Reckoning with the Unknown Meaning of Chronic Pain
A Reflection on Holy Saturday and Its Silence
About the author: Sara Mannen is the McDonald-Agape Research Fellow in Systematic Theology at the University of Aberdeen. She is working with Professor Tom Greggs on the Ecclesiology After Christendom project. Sara recently completed her PhD on the concept of divine personhood in Karl Barth. She is passionate about theological study, especially modern and contemporary doctrines of God, and its import for the life of the church and world. She currently lives in Aberdeenshire, Scotland, with her husband and two daughters.
“What is happening? Today there is a great silence over the earth, a great silence, and stillness, a great silence because the King sleeps; the earth was in terror and was still, because God slept in the flesh and raised up those who were sleeping from the ages.”
Chronic physical pain and suffering is one of the dimensions of life that I struggle to theologize. Unlike the type of pain that has a known and understandable purpose, like childbirth, chronic pain does not easily submit to explanatory categories. Instead, this type of pain leaves one with a haunting, “Why?”
The natural temptation in the face of this “why” is to find some way to theologically give meaning to all pain and suffering. This is an entirely understandable temptation since humans are meaning-making creatures. Brute facts—those that have no explanation—are intolerable. We desperately desire to make sense of ourselves and our world and seek a narrative that provides that meaning.1 However, the reality of the despair of physical, and seemingly meaningless, suffering often leaves me speechless.
I am intimately acquainted with persistent pain due to an incurable back problem. In my early twenties, I learned that I would have problems with my back for the rest of my life. The prospect of living without pain is slim to none; instead, the strategy is to manage and mitigate my pain—how to keep it at a level where it “whimpers” in the background rather than “howls” constantly. I know all too well that pain can become so all-consuming that it disrupts the ability to think or speak.
Physical pain is uniquely isolating. It is something that is “mine” in a way that no one else can share or endure—I alone must bear it. If borne for too long, pain crowds everything out and shatters one’s sense of self. Medical professionals call it the “terrible triad”—suffering, sleeplessness, and sadness—of chronic pain. How do I even begin to think about pain theologically without violating and further isolating those who suffer by valorizing suffering or abstracting from someone’s excruciating experience of pain to place it in a general system of meaning? How do I love and care for those who are suffering in pain?
The question of pain is both a theological and a pastoral one. I am not seeking to propose a specific answer for the meaning of pain. Giving quick answers to the purpose of pain does not reflect the reality of faith and the Christian life given to us in Scripture and it places an additional burden on the sufferer that does not allow them to wrestle through doubt, grief, and sorrow. After years of ministry, I am convinced that one of the reasons people become disillusioned with faith and Christ is they were “sold” a vision of Christianity that made Jesus a quick fix to the troubles of the world. Rather, I want to offer the silence of Holy Saturday—the day Jesus lay dead in his tomb—as analogous to the often-unknown meaning of the pain of physical suffering.
For theological and pastoral reasons, I cannot simply skip from the horror of Good Friday to the joy of Easter Sunday, but must respect the silence and unknowing of the day when the Son remained in the tomb. The journey from pain and suffering through unknowing, silence, and grief to hope is one we each live through in faith.
I do not think theology can provide definitive answers about the meaning of one’s pain and suffering, but I believe theology can assure us that we can have confident hope that there is meaning in our suffering and pain because of Jesus’s life, death, and resurrection.2 Simply put, I think the specific answer about pain and suffering requires a God’s eye view of history, one that temporal creatures do not have.
The temptation to find meaning for the suffering of someone we love is strong, and one I have regretfully succumbed to over the years. Karen Kilby describes this reaction to and discomfort with other’s pain:
We don’t really want to know about suffering which we can neither eliminate nor absorb into a larger story with a satisfying shape. We are inclined to avert our attention, either by simply looking away, or by trying to nudge the suffering into a story whose shape gives comfort.3
I have been on the receiving end of well-intended attempts to find meaning in my pain. Though I know these were meant as encouragement, they always furthered my sense of isolation and heightened my guilt over my feelings of despair and frustration since those indicated “I was not trusting God enough.”
This is what my theological mentor calls “Romans 8-ing” someone. “Romans 8-ing” is the habit of quoting Romans 8:28 to someone in despair, “And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him,” instead of sitting with the discomfort of someone’s unexplainable pain, grief, and suffering. Although I have faith that Romans 8 is true, this move skips over the process of faith and transformation that lives through the pain and sorrows of the world and goes straight to victory and triumph—a move that avoids living through the confusion, sorrow, and mourning of the day Jesus was in the tomb.
How do we avoid the rush to triumph? We must recognize that just as physical pain is a uniquely first-person experience, the ability to make meaning of pain must also be a first-person experience. Kilby has helpfully distinguished between the first, second, and third-person dimensions of pain and meaning-making. She suggests:
[T]here are some kinds of meaning-making, or meaning-finding, which can legitimately be done in relation to “my” suffering but not “yours” or “his”. The process of finding some way to be at least partly reconciled to suffering, of fitting it into a larger pattern of value, of discerning grace and growth met within suffering, is for the most part not one we can properly undertake in the second or third person.4
I believe this is a theologically wise and pastorally sensitive admonishment for caring for those in pain. We must resist the need to “nudge” someone’s pain into a comforting story. Rather, the church community can love and serve those in pain by not avoiding the discomfort of the unknown meaning of suffering and instead just listening to the laments of the suffering person while offering simple acts of practical care, such as preparing a meal, driving someone to the doctor, or cleaning the house.
Second, as Easter approaches, we can stop to meditate on the Passion narrative that includes a day when Jesus was dead. A day where a disciple’s cry of “Why?” did not receive an answer. It was a day of great silence on the earth, as the epigraphic Ancient Homily states. There are stories in Scripture where a person eventually sees some good or purpose for their suffering, such as Joseph in Genesis. But, there are others, such as Job, where there is no answer given even when God directly responds. The Bible does not shy away from the practice of lamenting, or questioning God (e.g., Psalm 13; Hab 1:2).
However, we are given a steadfast hope in the promise of the renewal of all things through Christ’s resurrection (Rev 21:5). We have a great high priest who knows our weaknesses, whom we can approach with confidence (Hebrews 4:14–16). We can sit in the sorrow of our own seemingly meaningless pain and love others through theirs trusting that God will eventually answer us although that may not be until our own death and resurrection. We can cling to the future promises of God in the middle of our confusion and unknowing because we have seen those promises begin to enter time in Christ’s resurrection, and it is to this hope that I cleave when I am left speechless.
I find Paul Ricoeur’s description of narrative identity as vital to our selfhood as a helpful way to reflect on our humanity. For more on this, see Paul Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, trans. Kathleen Blamey (London: University of Chicago, 1992), 113–68.
There are countless theological debates about the relation of sin and evil to the questions of pain and suffering. The questions boil down to whether one conceives of pain and suffering as reality before sin entered the world and how one understands the effects of sin on the created world, especially in terms of the relation between metaphysical, natural, and moral evils. Although I think we can have hope that there is meaning in our pain and suffering, I am not claiming that they are good in themselves.
Karen Kilby, “Negative Theology and Meaningless Suffering,” Modern Theology 36, no. 1 (2020): 98.
Kilby, “Negative Theology and Meaningless Suffering,” 98.
Powerful and very helpful. Many thanks.