why I don't want anybody crying at my funeral.


Catholics and other Christians are invited to click here for the Religious version of this post.

PAIN IS SLOWER THAN LIGHT --> REALLY!

SPEED OF PAIN

The graph to the right is a picture of the speed of pain.  Now you're asking yourselves, "What is Puttss throwing this out here for?"  Easy.  Did you forget that the title of this blog is "365 Thoughts Emanating from Paul Dion, STL?"  This is stuff I think about, and have been thinking about for a longer time than some of you have been alive.  The most interesting course I ever took in school was one entitled Physiological Psychology.  I learned more life enhancing information in that class than in just about any other one outside of one or two of the Theological classes I suffered through.  This one was revealing things to me that I would perhaps never have learned on my own.  It was delivered by a teacher who cared about us and who cared a lot about the subject matter.  It was all about the functions of the human body, from head to toe and from inside out.  The point of the class was that the observable material activities of our bodies impact the more spiritual parts of our being in ways that we are discovering every day.  Needless to say, this was a very demanding subject and one that nurses and doctors must be required to study early on in their preparation for the calling that they have chosen.  I have to say that knowing these things has made a different person of me, not that anyone can readily see, of course.  These are the deeper moments of this little outing.  The one passing thought that caused these deeper considerations, sometimes called excogitations by people who like the $25.00 words.  (Even the computer thinks I'm snooty, it's telling me that there is no such word.)  Shut up, Machine!
So back to the speed of pain.  I went to the dentist and I remembered the teacher saying that sensations travel in our nerves at a measurable rate of speed. He told us what it is but I forgot it. It was something like between 1 to 220 millimeters per millisecond, or something like that.  Actually it was not the pain thing that brought the thought to mind, it was the delay that was taking place during an interview over satellite and on television, between a person in North America and one in the Middle East.  Now I thought  that I remembered that electrons travel at almost the speed of light, and yet we experience a delay when we cause that to travel ungodly distances from earth to a satellite and back to earth 18,000 land miles away.  What a trip to complete in about 2 or 3 seconds.
I looked it up, and I was right.  Now the interesting thing about it is that sensations that are caused by a bunch of stimuli in our bodies travel at a snail's pace in comparison.  
I got my first lesson about that when one time I touched a hot water pipe in the cellar of our home and I remember that for a small fraction of a second, it felt like it was cold.  It quickly turned to hot and I got burned, but in fact my brain had fooled me in the first nanosecond of the experience.  My neurons weren't firing fast enough through the synapses.


So see, my brain has no rhyme nor reason.  It reaches out and makes really off-the-wall relationships.  You're not going to believe this (maybe you will, after this), but tomorrow will be weird too.  But it won't be about pain.  Pain is not silly.  Tomorrow is borderline silly.  It's about stuff that we were taught in school and made to memorize because it was said to be of great importance.  65 years later, I'll give you my opinion of that, tomorrow.

PAIN

I have written a lot about pain.  Well, here's more.  It is a never ending, always interesting topic because it is so mysterious, and also, so omnipresent.  Today, I was asked about my father (EFR Dion in this blog).  I found it impossible to define him to the interlocutor without mentioning his daily companion, Pain.  For years the man hardly ever had a pain-free moment.  It is amazing that he even managed to have a sense of others with the constant heat of the devil's fire that he had in his leg and lower back.  Yet, he had his light hearted moments.  It has crossed my mind very often that it was not the physical pain that kept him serious.  I have always been convinced that the fact that he had a rather short life free of true responsibility made him a real serious dude.  I also came to know that if we thought  that he was tough at home, we were lucky that we didn't have to work for him.  All reports have it that he didn't suffer fools lightly.  My closeness to him showed me that in his life there were many more fools than in the lives of less tightly wound managers.  I have to confess that I have a similar perception of the world's population.  I think that I am going to get sent behind St. Peter's shed because of it too.
One of the interesting aspects of this conversation is that it is happening, not by design, mind you, at the very threshold of what would be his 98th birthday.  Here I sit at nearly three quarters to a buck, and he didn't even make it halfway to 98.  But you know, in his condition, it was better.
I also think of the way the world has developed and I wonder if he would have survived under similar circumstances just a mere ten years farther along, say, mid '70's.  Despite my many reminiscences of him, I always come back to the deliverance from the pain and I thank God for letting me understand life in that light.
Also, I have to say that I think that tolerance to pain is a part of our lives.  We have two sons who are tough as nails when it comes to pain.  One of them has the gout very badly, but despite the slower movement that it imposes on him, I have never seen it stop him.  I have seen "The Voice from the Kitchen" endure pain for rather long stretches without "sitting it out", so to speak.
I have had some pain in my short life, but nothing compared to the daily suffering of my father.  The deepest thought I have about him, in the depths of my being, is that he knew that the pain was not his to keep.  It was his to convert into spiritual energy for those about whom he felt responsible, many of whom he loved, but couldn't reach except through the sublimation of his pain.  This thought started to grow in me some years ago, sprouting from compost too complicated to describe in this space.  I am convinced that this sublimation continues to touch us to this day.  Hey, it has to be us, we're all that's left.
The first stirring of the thought began on the way home from Enfield on the day that I left the seminary and he drove me home.  We didn't talk much, but there was a lot of communication going on.
You know, if I let myself go, I could write a book about this.  Gouty fingers and all ... :-)!