RELIEF FROM PAIN

June 17, 2007

One of the unfriendly things that many of today's film and TV action adventures do to us is to portray pain in a shallow way. Trivializing human suffering can be a way of masking our fear of it, of insulating ourselves from the unvarnished truth about it. An important index of our ability to accept the reality of human suffering and respond to it is the way in which we regard the most vulnerable members of society, such as neglected children, the elderly on fixed incomes, and those who are poor, unemployed, homeless, or hungry.

Social commentary addressing the problems of the disadvantaged often focuses on their material needs, but there is a deeper issue here. It's the unacknowledged suffering, perhaps mixed with anger, despair, or both, caused by the distress of feeling shut out, ignored, and abandoned by society. There is a terror of silence that hangs over these people. They come to understand that they are in desperate situations from which they do not know how to escape. They perceive that no one notices or cares, that no one is coming to their rescue. They see life flowing to others around them but passing them by, and they become convinced that, even if they work very hard, they have little chance of ever achieving real comfort or security.

Their greatest suffering is spiritual. They have become nameless, faceless strangers in our midst. In past generations, there were enough Americans around who knew what it was like to be poor. Some had pulled themselves up from the squalor of the Great Depression. Others were immigrants selling apples or newspapers on street corners or doing back breaking field or construction work, anything to gain a foothold on economic security. These Americans identified with the poor quite easily, long after escaping poverty themselves.

Many of today's generation, however, have been born into relative prosperity. They have always known economic security, never desperation. With no personal memory or experience of the suffering of hunger, homelessness, unemployment, or poverty, it's more difficult for these Americans to identify with those in pain. Public and political consensus on responding to those in need is made harder, if not impossible, to achieve.

American society at large, then, seems to lack effective strategies to bring about relief and change. Lacking these, those who do not suffer materially begin to feel another kind of distress. It is moral pain, guilt over a situation that no one has directly willed or acted to produce, but which undeniably exists.

Americans have been greatly successful in constructing and maintaining a democratic experiment in ordered liberty. Yet, our very success has raised problems for us. Our freedoms cultural, economic, personal, and political have by their very nature created conditions that have allowed excessive neglect and psychological cruelty to occur. Personal disaster seems so random. Our freedom, of its very nature, possesses elements of instability, unpredictability, and vulnerability. Those in dire need remind us we could be they. The same history has produced us both. We are connected.

It's almost as though our freedom has pitted us against one another in an all consuming struggle for the largest share of society's goods and advantages. We begin to realize how troubling this competitive struggle is when we meet some of its casualties, the people huddled at the bottom.

It's not that we have personally or directly willed the suffering of others. No, our shared distress is over the sheer existence of their pain, which we can never fully forget and from which we cannot separate ourselves. Those in pain awaken the rest of America from its great therapeutic dream that pain can be avoided, that the past can be escaped and the future controlled, that we can distance ourselves from society's woes to achieve a wholly private happiness.

The more we try to separate ourselves from others' pain, the more isolated from each other we become. And the more isolated we become, the more we are forced to realize that without shared moral vision and purpose, we as a society will collapse. None of our technologies, therapies, self help books, or political or economic strategies will save us. Only we as persons, with God's grace, can save each other.

The pain of others reminds us that we are not an island, we are connected. It reminds us that each person's decisions or actions produce a ripple effect of real, direct consequences in the lives of others. The social systems, institutions, and policies we have created, that at times disproportionately reward some, sometimes inflict pain on others.

The Church is challenged to be a community of conscience that does not forget those who suffer, nor our connectedness to them. The true disciple of Jesus Christ lives a life of compassion that does not abandon anyone to the shadows.

There is moral pain in coming to terms with the casualties our society has produced, and with our responsibility for the future that we will share with them. We can free ourselves from such pain, only by helping them to become free of their pain.

+Bishop Raymundo J. Peña

last updated 05-Jun-2008 9:48 sitemap