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?
