Possibilities for Pain

Lately I have been thinking about pain. I think it probably stems from experiencing, over the last few months especially, some real peace in the area of old relational wounds – in particular, absent parents, later, intimate friendships abruptly ended – that left me for many years relationally shredded and with a keen distrust of self and Other. Now, in this place of budding (and fragile?) release, I find myself uncertain how to come back, again and again, to relationship when I am still so human, and I’m pretty sure everyone else is, too.

And human here, to me, means pain. I suspect this is a universal story: we all have our narratives of brokenness, and we all, somehow, rub up against other humans. Sometimes that relational touching produces pleasure – encouragement, laughter’s effervescent holiness, the weighty hand of wisdom shared, the caress of loves in their many forms that at their very least assure us that we are not alone. Yet sometimes our contact with an Other comes in the form of pain, as we chafe against the grit of their humanness, of our own humanness. Hurts given and received. Love that turned out to be conditional after all. Absence where presence was promised. Death. A turning away. Wounds open across the surface of our spirit, and we are broken and alien. Again. How can I live in the reality of this pain that comes almost as a byproduct of having skin and being embodied in time and space on earth?


I have wanted to protect myself from this kind of relational wounding. Hermetically seal my Self, while I await (and rightly so!) my adoption as daughter and the redemption of all this brokenness. But sealing myself from pain also seals me from the blessings of healing touches here on earth, and even from other forms of grace more mysterious still. Is there another posture I can adopt in the reality of wounding that will reflect more fully the abundance of Life that God promises here, in the present? A way to put that painful reality to some Life-affirming use?

While I will never seek out pain for its own sake (no matter how many medieval women mystics I read), I did run across a beautiful image in a novel the other day that set me thinking. This from Frederick Buechner’s Godric, where the title character, now an old man, muses on his five most important friendships:

That’s five friends, one for each of Jesu’s wounds, and Godric bears their mark still on what’s left of him as in their time they all bore his [mark] on them. What’s friendship, when it’s all done, but the giving and taking of wounds?...Gentle Jesu, Mary’s son, be thine the wounds that heal our wounding. Press thy bloody scars to ours that thy dear blood may flow in us and cleanse our sin. Be thou in us and we in thee that [we]…may be a woundless one at last (7-8).

What I love about this image is the acknowledgement that relationships regularly leave their painful marks while also making space for the possibility of exchange and transformation across those very wounds. There is a kind of flow – a healing exchange of grace – that’s made possible when our neat surfaces have been ruptured. Our brokenness becomes the avenue via which we can be healed, if we will only press in, press our wounds into, the God of healing and rest. And what is more, we find in that press a God who is also wounded, across whose wounds we find release. A God who invites us, like Thomas, to trace his still-marked hands and to put ourselves into his still-wounded side, for there we, like Thomas, meet the divine.

I’m not arguing for some sort of relational sadism; I think we’re allowed to say “ouch” when we are hurt, to seek out and advocate for relationships in which healthy love is freely offered. To seek wholeness and belonging and rest. However, in my own experience, I have found that I have not been, and probably will not be, sealed away from deep relational wounding in this life, both giving and receiving. Parents, friends, spouse, children, community: their capacity for pain equals their capacity for healing transformation. Yet I choose relationships with all their – and my own – humanness, the grit of which can sometimes chafe. I choose to offer grace (or to grope towards grace) with the generosity and insistency with which grace has been lavished on me. Precisely because Jesus offers something richer and more multi-faceted via these relationships: he offers the possibility of connection and healing across the flows of our wounds, across his own wounds. Presence in absence; wholeness in brokenness.

Praise the God who invites us sacramentally to take his wounded body into ours – week after week – who invites us to place our wounded bodies into his own, in an exchange that is wholly Life-affirming and Life-restoring, allowing an astonishing intimacy with the universe’s I AM and his human images here on earth.

~Jamie Friedman